AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

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.”

You have got to be fucking kidding me

You people have no idea how much I want AI banned all across everything. I don’t care about anything at this point. These people are EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL. Pure breed CRIMINALS

Fucking 90% of the books I read are “rare”

“Oh, but there’s SOME benefits to having AI”, says some person on the internet that had it shoved down their throat by their boss. No. Fuck you. Fuuuuuuck you all the way.

Fucking 90% of the books I read are “rare”

That’s sort of the joke. These aren’t treasured first editions. They’re not shredding the Guttenburg Bible. These are single prints sitting in warehouses and abandoned libraries or dumps that nobody has read or carried about in decades. They’re rare because they never got a second edition.

And the process of digitizing the book means disassembling it. So the copy (that nobody wanted) is destroyed as a result.

The article is pure clickbait. These books aren’t valuable, save that they were produced pre-AI. That’s why you can get them in bulk on the cheap.

idk dude. i have a rare first edition that i absolutely treasure. single run, too. it’s a local therapist’s little comic book he drew. he gave a copy to my mother when her parents were divorcing. really effective at explaining masking, just uses different words.

if someone took my copy and pulped it, i’d [disproportionate response. very disproportionate response]