Not AI Companies, but billionaires. They have names, they’re people, and we shouldn’t let them hide behind “company”. These are some of the people fucking us all over for nothing but their own hubris. They have too much power and money, they’re delusional, and they need to be taxed, regulated, and stopped:
Sam Altman, Open AI
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet, Google
Clay Magouyrk, Oracle
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, FacebookOracle is owned by the Ellison family.
What about Amodei of Anthropic?
It would be slightly less horrrible if they released the digitized books online, or even just paid archivist organizations to carefully do the job for them and make public the works to then train on.
But no. They choose the worst way to do everything.
Welcome to capitalism…
Except this is different. That book burning was due to ideological reasons. This one is due to pure greed and disregard for collective knowledge
Even really evil people respect knowledge.
These aren’t people.
You’re right, it is different, the AI companies are misled into thinking this will generate some sort of profit but the Chinese were just doing it from a place of pure malice.
Putting the slightest chance of profits over the conservation of rare books is also pure malice in my book. With a layer of makeup.
And worse if you do it to benefit humanity (see: internet archive) they’ll sue you into oblivion or come for your neck. Even mobsters benefited their communities somewhat while doing heinous things.
Fahrenheit 451
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 :(
And the ring that kills me is how disingenious the whole ai thing is. It’s not really artificial intelligence, it’s basically really really fast computing. And I hate that they have named absolutely everything computer related “AI”. Please, it’s not fucking AI, not in the true sense of the word
sad dystopian sci-real story
And they are providing the OCR’d text free of charge to the masses, right? Right?
But hey at least in return we get insecure buggy slop software and soulless facsimiles of art!
Any examples of those rare books?
Edit: of course not, what an absolute shit article. “If you don’t dislike trashing a book you’re a bad person!!!” Basically. What an ignorant idea. The article linked in the first “article” (the first contains 0 information) isn’t much better, large companies buy books nobody wants, scans them and discards them.
Guess what librarians worldwide do? Well they don’t scan the books before sending them for recycling.
So an overly emotional trash headline to generate that sweet anger and engagement IMO.
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.
The video also was shit, you won’t scan that book when you cut that much off. I bet the video has absolutely nothing to do with it all, as it seems to be not at all recycling, but cutting books. Cutting books needs those expensive machines in the video (you use that when making books), not to pulp stuff.
Where did you get the idea that these were only books that no-one cared about? I re-read the article and didn’t find anything where they specified the type of rare books collected, scanned and destroyed
In the title of this post for starters, but even if it’s true, the post is just ragebait crap.
The first time I heard about this was from this article: https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/jagd-auf-alte-buecher-ki-firmen-kaufen-antiquariate-leer-und-vernichten-die-buecher
A translated quote from it:
“Not rarities, but the exact opposite,” the dealer reports: “What specifically was bought were nonfiction titles from 1970 onward with ISBN numbers—dusty, unsold stock that no one had wanted for years. Resale is completely out of the question: The books are worthless, and for each title only exactly one copy was purchased.”
That article still tries to frame this as “Rare antique books are going to be lost forever”.
Thank you for pulling that up and helping to make it more clear
Why is this so badly written?
Just another reminder in a planetary history of reminders of why our species fucking sucks.
❌ Destroying the books
✔️ …to fully digitize them
❌ …and hoard the data in their systemsHow do they manage to screw things twice in a row?
If they were truely “rare” books, then the owner wouldn’t have sold it to an AI company. People who collect rare books are usually very choosy about who they sell them to. Now I don’t like them destroying books in general, but I suspect the word rare in this article is likely not what most people would actually call rare.
rare books are not collectable books but collectable books are usually rare books.
By your definition, what makes a book rare? And if it is not a collectable book, why?
Literally this is the Library of Alexandria
There’s no legitimate purpose for destroying these books.
There are non-invasive ways scan books. But the destruction is an added bonus. These companies make a copy of these public domain books and then pulp the remains. They’re rare, so that means they’re hard to find (that’s what rare means, after all).
Then, they can turn around and sell their dataset to AI companies.
The destruction is the point.
Capitalism always creates perverse incentives. The most profitable thing you can do is seize something readily available and make it impossible to get without paying you.
But which companies are doing this? It sounds like these are companies that supply training data to AI companies. I think we need names.
They destroy them to comply with fair use laws. A judge in San Francisco ruled this practice as fair use.
Do you have a case to cite for that? Not calling you out or anything but I want know who the hell ruled that and why. That’s insane
Thank you! Though it doesn’t seem the judge imposed any requirement to destroy the physical copies just that creating a large digital library from the copies for reuse would violate the IP rights of the work owners
I think rare here may just mean misprints or something else rather than them destroying the one and only copy of books
No, they plunder antiquitarian book shops around the globe. There exist very few copies of those books around and they sure aren’t digitized anywhere.
I misread that as:
The most profitable thing you can do is seize someone readily available […]
… and realized that also tracks.
Like the mangrove forests in Africa and Asia. Scarcity is a feature, not a bug.
If its public domain couldn’t anyone else with a copy make it freely available
