From the website of the company that’s destroying books to feed them into the ravenous AI maw.

[librarymonster@glammr.us]

@shadows @overholt omg dude exactly - this gave me chills

[dasparky@spore.social]

@dukeboitans @overholt this this this.

[kosure@mas.to]

@overholt What if we took a library, and pasted on top the worst aspects of a book store. And also everything inside it COULD BE WRONG

[fragarach@social.vivaldi.net]

@overholt
I expect they'll be shredding the contents of the Louvre next...

[whoosh@neuromatch.social]

@angiebaby @overholt

.... except for the fact that human productivity is essentially unlimited, and is capable of being offered freely, or exchanged fairly and cooperatively, without exploitative extraction by predators.

The best human life excludes, as much as possible, interaction with publicly traded, or private equity funded, companies.

The only industries which Socialists need to nationalize are those which are required for civil integration .... health, education, housing, power, communications, fresh water, sanitation, and banking .... for essential starters.

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@Remittancegirl @kimlockhartga @overholt "Unlicensed knowledge is piracy."

[msbellows@c.im]

@overholt Also from the article: "Anthropic described the project as 'our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books' in an internal memo, which noted 'we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project'."

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@ashwin @datarama @angiebaby @overholt "Fungible capital human assets," at a few places.

[vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de]

@aehoogestraat @overholt goose is valued by cooking it (and then wondering why there isn't any more supply of golden eggs)

[thvv@social.vivaldi.net]

@overholt
this is like saying that a human
being is an arrangement of
oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and
other elements.

[angiebaby@mas.to]

@whoosh @overholt

Missed the point entirely, but I tend to expect that from mansplainers.

[riley@toot.cat]

@Fragarach There's precedent: Mireille Breitwieser.

Strangely, despite the initial assessments, it seems like the 2025 Louvre heist's gang didn't rush to melt their loot down into nameless gold.

@overholt

[riley@toot.cat]

@Guillotine_Jones It's also probably genAI-generated, reaching a previously unreachable level of 'self-serving'.

@overholt

[msbellows@c.im]

@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.

[gladsdotter@mastodon.world]

@overholt I am hanging on to all of my print reference books so that when AI garbles the content of its ingested books, I still have a touchstone for reality.

[raymierussell@mastodon.scot]

@thvv @overholt

It sounds like what late Philosopher Daniel Dennett would have called a "deepity".

from wikipedia

"(a deepity is) a statement that has two meanings: one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound and would be important if true, but is actually false or meaningless. "

[endorama@hachyderm.io]

@overholt this is so horrible, what a fucked up timeline. 🫂

[bluegreenandfree@mastodon.energy]

@overholt This is just disgusting. Really underlines that LLMs are illiteracy machines.

These tech companies are half a step away from just being Futurama's Brain Spawn with their Infosphere.

[adritheonly@mastodon.social]

@kmeisthax @overholt Yes, that makes sense. When I moved to a really small place and did not have space for my library of just under 3000 books, my only solution was to scan them but also the destructive way since that is the only scanner I had access to.

The issue here is not destructive scanning but what Anthropic intends with the end result. Knowledge monopoly via the internet? Warping knowledge to suit its makers view of the world? Difficult to do. There will always be my library.

[izzaboo@tilde.zone]

@kagan @overholt Also, when I look at a book there is *actual content* but that is only part of, and different than, my *actual experience* of looking at a book.