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.”
damn you could at least rebind the book and sell it instead of shredding it
The whole point is that they’re creating a proprietary dataset. If they re-sold it, then other people could use that data.
Hopefully the scans will stick around and when these companies are liquidated they aren’t lost.
The only contribution that LLMslop companies will make to human history is indexing all available human knowledge down to the letter. Opening those datasets to the public would be a social good that would almost offset the damage they’ve done (assuming they collapse soon).