- floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish1 hour
There’s no legitimate purpose for destroying these books.
There are non-invasive ways scan books. But the destruction is an added bonus. These companies make a copy of these public domain books and then pulp the remains. They’re rare, so that means they’re hard to find (that’s what rare means, after all).
Then, they can turn around and sell their dataset to AI companies.
The destruction is the point.
Capitalism always creates perverse incentives. The most profitable thing you can do is seize something readily available and make it impossible to get without paying you.
But which companies are doing this? It sounds like these are companies that supply training data to AI companies. I think we need names.
- FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish11 minutes
Just another reminder in a planetary history of reminders of why our species fucking sucks.
2 hoursNot 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, FacebookAny 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.
Not nice to see books being destroyed, but this part, I’m sure, will upset people:
Lastly, and most importantly, if you use these AI chatbots, you are complicit.
For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.
but this part, I’m sure, will upset people
I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. If you use these models, you are complicit; you’re part of creating the “need” for these models. You don’t necessarily have a choice (because realistically losing your job and all the stuff that entails isn’t a real choice, and that’s fully part of how the system is intended to work), but you’re still complicit.
We as individuals don’t have a lot of power, because power is mostly tied to some kind of capital. That’s why working together is so important, because it’s only by working together we’ll have any real power to impact things.
I don’t think being upset is a bad thing. Recognise it, and do something about it. It could be something small like talking to colleagues about it, or contacting a union representative, or a politician. Or go big, no shame in that either.
- 2 hours
It’s complicity under duress, essentially. Which is shitty in a few different directions.
Exactly, it’s built on systemic violence, in that when you don’t have a job you’re rendered more or less useless to society and left to wither by the wayside. Thus it is in the individuals immediate best interest to keep working with, thus enforcing these systems.
Worrying about anything beyond the immediate is for those with means, unfortunately.
I live in Sweden. I grew up a povvo bitch, but I’ve managed to do well for myself over the years. Even so, I don’t have anything to fall back on. If I lost my job I’d luckily have unemployment, through my union and various labour rights, but that too has a limit.
I get why people wouldn’t want to fight back, which is what leads to doomerism and wishes to just burn the entire system to the ground in the hopes of building something better next time. Which I get too, I feel that all the time; improvement seems unlikely given the perpetual decline I’ve witnessed my entire life. Even so, I contact politicians, and I engage with my union.
“For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.”
That would be Gardiner’s side of the article. I contributed by wroting two sections on this one:
- The Shadow of Fahrenheit 451, and
- “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Just to explain whose take is whose for this little article, at least.
- wakko@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.
Going to work for yourself is always an option. Ask any street busker. Insinuating it isn’t is your complicity.
I’m sure people with dependents, a mortgage , rent to pay, debt to clear, etc. would be thrilled with your suggestion.
- givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
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They didn’t just start
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People have been talking about this for months.
It’s really getting old how many people are starting to act like trump. And just assume if they just heard about something, no one else has.
It sounds like a minor thing, but it’s a huge red flag that people don’t have base levels of empathy.
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And they are providing the OCR’d text free of charge tonthe masses, right? Right?
- ExFed@programming.devEnglish2 hours
This is probably going to be an unpopular comment… but these articles are all super misleading. The physical books are getting destroyed, but their content is getting digitized. Is that a loss? Absolutely. But is there a benefit? Also yes.
The biggest loss is probably the fact that destroying the physical books removes them from circulation, making them essentially permanent additions to these companies’ book collections.
- 2 hours
What is the benifit of a book being digitized for only be used for one company training their “AI”. These digitized copies aren’t going to be made available to humans in any way because then the company would loose the advantage they have in training data.
DAMNIT
The original article was on the australian news corp website, so it’s probably not true and/or exaggerated but anyway
ha ha ai bad
