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

[mirijb2@c18.masto.host]

@bregt_lameris @overholt this comment reminds me of my first ever research trip, to the old British Library, as a PhD student in 1993. The catalogue was then on a mix of handwritten and typed paper slips pasted into a series of calf-bound folios arranged by author and title, but not subject. The next time I visited, in 1996, the folios were gone and the catalogue had been digitized. 1/2

[mirijb2@c18.masto.host]

@bregt_lameris @overholt Some materials had been inadvertently omitted from the new catalogue. On asking for the old catalogue (“the Third Catalogue”) to try to locate a scrapbook volume, I was told that the Third Catalogue had been pulped. As, presumably, had the First and Second Catalogues. Some books are lost forever. 2/2

[owlyph@cosocial.ca]

@overholt That prose has a feeling very reminiscent of something in a dystopian sci-fi novel. I have the impression that I've read an equivalent passage somewhere, imagining an administrative type, talking about the state's system for processing humans.

[manwhotalkstohishand@mastodon.social]

@McCrankyface @janeishly @overholt a tech bro that doesn't understand basic humanities? Shocking.

[janet_52square@sunny.garden]

@overholt Yeah pull out the plug in the library, the lights go out. Pull the plug on AI and everything is lost - migration is a myth.

[kosure@mas.to]

@overholt Is also a ghoulish pull quote. "these greedy SOBs already got paid. We put their information into a black box and you have to pay us a recurring fee to access it."

[bodhipaksa@mastodon.scot]

@overholt "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."

The same could be said of CEOs and their DNA. Maybe we could freeze a cheek swab from each of them and dispose of the physical remains (aka "the delivery mechanism")? According to their logic, nothing of value would have been lost.

[aehoogestraat@glammr.us]

@overholt The differences I see between older fiction paperbacks and their ebooks is enough to make me question any digital version of an older print book. It even happens with movies. I don't trust the information to not be manipulated anymore.

[elala@nrw.social]

@overholt
I'm at a loss for words … already -,-

[xbomb13@mastodon.social]

@overholt They have modernized and rendered the position of Winston Smith as obsolete. But of course we would find more efficient methods of reaching our dystopian end.

[heliospi@neuromatch.social]

@angiebaby
@overholt

Perhaps, in a way, the capitalist project of exploitation and domination destroys value, which human creativity reproduces society with, so to remake society & human experience more integrated and therefore more captured, isolated, and impoverished.

This from Graeber's exploration & summation of the anthropologist search for value, combined with Ian Alan Paul’s situationist book "The Reticular Society".

"[...] Value is the way our actions take on meaning or importance by becoming incorporated into something larger than ourselves. But almost always, this can only happen through some kind of material medium, a token of value like money. Fetishism occurs when we assume that the value comes from the token, rather than ourselves.

In most known human societies there was no such market in labour; but still, one can say something similar happens. Different sorts of labour (perhaps better put: different forms of human creative activity) cluster together. They tend to get reflected back in the form of concrete, material media that are seen as valuable in themselves, and thus end up becoming the actual ends for which action takes place. Tokens of honour inspire honourable behaviour, tokens of piety inspire religious devotion, tokens of wisdom inspire learning and so on. Their value is just that of the actions they represent, but the actors see them as valuable in themselves. Usually, these tokens are unlike money, which is an abstract medium in which all tokens are effectively the same: any dollar bill is to all practical intents and purposes identical to any other. Instead, these tokens are unique, particular things: heirlooms, unique gestures, titles and so on. But this makes sense, too. After all, the same thing happens, to a lesser degree, in our own society. Recall my earlier remark about economic ‘value’ applying within the market, and a more particular sort of ‘values’ applying outside it. Abstract labour, the sort you get in the capitalist workplaces, ends up being materialised in abstract symbols; more concrete forms of labour end up being materialised in more concrete symbols. So housework and childcare, for which one is not paid, becomes a matter of ‘family values’ and is reflected in tokens of love and respect; work for the church becomes a matter of religious values, political activism is inspired by social values and so on. But even here, there is usually some sort of material token through which it all becomes real.

[...]"

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-value#toc5
https://illwill.com/repertoire

[kieranmcguire@hachyderm.io]

@overholt if they truly believe that 'the value has migrated', why don't they give the scanned physical books away for free? What do they gain by destroying them? (Probably scarcity, but they won't admit that because that would reveal their true, unlikeable nature.)

[lcwheeler@ecoevo.social]

@overholt The idea that the contents of a book being ingested by a probabilistic language model (i.e. more or less an autocorrect with a shit ton of parameters) somehow represents the knowledge entering the "intellectual space" is so infuriatingly ludicrous. Knowledge from books enters an intellectual space when a human with genuine intelligence reads it and thinks about it. The people who run these "AI" companies are just the dumbest, most obtuse jags on the planet.

[morgan@sfba.social]

@overholt fuck that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Grr

[sleet01@fosstodon.org]

@overholt I bet that if you slurped up one of their hard drives and then tossed it in a shredder they would sing a completely different tune, though...

[thecasualcritic@writing.exchange]

@overholt this literally just is "tell me you don't understand the value of reading without telling me you don't understand the value of reading."

It so demonstrates that AI is driven by people who care only about outputs and hate the actual process of, well, anything. It's 0% the journey, and 100% just a picture of the destination with these goons.

[eestileib@tech.lgbt]

@overholt

Indeed, that quotation you pasted above infuriates me.

It's the same energy as saying "why would you ever want to go see a statue when you can just look at pictures of it?"

It's the same energy as "yes we killed your grandma but look she's in datacenter heaven and we have a chatbot of her. Same same, right?"

[wizarro@social.vivaldi.net]

@overholt These assholes want you to pay for the knowledge within these texts. Something you could borrow from a library will now cost you money per word, cap you out when they think you've read too much, track what you're reading, censor whatever they want. Fascist pigs.

[guillotine_jones@beige.party]

@overholt
In my opinion, John, the paragraph you've quoted about Ai "migrating the value" of books by stealing their content for Ai use and then destroying them, is:
1) Incredibly self-serving to an absurd level.
2) A glaring unintentional self-own about gen-Ai's predatory nature.
3) Hubris on a level that is scarier than any horror movie I have ever seen.
4) A direct outcome of letting people become billionaires who see nothing wrong with using the rest of us as lab rats.
5) Clear evidence that capitalists require greater regulation or they're going to kill us all.
#GenAi #Capitalism #Books

[guillotine_jones@beige.party]

@sennoma @overholt
"Its author," in this case, is probably Ai, Mr Human Capital.
Bong hits 4 dystopia.
Morse v Frederick, 2007.