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You have got to be fucking kidding me
You people have no idea how much I want AI banned all across everything. I don't care about anything at this point. These people are EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL. Pure breed CRIMINALS
Fucking 90% of the books I read are "rare"
"Oh, but there's SOME benefits to having AI", says some person on the internet that had it shoved down their throat by their boss. No. Fuck you. Fuuuuuuck you all the way.
What's the point of destroying books after scanning them instead of reselling them apart from *hurr durr we are evil*?
Cause to easily scan them they remove the binding and rebinding is more work %han destroyibg so the point is capitalism
Fair use loophole, they claim they convert one physical book into one digital with no illicit copies, while also supporting the delusion of AI being an equivalent to a human reader. It is weird on so many levels but no one of noticeable weight asked them wtf.
To keep their competitors from buying them and scanning them.
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.
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.
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.
Then they aren't rare books necessarily.
That's fucking evil.
That's absolutely disgusting. At this rate, governments should really be stepping in and stopping all this.
Issue is, the AI accelerationist cult has planned out every scenario, and they have a very good plan to amaze politicians. That's why the bubble haven't burst yet.
The whole point of post-enlightenment government is to serve the public good. But then it gets captured by capitalist interests (as Karl Marx explains in Das Kapital) at which point the government serves capital.
Destroying the an endangered book feels like it should be criminal no?
Good way to prepare for rewriting history to their liking. Shredding/destroying the books should be illegal in this regard.
To be fair, we don't know what books those are, anyone can publish anything as a book these days. It doesn't have to be good or even true. For example, Jordan Peterson shits out some books, and I personally would not mind if all copies were shredded and forgotten.
This makes me tear up a bit. All those lost books...
I really hope the AI bubble pops soon and takes at least some of these stupid companies with it. They've been operating at a GIANT loss for years at this point, how much longer will this go on?
Depends on how much power the financiers have to fabricate capital from debt. In modern economics that's not necessarily a limitation. I do hope it will be tho.
The way I see the situation is that every single AI company can clearly see the massive wall they are speeding ever faster towards, they see it and can also see that it is a massive wall, thick and sturdy.
There is however one thing that keeps them pushing the accelerator down hard against the floor, the delusion that they alone is smart enough to find the prefect weakpoint where they can smash through to the promised land of massive promises, while everyone else is just flattened against the wall.
It is extreme narcissism combined with yes men powering this shit.
i think they are just making sure they arnt holding the bag. thats why i keep seing new AI startups popping up.
Nevermind that when this bubble pops, the US govt will give them all the money they need from our taxes.
Investors are starting to notice that it’s all smoke and mirrors in terms of the profits. I am reasonably sure it will pop this year. I will be utterly shocked if it doesn’t pop by the end of next year. It’s just so comically and obviously unsustainable.
This is gonna go down as the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, I swear.
Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.
You know what, burn the whole fucking planet down. I'm done with this clown-ass species.
They're working on it :/
This sounded like clownish villainy in Rainbows End. I swear these guys are compulsively drawn to the worst parts of SciFi.
“Book burning, you say?”
The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.
“It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said.
I hate the AI slop as much as the next guy, but these are books nobody wanted. They were going to rot on the shelf until being thrown out. Just being rare doesn't mean it's particularly valuable.
Hopefully they are retaining the digitized versions for release at some point in the future. I'd imagine they are, since they'd still need the raw data to train future models.
You can't determine what knowledge will be useful or valuable to someone in the future. Archaeologists have poured over receipts and shopping lists from ancient Egypt that were thrown away. It's why the Internet Archive backs up all the random webpages they do. There's no justification for mass destruction of books, especially since it's being done to train broadly useless LLMs.
Of course they won't be releasing these books later on. These companies want to hoard this text data so their competitors can't access it. It would also be illegally distributing copyrighted work. Aside from destructive scanning being faster, the fact that a book is destroyed makes the digital copy "transformative" and therefore legal if it isn't further copied or distributed. A judge ruled on this recently. I don't mean to advocate for copyright enforcement, but that's the reality here.
I think China has a national repository of AI training data that companies can access if they contribute to it as well. Doing the same thing in the West would at least blunt some of the harm the AI craze is causing, but that would have made too much sense.
Bernie's plan for government control of AI companies made a lot of sense in this regard. And would mean those vast scanned libraries were public domain, or at least publicly stewarded.
But, ya know, 😱 socialism
