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.
If its public domain couldn’t anyone else with a copy make it freely available
Like the mangrove forests in Africa and Asia. Scarcity is a feature, not a bug.
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, FacebookWhat about Amodei of Anthropic?
Oracle is owned by the Ellison family.
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
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.
Not nice to see books being destroyed, but this part, I’m sure, will upset people:
Lastly, and most importantly, if you use these AI chatbots, you are complicit.
For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.
but this part, I’m sure, will upset people
I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. If you use these models, you are complicit; you’re part of creating the “need” for these models. You don’t necessarily have a choice (because realistically losing your job and all the stuff that entails isn’t a real choice, and that’s fully part of how the system is intended to work), but you’re still complicit.
We as individuals don’t have a lot of power, because power is mostly tied to some kind of capital. That’s why working together is so important, because it’s only by working together we’ll have any real power to impact things.
I don’t think being upset is a bad thing. Recognise it, and do something about it. It could be something small like talking to colleagues about it, or contacting a union representative, or a politician. Or go big, no shame in that either.
It’s complicity under duress, essentially. Which is shitty in a few different directions.
Exactly, it’s built on systemic violence, in that when you don’t have a job you’re rendered more or less useless to society and left to wither by the wayside. Thus it is in the individuals immediate best interest to keep working with, thus enforcing these systems.
Worrying about anything beyond the immediate is for those with means, unfortunately.
I live in Sweden. I grew up a povvo bitch, but I’ve managed to do well for myself over the years. Even so, I don’t have anything to fall back on. If I lost my job I’d luckily have unemployment, through my union and various labour rights, but that too has a limit.
I get why people wouldn’t want to fight back, which is what leads to doomerism and wishes to just burn the entire system to the ground in the hopes of building something better next time. Which I get too, I feel that all the time; improvement seems unlikely given the perpetual decline I’ve witnessed my entire life. Even so, I contact politicians, and I engage with my union.
improvement seems unlikely given the perpetual decline I’ve witnessed my entire life
To be fair, I’m sure there were plenty of people who lived in the late Roman, late Byzantine, and late Ottoman empires who felt the same way.
“For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.”
That would be Gardiner’s side of the article. I contributed by wroting two sections on this one:
- The Shadow of Fahrenheit 451, and
- “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Just to explain whose take is whose for this little article, at least.
For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.
Going to work for yourself is always an option. Ask any street busker. Insinuating it isn’t is your complicity.
I’m sure people with dependents, a mortgage , rent to pay, debt to clear, etc. would be thrilled with your suggestion.
Oh dear. The consequences of ones own choices. It’s almost like you’re trying to dictate the creature comforts of your cell, not eliminate the imprisonment entirely.
Maybe you should think real hard about the asymmetry in your position.
Creating stability for ourselves and loved ones really can be demanding and force us into positions that make impossible to be as ethical as we’d want to be.
That said it is crazy how many people in the “first world” view themselves in that category while the demands they have are “a room and bathroom per person in the household”, keeping the house 69 during the summer and 72 during the winter, a new 1000 dollar phone a year or two, a game system or two total a few k, a newer car because they’re last one is just over 80k miles, several subscriptions to constant instant entertainment, etc.
Like yes, there really are people that have to beg for more hours to keep a two bed room for themselves and their kids, those people don’t really have a choice. They are also the rest of us that really can just have a little less “treats” and be perfectly fine.
“Daddy, why can’t we eat dinner this week?”
Listen up sweetie, Daddy had to leave his job because they wanted him to use Claude to generate a spreadsheet. It was the only way to destroy our billionaire overlords from the inside. You’ll thank me when you’re older, now keep packing your things, we have until Friday before the landlord calls the police to forcibly evict us.
“Daddy, why does everyone work until they die? Why is the sky filled with satellite debris? Why is the water poison? Why are there no more winters?”
“Well, Daddy needs a paycheck because Daddy was prioritizing creature comforts and sold himself into wage slavery. Daddy’s been voting in favor of Corporatist entrenchment for decades. Daddy would rather have his Amazon Prime than be uncomfortable living without his consumerist devices to distract him from what his choices are doing to the planet.”
“Daddy’s also been selling your eyeballs to advertisers since before you could form coherent thoughts because he’d rather let the iPad babysit you than be a real parent. Daddy’s too busy doomscrolling Pornhub.”
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They didn’t just start
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People have been talking about this for months.
It’s really getting old how many people are starting to act like trump. And just assume if they just heard about something, no one else has.
It sounds like a minor thing, but it’s a huge red flag that people don’t have base levels of empathy.
For every person who has heard about it, there are many more who have not. It’s important to have these conversations so that we as a society can make decisions about what we value; only when a critical mass of individuals have awareness can we work together toward common goals.
Yeah. And you can easily phrase a headline like that…
That it had been going on for a while and people should pay attention…
But they didn’t.
Which is why I mentioned it.
Edit:
For example:
https://lemmy.world/post/50060570?scrollToComments=true
There is a difference between headlines, and it shouldn’t be surprising the major network is more professional and accurate than a blog.
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Why is this so badly written?
sad dystopian sci-real story
And they are providing the OCR’d text free of charge to the masses, right? Right?
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 :(
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.
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
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.
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
This is probably going to be an unpopular comment… but these articles are all super misleading. The physical books are getting destroyed, but their content is getting digitized. Is that a loss? Absolutely. But is there a benefit? Also yes.
The biggest loss is probably the fact that destroying the physical books removes them from circulation, making them essentially permanent additions to these companies’ book collections.
The biggest loss is probably the fact that destroying the physical books removes them from circulation
And these are books that have been sitting in warehouses that haven’t been able to be sold because no one wanted them. They were removed from circulation long ago.
They aren’t in current circulation, not the same thing.
Not arguing that they are useful, just that sitting in a warehouse and physical destruction aren’t equivalent in terms of potential use.
That’s true, but sitting in a warehouse is costing someone money and I’m sure they were more than happy to sell the books even if they knew they’d eventually get destroyed.
But the other thing is, what should these companies do instead? They scraped the internet and got skewered for that. They pirated books and got in trouble for that. Now they are legally purchasing books to scan. They can’t donate or sell the books since they’ve effectively copied the book and that would get them into piracy trouble again.
That’s true, but sitting in a warehouse is costing someone money and I’m sure they were more than happy to sell the books even if they knew they’d eventually get destroyed.
Sure, thats a possibility, I wasnt arguing otherwise.
But the other thing is, what should these companies do instead? They scraped the internet and got skewered for that. They pirated books and got in trouble for that. Now they are legally purchasing books to scan.
For me, them doing sketchy and illegal shit, mostly getting away with it and then charging you for access to said ill-gotten gains is a valid reason for people to be upset at them, rage inducing, even.
That aside the equivalent of mass book burning isn’t a good look regardless of legality, even less so when its the same people that did the sketchy shit before.
There is no benefit of the doubt left.
I can see how someone could get to:
“all they do is sketchy shit so even though this might look legit, let’s vocally show our disdain for them and anything they are doing”
So… back to my question: what should they do instead?
