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?
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.
I dunno, the GameStop Bros are still waiting for MOASS. So I'd say the wealthy have more ways to keep the plates spinning than we wish they did.
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.
"We must destroy this precious archive of humanity so our competitors can't also scan it"
So it can’t be traced that they’ve used said books for training data.
Destroying the an endangered book feels like it should be criminal no?
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.
“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” one small bookseller told tech news website 404 Media last week.
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’ve been well suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”
Then stop selling rare and out of prints to an AI company, you fucking doorknob.
Greed knows no bounds.
How would a book seller know? Orders increase and you find out afterwards why. Bit hard to know ahead of time
That's fucking evil.
Because when you destroy the publicly available source you become the only available source. Paid, of course.
The final nail in the coffin for humanity, locking knowledge behind digital sources that are inaccessible in event of catastrophe.
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?”
You know what, burn the whole fucking planet down. I'm done with this clown-ass species.
I just dont even know what to say about the intentional destruction of knowledge
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
Have you ever tried scanning a book? It's a huge PITA.
They just cut the binding off so they can be run through a document feeder.
Easier to scan if you cut the binding off, and it costs money to re-bind a book you purchased for 10 cents as part of a lot.
Do make sure that knowledge is only available through their model and otherwise lost to humanity.
Same with bombarding small websites until they give up and pull the plug.
Everything is fucked
Copyright. They mustn't make a copy. There is legal precedent that confirms it's okay to transform the copy you bought into digital format. The Internet Archive relies a lot on that. I think they actually litigated it in the first place. So that's why the copyright heads are going so absolutely apeshit. If no one's charging you rent for using some data, then it's "unethical".
This makes me tear up a bit. All those lost books...
So they can gatekeep knowledge? Got it.
That would imply preserving the original. No, they are having their AIs revise history and its literature to whatever they deem 'acceptable' in their new world order, hence the rampant book banning spree they've been on as of late.
Combine this mass burning of humanity's canon with the onslaught of AI generated nonsense and think about what is doing to do our history and knowledge going forward.
Humanity is being dragged into a black hole by these blood sucking tech fetishist demons.
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.
To be honest, I'd be MUCH less against this practice if this shredding at the very least included saving the original scans at at least 300 dpi for everyone to access, freely.
Ideally, they wouldn't cut them by the spine, but even giving the despined ones to an archive/library would be just above the unpermissible line.
Despining, scanning and public access archiving is borderline permissible.
Also, if every AI company does this, then it's more books gone. If they cooperated they'd only need to do it once. Good scans of all books in the public domain would be so useful for us all as society.
That's absolutely disgusting. At this rate, governments should really be stepping in and stopping all this.
"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?" Stupid AI!
I hope when the bubble bursts the cunts making these kinds of decisions are so distraught by their losses they resort to suicide.
I hate that I started to wish for the deaths of people I don't even know outside of news coverage, but that's what it takes unfortunately
These companies need quantity over quality. They're gonna buy the cheapest books in bulk they can.
Contrary to what some might think. I'm not taking a stance for AI. I'm just pointing out, no one cared about these books 1 month ago. No one wanted to buy them. No one wanted to read them. That's why they've been sitting on a shelf in a warehouse collecting dust.
They're not valuable in any sense of the word. They're only "rare" in the sense that they sold so poorly, there was no point in printing more.
This is such a silly thing to glue on the hate-train. "They're destroying books no one wanted to read!" Oh no... anyway
Popular doesnt always mean good. Unpopular doesnt always mean bad. There are countless little poetry books that only circulated through clubs. Texts circulated through writing groups that contain works of authors before they were famous.there are rare books you've never heard of that a collector would pay thousands for because they are one of the few people who know its value. Old folios that crossed oceans as the libraries behind them burned in petty wars that sat in attics for generations before the family found it only to send it up wholesale in an estate auction.
The point is that these assholes buy it all up by the truck load and process it indiscriminately. All to avoid copyright, and to feed their environment destroying hallucination machine.
Why cant they rebind them in some sort of ring binder? I guess the answer is money, but that should be possible no?
They're making it really hard to like them.
Library of Alexandria II
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
