From the website of the company that’s destroying books to feed them into the ravenous AI maw.
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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 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.
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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
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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 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...
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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 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.
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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.
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?"
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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 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.
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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
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 -
@overholt I have rarely seen such weak, sanctimonious, disingenuous drivel; nor ever wanted so badly to stab its author.
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@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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@overholt That's something only a sociopath would say.
@dukeboitans @overholt this this this.
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@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."
@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
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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 expect they'll be shredding the contents of the Louvre next... -
"A human is a delivery mechanism for productivity. Once that productivity has been extracted and converted into profits, the delivery mechanism has served it's purpose. What remains is organs, bones and viscera. The human is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The body returns to the earth; the profits enter the CEO's financial portfolio."
.... 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.
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@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.
@Remittancegirl @kimlockhartga @overholt "Unlicensed knowledge is piracy."
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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 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'."
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@ashwin @datarama @angiebaby @overholt "Fungible capital human assets," at a few places.
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@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.
@aehoogestraat @overholt goose is valued by cooking it (and then wondering why there isn't any more supply of golden eggs)
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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
this is like saying that a human
being is an arrangement of
oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and
other elements. -
.... 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.
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@overholt
I expect they'll be shredding the contents of the Louvre next...@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.
