- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.”
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.
You’re doing an awful lot of speculating. The texts circulating through clubs, are circulating. These books were not.
Do you have any idea how many books we casually destroy? Books that never got sold, that are just wasting space for the next new book. The only difference is that unsold books being burned for energy isn’t manking the news. It’s just another thursday
Yeah, when I had a library close by I’d go all the time and find books I’d never heard of to read. It was great. Just because something doesn’t have a publicst pushing it on everyone doesn’t mean it’s not good or valuable. These ghouls destroying everything to feed their slop machine disgust me.
Yeah, small community literature is extremely valuable to historians of such communities.