Why is this so badly written?
And the ring that kills me is how disingenious the whole ai thing is. It’s not really artificial intelligence, it’s basically really really fast computing. And I hate that they have named absolutely everything computer related “AI”. Please, it’s not fucking AI, not in the true sense of the word
If they were truely “rare” books, then the owner wouldn’t have sold it to an AI company. People who collect rare books are usually very choosy about who they sell them to. Now I don’t like them destroying books in general, but I suspect the word rare in this article is likely not what most people would actually call rare.
rare books are not collectable books but collectable books are usually rare books.
But hey at least in return we get insecure buggy slop software and soulless facsimiles of art!
Farenheit 451
That and the ending (V for Vendetta) were the sections I wrote in this article. Because as soon as I saw the news, it was all I could think of :(
I’ve read somewhere that it has to do with copyright, i.e. if you destroy the original, then it’s not a copy and therefore allowed
No, it’s far cheaper to scan a stack of loose papers than it is to scan a bound book, that’s why they’re cutting the pages out. And most of the books aren’t that valuable, even if they’re rare. So it’s an accounting decision to destroy the books.
sad dystopian sci-real story
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…
Except this is different. That book burning was due to ideological reasons. This one is due to pure greed and disregard for collective knowledge
So you’re arguing that capitalism and its greed are not an ideology?
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.
Literally this is the Library of Alexandria
Just another reminder in a planetary history of reminders of why our species fucking sucks.
Any examples of those rare books?
Edit: of course not, what an absolute shit article. “If you don’t dislike trashing a book you’re a bad person!!!” Basically. What an ignorant idea. The article linked in the first “article” (the first contains 0 information) isn’t much better, large companies buy books nobody wants, scans them and discards them.
Guess what librarians worldwide do? Well they don’t scan the books before sending them for recycling.
So an overly emotional trash headline to generate that sweet anger and engagement IMO.
Where did you get the idea that these were only books that no-one cared about? I re-read the article and didn’t find anything where they specified the type of rare books collected, scanned and destroyed
The first time I heard about this was from this article: https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/jagd-auf-alte-buecher-ki-firmen-kaufen-antiquariate-leer-und-vernichten-die-buecher
A translated quote from it:
“Not rarities, but the exact opposite,” the dealer reports: “What specifically was bought were nonfiction titles from 1970 onward with ISBN numbers—dusty, unsold stock that no one had wanted for years. Resale is completely out of the question: The books are worthless, and for each title only exactly one copy was purchased.”
That article still tries to frame this as “Rare antique books are going to be lost forever”.
Thank you for pulling that up and helping to make it more clear
In the title of this post for starters, but even if it’s true, the post is just ragebait crap.
They have a video in the article showing some books being destroyed (although, granted, dictionaries are not “rare” but I’m sure some rare texts have been destroyed in this process).
And as others have pointed out, they could easily publish the digital copies for other uses as a preservation measure.
The video also was shit, you won’t scan that book when you cut that much off. I bet the video has absolutely nothing to do with it all, as it seems to be not at all recycling, but cutting books. Cutting books needs those expensive machines in the video (you use that when making books), not to pulp stuff.
Still plenty to be pissed about though. As someone who does archiving it’s still enraging because they are destroying thousands of books not for archival where you destroy one copy to provide access to all, but to copy the book, rewrite it, and sell it back to you.
There’s now less copies of said book, it wasn’t archived, they stole that content, and are now selling it back to you. People will then take this stolen content and act like it’s something they created and then try to turn profit. It makes every copyright argument the publishers have ever made look like a joke. Why do publishing companies even exist?
And they are providing the OCR’d text free of charge to the masses, right? Right?
Not AI Companies, but billionaires. They have names, they’re people, and we shouldn’t let them hide behind “company”. These are some of the people fucking us all over for nothing but their own hubris. They have too much power and money, they’re delusional, and they need to be taxed, regulated, and stopped:
Sam Altman, Open AI
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet, Google
Clay Magouyrk, Oracle
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, FacebookWhat about Amodei of Anthropic?
Oracle is owned by the Ellison family.
This is probably going to be an unpopular comment… but these articles are all super misleading. The physical books are getting destroyed, but their content is getting digitized. Is that a loss? Absolutely. But is there a benefit? Also yes.
The biggest loss is probably the fact that destroying the physical books removes them from circulation, making them essentially permanent additions to these companies’ book collections.
The biggest loss is probably the fact that destroying the physical books removes them from circulation
And these are books that have been sitting in warehouses that haven’t been able to be sold because no one wanted them. They were removed from circulation long ago.
They aren’t in current circulation, not the same thing.
Not arguing that they are useful, just that sitting in a warehouse and physical destruction aren’t equivalent in terms of potential use.
That’s true, but sitting in a warehouse is costing someone money and I’m sure they were more than happy to sell the books even if they knew they’d eventually get destroyed.
But the other thing is, what should these companies do instead? They scraped the internet and got skewered for that. They pirated books and got in trouble for that. Now they are legally purchasing books to scan. They can’t donate or sell the books since they’ve effectively copied the book and that would get them into piracy trouble again.
That’s true, but sitting in a warehouse is costing someone money and I’m sure they were more than happy to sell the books even if they knew they’d eventually get destroyed.
Sure, thats a possibility, I wasnt arguing otherwise.
But the other thing is, what should these companies do instead? They scraped the internet and got skewered for that. They pirated books and got in trouble for that. Now they are legally purchasing books to scan.
For me, them doing sketchy and illegal shit, mostly getting away with it and then charging you for access to said ill-gotten gains is a valid reason for people to be upset at them, rage inducing, even.
That aside the equivalent of mass book burning isn’t a good look regardless of legality, even less so when its the same people that did the sketchy shit before.
There is no benefit of the doubt left.
I can see how someone could get to:
“all they do is sketchy shit so even though this might look legit, let’s vocally show our disdain for them and anything they are doing”
So… back to my question: what should they do instead?
What is the benifit of a book being digitized for only be used for one company training their “AI”. These digitized copies aren’t going to be made available to humans in any way because then the company would loose the advantage they have in training data.
