The damage caused by the AI regime has yet to be fully realized.
  • mangobanana@discuss.onlineEnglish
    3 months

    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

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 months

    If they were truely “rare” books, then the owner wouldn’t have sold it to an AI company. People who collect rare books are usually very choosy about who they sell them to. Now I don’t like them destroying books in general, but I suspect the word rare in this article is likely not what most people would actually call rare.

  • NewOldGuard@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3 months

    But hey at least in return we get insecure buggy slop software and soulless facsimiles of art!

    • PerfectDark@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 months

      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 :(

  • marius@feddit.orgEnglish
    3 months

    I’ve read somewhere that it has to do with copyright, i.e. if you destroy the original, then it’s not a copy and therefore allowed

    • Ajen@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3 months

      No, it’s far cheaper to scan a stack of loose papers than it is to scan a bound book, that’s why they’re cutting the pages out. And most of the books aren’t that valuable, even if they’re rare. So it’s an accounting decision to destroy the books.

  • csolisr@hub.azkware.net
    3 months

    ❌ Destroying the books
    ✔️ …to fully digitize them
    ❌ …and hoard the data in their systems

    How do they manage to screw things twice in a row?

  • FiniteBanjo@feddit.onlineEnglish
    3 months

    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.

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          3 months

          Except this is different. That book burning was due to ideological reasons. This one is due to pure greed and disregard for collective knowledge

          • Asetru@feddit.orgEnglish
            3 months

            So you’re arguing that capitalism and its greed are not an ideology?

            • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              3 months

              Of course it’s an ideology, but it’s the ideology that enables the greed. The greed would exist with or without it.

              When billionaire oligarchs destroy the planet and people’s lives in order to make themselves richer, they’re not doing it on ideological ground. Most of them don’t care about ideology. Their ideology is just how they brainwash the public into voting for politicians who will help them continue to dominate the economy.

          • FiniteBanjo@feddit.onlineEnglish
            3 months

            You’re right, it is different, the AI companies are misled into thinking this will generate some sort of profit but the Chinese were just doing it from a place of pure malice.

            • iglou@programming.devEnglish
              3 months

              Putting the slught chance of profits over the conservation of rare books is also pure malice in my book. With a layer of makeup.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 months

    Just another reminder in a planetary history of reminders of why our species fucking sucks.

  • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3 months

    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.

    • waveyvibes@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3 months

      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

    • PattyMcB@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 months

      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.

      • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3 months

        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.

    • Tim_Bisley@piefed.socialEnglish
      3 months

      Still plenty to be pissed about though. As someone who does archiving it’s still enraging because they are destroying thousands of books not for archival where you destroy one copy to provide access to all, but to copy the book, rewrite it, and sell it back to you.

      There’s now less copies of said book, it wasn’t archived, they stole that content, and are now selling it back to you. People will then take this stolen content and act like it’s something they created and then try to turn profit. It makes every copyright argument the publishers have ever made look like a joke. Why do publishing companies even exist?

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3 months

    And they are providing the OCR’d text free of charge tonthe masses, right? Right?

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 months

    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, Facebook