I really hope the AI bubble pops soon and takes at least some of these stupid companies with it. They've been operating at a GIANT loss for years at this point, how much longer will this go on?

Good way to prepare for rewriting history to their liking. Shredding/destroying the books should be illegal in this regard.

Does anyone remember circa 2014 that radical jihadists in the middle east were destroying ancient and medieval artifacts, including stone heads? And I remember here in the liberal west we thought that was awful.

This is not the only thing that makes me think of that. Also Trump's recent calls to reduce the size of US national parks and open them up to oil and uranium mining exploitation.

Literally 1984 Fahrenheit 451

"We must destroy this precious archive of humanity so our competitors can't also scan it"

You have got to be fucking kidding me

You people have no idea how much I want AI banned all across everything. I don't care about anything at this point. These people are EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL. Pure breed CRIMINALS

Fucking 90% of the books I read are "rare"

"Oh, but there's SOME benefits to having AI", says some person on the internet that had it shoved down their throat by their boss. No. Fuck you. Fuuuuuuck you all the way.

Destroying the an endangered book feels like it should be criminal no?

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” one small bookseller told tech news website 404 Media last week.

The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.

“It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said. “I’ve been well suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”

Then stop selling rare and out of print books to an AI company, you fucking doorknob.

Greed knows no bounds.

What's the point of destroying books after scanning them instead of reselling them apart from *hurr durr we are evil*?

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”.

This sounded like clownish villainy in Rainbows End. I swear these guys are compulsively drawn to the worst parts of SciFi.

That's fucking evil.

“Book burning, you say?”

Because when you destroy the publicly available source you become the only available source. Paid, of course.

The final nail in the coffin for humanity, locking knowledge behind digital sources that are inaccessible in event of catastrophe.

You know what, burn the whole fucking planet down. I'm done with this clown-ass species.

I just dont even know what to say about the intentional destruction of knowledge

Combine this mass burning of humanity's canon with the onslaught of AI generated nonsense and think about what is doing to do our history and knowledge going forward.

Humanity is being dragged into a black hole by tech-fetishist demons.

This makes me tear up a bit. All those lost books...

That's absolutely disgusting. At this rate, governments should really be stepping in and stopping all this.

So they can gatekeep knowledge? Got it.

To be honest, I'd be MUCH less against this practice if this shredding at the very least included saving the original scans at at least 300 dpi for everyone to access, freely.

Ideally, they wouldn't cut them by the spine, but even giving the despined ones to an archive/library would be just above the unpermissible line.

Despining, scanning and public access archiving is borderline permissible.

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?" Stupid AI!

They're making it really hard to like them.

Library of Alexandria II

Why cant they rebind them in some sort of ring binder? I guess the answer is money, but that should be possible no?

I hope when the bubble bursts the cunts making these kinds of decisions are so distraught by their losses they resort to suicide.

The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.

“It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said.

I hate the AI slop as much as the next guy, but these are books nobody wanted. They were going to rot on the shelf until being thrown out. Just being rare doesn't mean it's particularly valuable.

Hopefully they are retaining the digitized versions for release at some point in the future. I'd imagine they are, since they'd still need the raw data to train future models.