posted in Technology
Amazon Caught Destroying Rare Books to Train AI
futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/amazon-destroying-rare-books-ai
there’s this idea in the AI development zeitgeist that “rare data” is the only advantage left. this stuff is almost certainly motivated by that type of thinking. if they can have data in their datasets that no one else does, they view that as the only way left to be ahead of the competition.
Rare does not mean good. I could write a novel, and it would be fucking atrocious. If I released 5 copies, it would be extremely rare, but it wouldn’t be worth shit.
i mean, i’m not arguing for this position necessarily. i agree with you.
that said, in practice, the “bad data” comes out in the wash. for example, all of Reddit is likely in their datasets. who knows what their data cleaning process is like, but diversity in the data is generally a good thing from a training perspective.