Thursday
A young friend who regularly reads this blog asked me recently if Ray Bradbury anticipated the AI companies that are currently destroying books. Apparently Anthropic, responsible for Claude, has “Project Panama,” whose stated mission is “to destructively scan all the books in the world.”
The substack blog Card Catalog describes what is involved:
Destructive scanning means cutting a book from its binding, feeding the loose pages through a scanner, and discarding the book afterward. According to the court, Anthropic spent millions of dollars buying millions of print books, often used. Its service providers removed the bindings, cut the pages, scanned them into searchable digital files, and discarded the books. Anthropic kept the scans in an internal digital library and used books from that library to train the AI systems behind Claude.
Applying Fahrenheit 451 to AI provides some insight into what Anthropic is up to. In her Card Catalog article, Hanna Golden that asserted that, while books have always been destroyed, “they’ve never been destroyed like this.” As she sees it, we’ve entered “the third era of libricide.”
The first era, “Annihilation,” involves the destruction that comes with war, fire, or just plain neglect. While during Annihilation it’s possible to lose works entirely (say, Alexandria library destroyed by fire, the Mayan codices destroyed by the Spanish), at least we remember that they once existed.
Hitler’s book burning was for “Spectacle,” aimed not at eradicating the offending texts (not possible) but sending a political signal.
In the third era, “Destruction as Disappearance,” Golden is disturbed that it’s possible that rare books, caught up in mass purchases, are disappearing without a trace. Anthropic has especially been interested in “less common” books, preferring harder-to-find titles over mass-market ones. Although Anthropic claims that it doesn’t destroy “rare” or “antiquated” books, Golden notes that its assurance “can’t be tested from outside, because no list of what was bought has ever been made public.”
“The impossibility of answering what was destroyed,” she adds, “is what’s new.”
In one way, Fahrenheit 451 does not apply to scan-and-destroy as AI companies are not out to destroy all books, even if there’s a chance that they annihilate a few single copies. On the other hand, they are interested in locating and scanning every book in existence, which means that they share the global ambitions of the government in Bradbury’s novel. As I don’t know what is involved with training Claude and other AI systems, I don’t understand why they need older books or, for that matter, every one of the 130 million titles they estimate are in existence. Do they really believe that they will only be as wise as collective humanity if they get them all? It sounds like a Tower of Babel-type ambition.
Apparently, to teach Claude and other chatbots, AI companies don’t like to scan the internet since, increasingly, AI-generated texts are showing up there. Claude needs fresh material the way a vampire needs fresh meat. The question, then, is whether a well-fed Claude can generate better writing than humans are capable of and, in so doing, will humans dependent on Claude see their writing deteriorate. Writing is difficult and, if people lose that ability and the learning that comes with it, we really will become more stupid. Likewise, scientists, journalists, doctors, and others will lose essential skills if no one is doing the hard work of research and investigation, just relying on other texts synthesized by Claude. And how can one verify the synthesis if Claude doesn’t reveal its sources?
I could imagine the following downward spiral: having once sampled various literary classics, Claude would produce Reader’s Digest-quality work and, if it sampled that, the writing would become even more insipid. The fire chief describes such a process in a talk with protagonist Montag:
Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending….Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve- line dictionary resume.
The fire chief, it so happens, is fine with this evolution, warning, “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
It so happens that Bradbury anticipates certain aspects of AI not involved with book destruction. I acknowledge to still being startled when Facebook uses my first name when notifying me of friend posts, but the author describes this happening in his 1953 novel:
Montag turned and looked at his wife, who sat in the middle of the parlor talking to an announcer, who in turn was talking to her. “Mrs. Montag,” he was saying. This, that and the other. “Mrs. Montag?” Something else and still another. The converter attachment, which had cost them one hundred dollars, automatically supplied her name whenever the announcer addressed his anonymous audience, leaving a blank where the proper syllables could be filled in.
Mrs. Montag is also given the illusion that she is helping script a television show (call it auto-script):
They mailed me my part this morning. I sent in some box tops. They write the script with one part missing. It’s a new idea. The homemaker, that’s me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines: Here, for instance, the man says, “What do you think of this whole idea, Helen?” And he looks at me sitting here center stage, see? And I say, I say —” She paused and ran her finger under a line in the script. “‘I think that’s fine!” And then they go on with the play until he says, “Do you agree to that, Helen!” and I say, “I sure do!”
What is the qualitative difference between this and a student ordering up an essay from AI to submit to a professor? To be sure Claude, drawing as “he” does from millions of books, can generate more interesting scripts than this. Perhaps it can generate a unique piece of writing every time (if anything that preys parasitically on other writing can be called unique). Yet won’t the final result just be a more sophisticated version of what Clarice observes in her fellow human beings? Clarice is the 17-year-old who first starts alerting Montag to his shallow existence:
“People don’t talk about anything.”
“Oh, they must!”
“No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”
His mind set in motion by Clarice, Montag begins grappling with the human dimension of writing after he has burned down a secret home library:
Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before….It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! It’s all over.
In two columns I wrote about an Atlantic author’s despair over how English education is being hollowed out (here and here ), I pointed to a potent antidote, which is the literature itself. Don’t underestimate the ability of novels, poems and plays to step up to the plate when the going gets rough. An old literature professor helps Montag understand the nature of literature:
Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only waxmoon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.
Will Claude-generated writing, regardless of how many books it scans and destroys, ever do more than run a quick hand over life? The professor then continues with an observation that applies even more to AI’s parasitical nature:
We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But when he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn’t something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane.
AI writing, as opposed to real writing, is Anteus separated from the earth. People may think that AI gives them special powers, but Hercules should be our real model, difficult though that path may be.
Bradbury ends his book on two notes, one dark and one light. If we are in our current situation, it is because people didn’t fight harder for books. The professor confesses,
Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it’s too late.
So that’s one lesson for us.
The novel ends on a different note, however, although not after a failed manhunt and a nuclear bomb destroying the city (!). The authorities pretend to catch and kill Montag, using doctored footage to convince the public (today they might use an AI generated image). Then the city is wiped out in a one-day war. But because thousands of wanderers have been keeping the books alive by memorizing them, the civilization they will rebuild will have the classics for a foundation. As Granger explains,
Some of us live in small towns. Chapter One of Thoreau’s Walden in Green River, Chapter Two in Willow Farm, Maine. Why, there’s one town in Maryland, only twenty-seven people, no bomb’ll ever touch that town, is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, so many pages to a person. And when the war’s over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.”
Montag has himself memorized passages from Ecclesiastes and The Book of Revelations and the novel ends by demonstrating the power of writing. With Ecclesiastes we are reminded of the cycle of life: “To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that.”
Then Montag remembers the vision of New Jersusalem found in the Book of Revelation:
And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
John of Patmos said that his vision was inspired by God. More powerful than Claude.
