this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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[–] Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 28 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Google already did this ~15 years ago with the google library project, but they didn’t buy books. They took them from libraries and then as a result of scanning old and rare books, they were generally damaged or destroyed.

I know. I saw it first hand. There wasn’t an incinerator or anything, but the carts full of books that disintegrated half the time. They had quotas for pages scanned and falling below them was a firable offense. You had to rush through it and there was no process to set aside books that disintegrated when the pages were turned.

[–] Canconda@lemmy.ca 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Not trusting google but IMO digitizing books is completely different from training an LLM on them and subsequently destroying them.

The originals getting damaged is certainly not ideal, but if the contents are being preserved it's not as bad.

I know google isn't giving away that stuff for free either.

[–] Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I promise google used the scanned books with OCR to train their LLMs. This sort of thing isn’t even new from them.

[–] Canconda@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 days ago

As long as they don't delete the PDFs afterwards it's still categorically different in my eyes.

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

IMO digitizing books is completely different from training an LLM on them and subsequently destroying them

I'm so sick of this style of Internet commenting. The comments premise isn't "Google did this and so it's fine"... The person is literally saying "Google did this and it was ALSO bad".

The Internet has broken our brains, and the reason we don't focus on hating the right class in society, is we're too busy fighting amongst ourselves in the comments over which one of us has the purest definition of the bad thing on today's corporate agenda.

"But I have a more pure definition of the worse thing they're doing right now" isn't the debate. "We should do something about it" should be the discussion.

I don't like the "this shit sandwich is even worse than the last one - it's not even comparable" is where our consciousness has been dragged by this system and we need to do better than that. Resist.

P.S Once you see the purity politics we do around having the best example/definition of todays bad thing, you'll notice it everywhere. It's as if we're all trying to be the best documentarians of this Capitalist shit rather than writing our own agendas. Can we just let people agreeing the bad thing is bad alone, maybe even see them as commerades for agreeing the bad thing is bad?

[–] daannii@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Preserving books that are falling apart isn't really the same as intentionally destroying so that the copyright can't be traced.