From the website of the company that’s destroying books to feed them into the ravenous AI maw.
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@overholt
I came across this related substack yesterday, where the author has additional information to impart..."Is an AI company buying up all the used books? (I don’t think so, not this time.) | #103
But no matter what, the Library of Alexandria is still burning.""The theory that’s taken off like wildfire on Twitter is that it’s an AI company buying all these books to scan them for purposes of creating more training data for the algorithm. My theory, which is a little more mundane, is that it’s just simple financial arbitrage."
https://charliebecker.substack.com/p/is-an-ai-company-buying-up-all-the
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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 "The bubble has not popped. Its value has migrated into the ether." Can't happen soon enough
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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 I feel a disturbance as if a million librarians cried out in fear and pain.
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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.
Oh, I’d like to suggest that it’s much more than simply feeling a knife in the gut.
This is book burning 2.0
We don’t know what AI does to, and with the content it ingests. A consolidates control over information into the hands of the few.
The value of the book was to broadly disseminate information. The value of AI to psychopaths is to consolidate control over information.
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Fahrenheit 451, AI version.
Sure, you can read Shakespeare, Marx, Ray Bradbury, Little Women, the Bible... AI filtered: "Would you like me to summarize this book for you? I can do that."@pattykimura @overholt Seems like the firemen are already at work in our world, too
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J jwcph@helvede.net shared this topic
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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 Oh my god
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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 cartoon villains made flesh
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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
*Pantheon* (2022)-ass statement -
@overholt Bullshit trying to sound philosophical. Which is exactly what AI is most of the time.
In Logan's Run, a classic sci-fi picture, all the books had been destroyed, and people could only read summaries of them.
@gimulnautti @overholt I want to go cheer as the Carousel takes Sam Altman and his Slop Baron friends.
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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.
when will they be destroying the papyri from ancient Egypt? The Scrolls?
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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 I have a lot of ebooks around, but I've occasionally made a point of buying physical books, in part because digital data is so vulnerable. Even the DRM-free epub files are vulnerable to the decay of storage media with short lifespans.
The mass destruction of physical books seems like an intentional threat.
People talk about this being the result of a grotesque judicial interpretation of copyright law, but I don't think "AI" companies care about law that much. They seem to violate laws pretty frequently. This looks to me like a deliberate act of violence. They actually intend to destroy physical books.
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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
Apparently the quote was shocking enough they've rewritten the post, but IA has the receipts. https://web.archive.org/web/20260720152647/https://isbndb.com/blog/print-books-sourcing-ai-training/
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@overholt “A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information.... the knowledge enters the intellectual [cycle].”
Okay, so I could ask the AI model, "Give me the entire, unaltered text of $TITLE_OF_BOOK," and it would do it? It wouldn't make up some random crap that wasn't actually the original text?
Yeah, I don't buy that for a moment.
The *actual content* of the book has been destroyed. It's a tragedy.
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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 I don't think I've seen a better explanation of how IP theft works.
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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 More spark than joy with KonMari-ing vandalism.
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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 never, ever, ever destroy your starting material after duplicaten. Rule nr 1
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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
Corporate speak for "we've found a way to monetize access to literature that you used to have access to for free or very low cost", aren't we the clever ones?
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@overholt It's also short-sighted. We cannot conceive of a massive interruption to our access to technology? It could happen in so many ways.
@kimlockhartga They don't give a fuck about a massive interruption of OUR access to data. In fact, I'm quite sure they are banking on it. It will hike the price of access.
We are much more manipulatable and gullible without all that 'culture' stuff. Remember how much easier it was to manage illiterate peasants?
What they can't conceive of is a massive erasure of data. Because they cannot conceive it might ever happen to them. Which is emblematic of their psychopathy.
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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 They are destroying the commons by both generating absolute slop, and shredding our history
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@overholt horrifying
Why does "books" feel like "people's brains" ??? I see tech bros planning on selling immortality by claiming our bodies are just "delivery mechanisms for information" & some Isaac Asimov end to humanity
@librarymonster @overholt seems implicit given everything we’ve seen with AI and layoffs and everything else.
“A physical being is a delivery mechanism for skilled labor. Once those skills have been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is blood, bone, and binding material. The being is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The being returns to the material cycle; the skills enter the production one.”
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