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.”

  • NGC2346@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    583·
    20 hours ago

    Good way to prepare for rewriting history to their liking. Shredding/destroying the books should be illegal in this regard.

    • AmyAye@nord.pubEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Yeah, part of me thinks this is part of why they are desperate for these LLMs to take off.

      Get everyone to trust it, then just manipulate it to saw whatever fascist lies they want as truth. Look at how Elon gets all pissy everytime Grok starts going to the left on its ideas.

    • kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      The reason they are doing it this way is because it is illegal to not destroy the books if they ingest them. Skirting copyright laws.

    • bluefootedbooby@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      32·
      11 hours ago

      To be fair, we don’t know what books those are, anyone can publish anything as a book these days. It doesn’t have to be good or even true. For example, Jordan Peterson shits out some books, and I personally would not mind if all copies were shredded and forgotten.