From the website of the company that’s destroying books to feed them into the ravenous AI maw.
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@jessamyn @overholt I think that sometime in the 2010s they shifted to sending a lot of books to China and the Philippines for scanning.
I'm going off of this DH project, which looked at the metadata attached to scanned IA items in addition to talking to scanning staff: https://scanninglabor.github.io/IAScanningLabor/discussion.html
I saw these folks present at a conference, and recall them saying the books were being destroyed rather than sent back across the Pacific—but can't find confirmation
@linguistory @overholt Thanks -- it's entirely possible I am not correct about that
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@overholt It would be difficult for them to be more wrong about this. But it sounds like they might be too stupid to ever understand any better.
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@Remittancegirl @kimlockhartga @overholt "Unlicensed knowledge is piracy."
@drwho @Remittancegirl @kimlockhartga @overholt you know what I say to that? “Arrrrr you serious?”
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From the website of the company that’s destroying books to feed them into the ravenous AI maw.
“A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information. Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is paper, ink, and binding material. The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one.” https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/ai-labs-buy-scan-shred-millions-of-rare-books/news-story/0c3b45a67093ab462a587a0348538ce9
@overholt That’s some cold shit right there.
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@drwho @Remittancegirl @kimlockhartga @overholt you know what I say to that? “Arrrrr you serious?”
@c0dec0dec0de @Remittancegirl @kimlockhartga @overholt Back up fully and often.
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As someone who has devoted his career to celebrating and preserving the artifactual, tangible value of books, this feels like a knife in the gut.
@overholt They don't believe in the information that isn't in the print. Their awareness of "bibliography" goes no further than "list of works cited". They probably use APA style and think that it's the best.
Much of this applies to a vast number librarians outside the special collections, too.
And unfortunately even to a fair few within special collections.
I once flew to another country to see a book. The desk assistant brought it out to me, and at first glance it was obviously a different copy. I told the assistant this, and she was mystified. How could I be so sure so soon? Because it had a bookplate postdating the person whose traces I was hoping to find. He'd borrowed it repeatedly over several years, keeping it for months each time. I knew when because he was a hoarder and I'd see his borrowing slips, on the back of which he wrote brief reviews of every book documented.
There was evidence in the card catalogue that the copy I wanted had been thrown away because this one was in better condition. So I wasted a flight, accommodation, taxi fares, restaurant food, and several days because someone had not valued the non-print information that I wanted and not bothered to document that in the on-line catalogue in one of those projects where someone says "Let's make the card catalogue digital" and then runs out of resource between making stub entries and filling in the finer details.
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From the website of the company that’s destroying books to feed them into the ravenous AI maw.
“A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information. Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is paper, ink, and binding material. The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one.” https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/ai-labs-buy-scan-shred-millions-of-rare-books/news-story/0c3b45a67093ab462a587a0348538ce9
@overholt Also striking me that that the paragraph itself is almost certainly AI generated. It’s exactly the set of cliches they’re biased towards.
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@overholt "its value has migrated." but BOOK WAS NOT VALUED.
i'll take my golden egg now, thank you.
@rothko@beige.party @overholt@glammr.us The "information" in the literal text, isn't the only information contained even in a brand new book. Even from that perspective, the scanning, and destroying the book, is destroying information. No idea what titles this involved, because it might change my mind. I own books that I'd be willing to throw in the fire. Not as a "book burning, censorship" thing. But as in, "this book was so bad, but at least it can keep me warm." Personal judgement, nothing more.
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@McCrankyface @janeishly @overholt a tech bro that doesn't understand basic humanities? Shocking.
@ManWhoTalksToHisHand @McCrankyface @janeishly @overholt doesn't even understand maths – one of the celebrated stories in natural statistical distributions is all about the dirt marks left by fingers in the numerical tables
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@overholt language is fascinating. Today I learned, "The book's value has migrated." is Techbro speak for, "We've stolen another book."
@allpoints @overholt The goose is not valued. It's value has migrated.
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@riley @Guillotine_Jones @overholt Actually, that language pretty much comes from dicta in the federal court decision allowing one AI company to settle copyright infringement claims for $1.6 billion. That decision said that the only way around such claims is to destroy the physical book after extracting the information, because then you're not stealing, you're transforming. An absolutely unintended consequence on the court's part, but the AI companies all are running with it.
@msbellows "The optics problem is real." sounds an awful lot like Claude's way of doing sycophancy to me, and is not like something that a human with any degree of PR experience would begin a public-oriented piece with.
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