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.”
Just donate the books for a tax break or sell them at a discount. The destruction has a level of cruelty equal to restaurants poisoning their surplus food in the garbage.
Probably for exclucivity or something.
Similar to stories of orchid pickers way back when destroying the habitats afterward for exclusivity.
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My thoughts exactly! And more concise than I could have put it!
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Picks up a clay-tablet, and starts chiseling:
*"As the archeologist wandered around he found basically nothing other rectangular plates. A clay-tablet hinted this layer should have been part of an information rich age, a so called ‘digital age’. Somehow there was no evidence to be found other than rectangles in all shapes, sizes and composition. Not only for that time period, but surprisingly also a thousand years prior to that… *
A small blue brick with a strange marking on it was found, “NØKÍÁ”. When a button was pressed a screen lit up with a young blond female and pink hyroglyphics “HANNAH MONTANA LINUX FOR NOKIA 2026”. On it, an instance of Minecraft with a library unlocked keys to the past as archeologists roamed a pixelated landscape as an avatar named Rahul.
IIRC this is very much created by the way copyright law works. So this is the company acting on incentives. It needs regulatory adjustment. If you stop them from THIS method they might find an even more destructive path. Make it so their actions create positive 2nd order effects.
Bro
