Hugin & Munin Journal

Editorial image generated by the author. There is something instinctively disturbing about cutting the spine off an old book, feeding its pages through a scanner and throwing what remains into recycling. That reaction becomes stronger when the purpose is training an artificial intelligence model. Anthropic did this on an industrial scale under Project Panama , purchasing large numbers of physical books, removing their bindings and scanning them into a digital library. More recently, 404 Media traced a shipment containing rare books to an Amazon facility that its investigation identified as an AI-training operation, where employees described books being disbound and digitised. It makes for an effective story about the excesses of the AI industry: immensely valuable companies consuming physical remnants of human culture to feed their machines. But the outrage obscures a more interesting problem. The problem is not that these books are being digitised. Many of them pro...

For centuries, art looked like the last refuge from automation. Machines could calculate, classify, optimise, and reproduce. Creativity seemed different: an activity rooted in experience, intention, and the peculiar human need to make one thing stand for another. Generative AI has made that distinction harder to maintain. It can now produce stories, music, images, voices, animation, and video. Much of the material remains uneven, but awkward outputs are no longer the decisive fact. What matters is that plausible cultural material can be produced faster, at greater scale, and at a fraction of its former cost. The resulting question reaches beyond whether an individual image is beautiful or derivative. If machines can generate culture in enormous quantities, what happens to the human ecosystem from which that culture was learned? Machines can imitate the surface of culture. The harder question is what happens beneath it. Editorial image generated by the author. The...