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.”

  • FireWire400@lemmy.worldEnglish
    57·
    3 个月前

    I really hope the AI bubble pops soon and takes at least some of these stupid companies with it. They’ve been operating at a GIANT loss for years at this point, how much longer will this go on?

    • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
      28·
      3 个月前

      The way I see the situation is that every single AI company can clearly see the massive wall they are speeding ever faster towards, they see it and can also see that it is a massive wall, thick and sturdy.

      There is however one thing that keeps them pushing the accelerator down hard against the floor, the delusion that they alone is smart enough to find the prefect weakpoint where they can smash through to the promised land of massive promises, while everyone else is just flattened against the wall.

      It is extreme narcissism combined with yes men powering this shit.

      • bobs_monkey@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        3 个月前

        Nevermind that when this bubble pops, the US govt will give them all the money they need from our taxes.

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      14·
      3 个月前

      Investors are starting to notice that it’s all smoke and mirrors in terms of the profits. I am reasonably sure it will pop this year. I will be utterly shocked if it doesn’t pop by the end of next year. It’s just so comically and obviously unsustainable.

      This is gonna go down as the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, I swear.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      62·
      3 个月前

      I dunno, the GameStop Bros are still waiting for MOASS. So I’d say the wealthy have more ways to keep the plates spinning than we wish they did.

      • LordFireCrotch@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        3 个月前

        I like the plate spinning analogy. I think these guys have SO much money that they do have a few tricks up their sleeve to keep investors going.

        I think once they land a few enterprise level fish hard, it will keep the plates spinning a good bit longer.

  • NGC2346@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    261·
    3 个月前

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

    • idiomaddict@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 个月前

      As his faculties return, Robert (who has always been technophobic) must adapt to a different world, where almost every object is networked and mediated-reality technology is commonplace.

      …

      However, jitter and latency are considerable problems with this basic network when long distances are involved. In the novel, Robert Gu develops an algorithm that partially compensates for these technical deficiencies, and might ultimately allow the inclusion of haptics.

      This feels like it would be a little Mary-Sue to me, but I haven’t read the book. Is that transition handled well?

      • GrabtharsHammer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 个月前

        I found it a bit of a stretch that a cranky technophobe English professor could, or even would bother to, create an algorithm the whole world of math and computer nerds overlooked. But I don’t let preposterous characters get in the way of my big-ideas SF when I can help it.

  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    3 个月前

    Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    183·
    3 个月前

    You know what, burn the whole fucking planet down. I’m done with this clown-ass species.

    I just dont even know what to say about the intentional destruction of knowledge

    • Funwayguy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 个月前

      That would imply preserving the original. No, they are having their AIs revise history and its literature to whatever they deem ‘acceptable’ in their new world order, hence the rampant book banning spree they’ve been on as of late.

  • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
    82·
    3 个月前

    The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.

    “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said.

    I hate the AI slop as much as the next guy, but these are books nobody wanted. They were going to rot on the shelf until being thrown out. Just being rare doesn’t mean it’s particularly valuable.

    Hopefully they are retaining the digitized versions for release at some point in the future. I’d imagine they are, since they’d still need the raw data to train future models.

    • el_eh_chase@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      11·
      3 个月前

      You can’t determine what knowledge will be useful or valuable to someone in the future. Archaeologists have poured over receipts and shopping lists from ancient Egypt that were thrown away. It’s why the Internet Archive backs up all the random webpages they do. There’s no justification for mass destruction of books, especially since it’s being done to train broadly useless LLMs.

      Of course they won’t be releasing these books later on. These companies want to hoard this text data so their competitors can’t access it. It would also be illegally distributing copyrighted work. Aside from destructive scanning being faster, the fact that a book is destroyed makes the digital copy “transformative” and therefore legal if it isn’t further copied or distributed. A judge ruled on this recently. I don’t mean to advocate for copyright enforcement, but that’s the reality here.

      I think China has a national repository of AI training data that companies can access if they contribute to it as well. Doing the same thing in the West would at least blunt some of the harm the AI craze is causing, but that would have made too much sense.

      • PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 个月前

        Bernie’s plan for government control of AI companies made a lot of sense in this regard. And would mean those vast scanned libraries were public domain, or at least publicly stewarded.

        But, ya know, 😱 socialism

  • wasabi_noir@lemmy.zipEnglish
    61·
    3 个月前

    I hope when the bubble bursts the cunts making these kinds of decisions are so distraught by their losses they resort to suicide.

    • FireWire400@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 个月前

      I hate that I started to wish for the deaths of people I don’t even know outside of news coverage, but that’s what it takes unfortunately

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    3 个月前

    I was worried there would be some part of AI that I didn’t like at all . . .

  • _NetNomad@fedia.io
    21·
    3 个月前

    if this was about Number Go Up, they’d probably make more money selling the despined books or something instead of destroying them and selling (or do whatever they’re doing with) the raw pulp. this sounds like an expensive process and there’s no guarantee that expanding these datasets is going to improve their models in a quantifiable way, let alone a profitable one. they must just get some kind of perverse pleasure out of making the world a worse place