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.”
12 Comments
Fredselfish@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 7d
This should make anyone who loves books sick to their stomach.
Fancy_Gecko@lemmy.ml · 19 pts · 7d
This should make everyone sick to their stomach
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 6d
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.
_lunar@lemmy.ml · 11 pts · 6d
AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 6d
My thoughts exactly! And more concise than I could have put it!
Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 10 pts · 6d
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.
HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 6d
Probably for exclucivity or something.
Similar to stories of orchid pickers way back when destroying the habitats afterward for exclusivity.
Flying_Lynx@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 6d
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... *
umbrella@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 6d
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.
maxprime@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 6d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
arran4@aussie.zone · 3 pts · 6d
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.
712@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 6d
Bro
fubarx@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 6d
This is great!
All the bad advice in those poorly-edited "For Dummies" books gets to live on.