this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
328 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
86757 readers
2868 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It would be slightly less horrrible if they released the digitized books online, or even just paid archivist organizations to carefully do the job for them and make public the works to then train on.
But no. They choose the worst way to do everything.
And worse if you do it to benefit humanity (see: internet archive) they'll sue you into oblivion or come for your neck. Even mobsters benefited their communities somewhat while doing heinous things.
Welcome to capitalism...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/11/china-burning-book-censorship-online-outrage/
Welcome to humanity
Except this is different. That book burning was due to ideological reasons. This one is due to pure greed and disregard for collective knowledge
Even really evil people respect knowledge.
These aren't people.
You're right, it is different, the AI companies are misled into thinking this will generate some sort of profit but the Chinese were just doing it from a place of pure malice.
Putting the slightest chance of profits over the conservation of rare books is also pure malice in my book. With a layer of makeup.