cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73048134
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.”
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Book burnings but its lame ass techbro dweebs doing it
Wow that’s really fucked up and completely unnecessary.
They could have just hired a bunch of broke students to flip the pages of the books or something but no they need the data yesterday gotta make the line go up
didn’t want any grubby human fingerprints on that sweet sweet data
It is the quickest and easiest way to digitize books. We used to cut the spines off of text books and scan them with our schools industrial photo copier to make the PDFs available to everyone.
It depends on what is meant by necessary, because all of this behavior is “made necessary” to maximize profit for the companies, but it’s extremely wasteful and makes the world worse than it otherwise quite easily could be, so I wouldn’t call it necessary on that level.
I just mean unnecessary in the sense that one doesn’t need to destroy a book to scan its contents
I understand, but if they weren’t doing this whole operation then they wouldn’t give a shit about scanning these books in the first place, which is why I said there are two types of necessity. They have every incentive to destroy the books to be more competitive. The fact that it’s worse for the rest of us is to them incidental to what is “necessitated” by the market.
Right, I understand. This happened to strike me as particularly heinous.
Enclosure of the creative commons
Must suppress urge to fedpost
I’ll say it. Something should be done
[redacted] to book burners
Also, I realize that the economy is no longer real, but it boggles my mind how many of these slop companies are able to continue operating while taking massive losses
damn you could at least rebind the book and sell it instead of shredding it
The whole point is that they’re creating a proprietary dataset. If they re-sold it, then other people could use that data.
Hopefully the scans will stick around and when these companies are liquidated they aren’t lost.
The only contribution that LLMslop companies will make to human history is indexing all available human knowledge down to the letter. Opening those datasets to the public would be a social good that would almost offset the damage they’ve done (assuming they collapse soon).
New captain planet villain just dropped
Its like AI tech bros are trying to find new lows. I guess that is what they contribute. New ways to dig lower when you think they hit rock bottom.
