this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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Does anyone remember circa 2014 that radical jihadists in the middle east were destroying ancient and medieval artifacts, including stone heads? And I remember here in the liberal west we thought that was awful.
This is not the only thing that makes me think of that. Also Trump's recent calls to reduce the size of US national parks and open them up to oil and uranium mining exploitation.
Yeah we remember. Because that’s a literal fucking warcrime. You’re not allowed to destroy historical sites.
While I agree that destroying books is bad - even common ones - it’s also not technically illegal. If I want to burn a first edition of whatever book worth thousands of dollars… I’m legally allowed to do that.
I can also see the benefit of having a digital version of a rare book that can be enjoyed by thousands as opposed to sitting on a shelf. But yeah, definitely hold companies accountable for destroying them. There has to be a better way to do that work and still have a useable book afterwards.
The point of bookburning is that it would only be accessible to AI, bringing forth it's monopoly on said first edition. No one would upload it to IA in the process. It is deleting one source of knowledge out of existence.
Theyre actually destroying the book to be legal according to the article.
I don't trust AI companies to not alter the texts of those books if there's something in them that does not align with their worldview.
So any book added to the online archive(s) by these companies is suspect.
Random bulk rate books aren't artifacts. The vast majority of them probably have a copy in Anna's Archive.
If they did have a copy in Anna's Archive, why the fuck would AI companies find physical copies, buy them, rip them apart, scan them, and then digitize them before destroying them?
Remember, you don't get the digital copy. It's only used to train their models.
Then they aren't rare books necessarily.
The use of the word "rare" implies that they are not bought in bulk....
Rare doesn’t necessarily mean culturally valuable. How many of these rare books are actually just old instruction manuals, travel guides, training materials, phone books, and dictionaries?
The issue with that is that we don't yet know what is culturally valuable or not.
Just because we don't see a need for the specific book now, doesn't mean it won't change tomorrow.
Which appears to be backed up by nothing.
Why are you so intent on riding big corpo cock? Do you think daddy Altman is going to praise you, call you his good girl?
You don’t actually need to play devil’s advocate, you know.