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.”

  • subverted_per@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    8·
    2 hours ago

    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.