Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
this kills two birds with one stone, it compiles data for the hallucination machine and it destroys irreplaceable knowledge so people will be left with no substitute to the hallucination machine.
on top of art being completely ruined, we’re now getting to the point where nobody can actually know anything with any certainty.
My thoughts exactly! And more concise than I could have put it!
Just donate the books for a tax break or sell them at a discount. The destruction has a level of cruelty equal to restaurants poisoning their surplus food in the garbage.
Probably for exclucivity or something.
Similar to stories of orchid pickers way back when destroying the habitats afterward for exclusivity.
This should make anyone who loves books sick to their stomach.
This should make everyone sick to their stomach
It’s like all of these companies had a starting point of “How can we be as evil as we possibly can be” and then they workshop until they run into insane shit like this.
Picks up a clay-tablet, and starts chiseling:
*"As the archeologist wandered around he found basically nothing other rectangular plates. A clay-tablet hinted this layer should have been part of an information rich age, a so called ‘digital age’. Somehow there was no evidence to be found other than rectangles in all shapes, sizes and composition. Not only for that time period, but surprisingly also a thousand years prior to that… *
A small blue brick with a strange marking on it was found, “NØKÍÁ”. When a button was pressed a screen lit up with a young blond female and pink hyroglyphics “HANNAH MONTANA LINUX FOR NOKIA 2026”. On it, an instance of Minecraft with a library unlocked keys to the past as archeologists roamed a pixelated landscape as an avatar named Rahul.
paired with trying their best to close resources like anna’s archive, we are watching these fucks burn the library of alexandria we built on the internet.
IIRC this is very much created by the way copyright law works. So this is the company acting on incentives. It needs regulatory adjustment. If you stop them from THIS method they might find an even more destructive path. Make it so their actions create positive 2nd order effects.
Regulating is useless, if it can’t be enforced. And why the representatives will create any regulations at all if they are in the pocket of the billionaires who run those companies?
This is great!
All the bad advice in those poorly-edited “For Dummies” books gets to live on.
Bro
