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 :(

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.

Like the mangrove forests in Africa and Asia. Scarcity is a feature, not a bug.

They destroy them to comply with fair use laws. A judge in San Francisco ruled this practice as fair use.

I misread that as:

The most profitable thing you can do is seize someone readily available [...]

... and realized that also tracks.

its silly, i use a phone but i dont want it made with child labor. there is no need to destroy the books.

but this part, I'm sure, will upset people

I don't know that that's a bad thing. If you use these models, you are complicit; you're part of creating the "need" for these models. You don't necessarily have a choice (because realistically losing your job and all the stuff that entails isn't a real choice, and that's fully part of how the system is intended to work), but you're still complicit.

We as individuals don't have a lot of power, because power is mostly tied to some kind of capital. That's why working together is so important, because it's only by working together we'll have any real power to impact things.

I don't think being upset is a bad thing. Recognise it, and do something about it. It could be something small like talking to colleagues about it, or contacting a union representative, or a politician. Or go big, no shame in that either.

"For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not."

That would be Gardiner's side of the article. I contributed by wroting two sections on this one:

• The Shadow of Fahrenheit 451, and
• “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

Just to explain whose take is whose for this little article, at least.

For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.

Going to work for yourself is always an option. Ask any street busker. Insinuating it isn't is your complicity.

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?

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.

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.

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.