The Chatbots are hungry for literacy: De-digitalising literature in the age of A.I:

It’s 2026, and society is slowly morphing into a Bradburian dystopia. Everyone’s favourite little LLM (Large Language Model) taskers behind the screens are being fed a 3-course meal with the appetiser and main course being generic human data, and for dessert? A little humane literacy.

Claude, Anthropic’s chatbotbaby is the AI assistant used by a number of software and creative industries for churning out emails, essays, reports and sprawling large chunks of data into digestible bits of information. Amid the saturated web of AI slop, Anthropic’s latest project–Project Panama, is working overtime to ensure Claude is being fed physically written works of literature rather than low quality internet speech. Through the process of “using hydraulic cutters to destroy books from the last century to train the next generation of chatbots.” 

One of Anthropic’s mission statements is to “do the simple thing that works,” while also stating that they “take an empirical approach to problems and care about the size of our (their) impact and not the sophistication of our (their) methods.” However, when the sophistication level of their methods reaches the brink of book burning, they might want to reconsider. In a stark juxtaposition to the clarity of their mission statement, the covertness of Project Panama was well concealed until 2024, when a copyright lawsuit between a group of authors and Anthropic led to a leakage of documents that revealed the shadowy plan. With one leaked legal filing stating their want of anonymity, by proclaiming that:

We don’t want it to be known that we are work­ing on this.”

The digitalisation of text and literature has created a seamless transition for the tech bros to capitalise on humane inbuilt creativity. Maybe it’s time to de-digitalise our thoughts and carve ideas into physical mediums again. The ubiquitous presence of AI in our day-to-day feels alarming enough, with posters and filters drowning out literacy. 

The cold war between AI and Humanity is escalating, and the more we feed into these LLM systems, the more we need to create for ourselves and humanity, because as Ray Bradbury once wrote;

“There is more than one way to burn a book, and the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”