cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73048134

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.”

  • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
    6·
    19 hours ago

    It’d be such an easy PR win to do this, but of course they aren’t. I guess for things they don’t have the rights to they probably couldn’t easily, but they could for older things. They could also create a database of it and release it when they become public domain too, which wouldn’t be that hard.

    • Kissaki@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      If they can publish a dataset of all of GitHub* then they can publish a dataset of all books.

      * main branch head state, + some filtering and manual opt-out-apply logic