There’s no legitimate purpose for destroying these books.
There are non-invasive ways scan books. But the destruction is an added bonus. These companies make a copy of these public domain books and then pulp the remains. They’re rare, so that means they’re hard to find (that’s what rare means, after all).
Then, they can turn around and sell their dataset to AI companies.
The destruction is the point.
Capitalism always creates perverse incentives. The most profitable thing you can do is seize something readily available and make it impossible to get without paying you.
But which companies are doing this? It sounds like these are companies that supply training data to AI companies. I think we need names.
They destroy them to comply with fair use laws. A judge in San Francisco ruled this practice as fair use.
Do you have a case to cite for that? Not calling you out or anything but I want know who the hell ruled that and why. That’s insane
Thank you! Though it doesn’t seem the judge imposed any requirement to destroy the physical copies just that creating a large digital library from the copies for reuse would violate the IP rights of the work owners
I misread that as:
The most profitable thing you can do is seize someone readily available […]
… and realized that also tracks.
Not AI Companies, but billionaires. They have names, they’re people, and we shouldn’t let them hide behind “company”. These are some of the people fucking us all over for nothing but their own hubris. They have too much power and money, they’re delusional, and they need to be taxed, regulated, and stopped:
Sam Altman, Open AI
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet, Google
Clay Magouyrk, Oracle
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, FacebookOracle is owned by the Ellison family.
What about Amodei of Anthropic?
It would be slightly less horrrible if they released the digitized books online, or even just paid archivist organizations to carefully do the job for them and make public the works to then train on.
But no. They choose the worst way to do everything.
Welcome to capitalism…
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They didn’t just start
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People have been talking about this for months.
It’s really getting old how many people are starting to act like trump. And just assume if they just heard about something, no one else has.
It sounds like a minor thing, but it’s a huge red flag that people don’t have base levels of empathy.
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Not nice to see books being destroyed, but this part, I’m sure, will upset people:
Lastly, and most importantly, if you use these AI chatbots, you are complicit.
For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.
“For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.”
That would be Gardiner’s side of the article. I contributed by wroting two sections on this one:
- The Shadow of Fahrenheit 451, and
- “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Just to explain whose take is whose for this little article, at least.
For some people the choice to use a bot or not is a choice of having the job, or not.
Going to work for yourself is always an option. Ask any street busker. Insinuating it isn’t is your complicity.
I’m sure people with dependents, a mortgage , rent to pay, debt to clear, etc. would be thrilled with your suggestion.
Oh dear. The consequences of ones own choices. It’s almost like you’re trying to dictate the creature comforts of your cell, not eliminate the imprisonment entirely.
Maybe you should think real hard about the asymmetry in your position.
Creating stability for ourselves and loved ones really can be demanding and force us into positions that make impossible to be as ethical as we’d want to be.
That said it is crazy how many people in the “first world” view themselves in that category while the demands they have are “a room and bathroom per person in the household”, keeping the house 69 during the summer and 72 during the winter, a new 1000 dollar phone a year or two, a game system or two total a few k, a newer car because they’re last one is just over 80k miles, several subscriptions to constant instant entertainment, etc.
Like yes, there really are people that have to beg for more hours to keep a two bed room for themselves and their kids, those people don’t really have a choice. They are also the rest of us that really can just have a little less “treats” and be perfectly fine.
but this part, I’m sure, will upset people
I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. If you use these models, you are complicit; you’re part of creating the “need” for these models. You don’t necessarily have a choice (because realistically losing your job and all the stuff that entails isn’t a real choice, and that’s fully part of how the system is intended to work), but you’re still complicit.
We as individuals don’t have a lot of power, because power is mostly tied to some kind of capital. That’s why working together is so important, because it’s only by working together we’ll have any real power to impact things.
I don’t think being upset is a bad thing. Recognise it, and do something about it. It could be something small like talking to colleagues about it, or contacting a union representative, or a politician. Or go big, no shame in that either.
It’s complicity under duress, essentially. Which is shitty in a few different directions.
Exactly, it’s built on systemic violence, in that when you don’t have a job you’re rendered more or less useless to society and left to wither by the wayside. Thus it is in the individuals immediate best interest to keep working with, thus enforcing these systems.
Worrying about anything beyond the immediate is for those with means, unfortunately.
I live in Sweden. I grew up a povvo bitch, but I’ve managed to do well for myself over the years. Even so, I don’t have anything to fall back on. If I lost my job I’d luckily have unemployment, through my union and various labour rights, but that too has a limit.
I get why people wouldn’t want to fight back, which is what leads to doomerism and wishes to just burn the entire system to the ground in the hopes of building something better next time. Which I get too, I feel that all the time; improvement seems unlikely given the perpetual decline I’ve witnessed my entire life. Even so, I contact politicians, and I engage with my union.
improvement seems unlikely given the perpetual decline I’ve witnessed my entire life
To be fair, I’m sure there were plenty of people who lived in the late Roman, late Byzantine, and late Ottoman empires who felt the same way.
Fahrenheit 451
That and the ending (V for Vendetta) were the sections I wrote in this article. Because as soon as I saw the news, it was all I could think of :(
