If they are poetry books, this would be poetic justics, I guess https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

@codinghorror Can't wait for past miracle tech like Mercury or Radium do their comeback on the back of LLMs!

@buherator well they didn't say how old, cause yeah, that could get pretty dark if we went WAY back. Also not sure how much is writing style versus values, and certainly some values are marked deprecated like uh.. "slavery"?

@codinghorror @buherator

They are buying old and rare books in bulk, too.

See the link (in Dutch): https://www.bnr.nl/nieuws/tech-innovatie/10604219/tweedehandsboekverkopers-slaan-alarm-ai-bedrijven-kopen-obscure-boeken-op-om-te-versnipperen

Excerpt in English: Second-hand booksellers are concerned about AI companies buying up massively old titles. It is suspected that the books are destroyed after being scanned, even though it is sometimes very rare specimens. Dutch booksellers also receive requests from abroad, according to a tour of BNR.

@bayindirh @codinghorror That sounds bad, but if they have significant historic value shouldn't their trade be restricted in the first place (aka. "it belongs to a museum!")?

@buherator @codinghorror
Not necessarily. There are private book collectors at one side, and people who do real research on these texts at the other side. Moreover, there’s no global and universal book list which you can look and say “let’s get these into a museum”.

So, protecting all rare books in museums and libraries is a worthy, but impossible goal for plethora of reasons.

Also, why don’t we try to be a little better person all around and be more considerate about what we do?

@bayindirh @codinghorror ideally, sure! But I'm afraid shops will have to establish some kind of KYC program for rare items to mitigate this behavior :(

@buherator @codinghorror If it's going to help preserving valuable artifacts, I'm all for it, actually.

Sacrificing everything we built so far for the machine feels so inconsiderate, shallow and short-term thinking. Human civilization is more than that. Also, art is more than that.