There’s no legitimate purpose for destroying these books.
There are non-invasive ways scan books. But the destruction is an added bonus. These companies make a copy of these public domain books and then pulp the remains. They’re rare, so that means they’re hard to find (that’s what rare means, after all).
Then, they can turn around and sell their dataset to AI companies.
The destruction is the point.
Capitalism always creates perverse incentives. The most profitable thing you can do is seize something readily available and make it impossible to get without paying you.
But which companies are doing this? It sounds like these are companies that supply training data to AI companies. I think we need names.
I misread that as:
The most profitable thing you can do is seize someone readily available […]
… and realized that also tracks.
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, FacebookOracle is owned by the Ellison family.
What about Amodei of Anthropic?
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They didn’t just start
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People have been talking about this for months.
It’s really getting old how many people are starting to act like trump. And just assume if they just heard about something, no one else has.
It sounds like a minor thing, but it’s a huge red flag that people don’t have base levels of empathy.
For every person who has heard about it, there are many more who have not. It’s important to have these conversations so that we as a society can make decisions about what we value; only when a critical mass of individuals have awareness can we work together toward common goals.
Yeah. And you can easily phrase a headline like that…
That it had been going on for a while and people should pay attention…
But they didn’t.
Which is why I mentioned it.
Edit:
For example:
https://lemmy.world/post/50060570?scrollToComments=true
There is a difference between headlines, and it shouldn’t be surprising the major network is more professional and accurate than a blog.
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sad dystopian sci-real story
And they are providing the OCR’d text free of charge to the masses, right? Right?
But hey at least in return we get insecure buggy slop software and soulless facsimiles of art!
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
Just another reminder in a planetary history of reminders of why our species fucking sucks.
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.
By your definition, what makes a book rare? And if it is not a collectable book, why?
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.
