Did you know evil companies have been destroying tons of books? Your thoughts?

[Still-alive]

https://www.aol.com/articles/rare-books-being-scanned-burned-172200000.html

"New court documents show that artificial intelligence companies have been buying, scanning, and shredding printed books by the thousands, physically dismantling them to digitize them in a new effort to improve AI-quality writing.

The method of destruction is known as "destructive scanning," and involves slicing the spine off a bound book, running loose pages through high-speed scanners, and then throwing away or recycling the remains. There are no reports on whether books are always rare or one-of-a-kind, though second-hand book sellers of those rare manuscripts and titles say they've been getting orders for hundreds of books at a time and allege they are being bought up by third-party vendors on behalf of the AI companies.

Supporters say the goal is to capture large volumes of edited, human-written language at a moment when online text is getting harder to trust because so much of it is machine-generated. Critics, meanwhile, have compared the trend to "book burning," even though the books are not usually "burned" in actual flames."

I'm sure i don't have to stress why this is bad or downright evil right? oh what the heck ill just put this famous quote here:

Wow this is terrible!

Eh not a big deal

Nobody reads anymore anyways so who cares?

I'm sure those books weren't worth reading anyways

Updates

25 d

EVIL AI COMPANIES. Ai just deleted that part of my question title!

[slatyb]

This claim is unsubstantiated. There is a Snopes article on it. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/

[Still-alive]

I can't read that because of my adblock. But multiple outlets im seeing are reporting this is true. Snopes isn’t the end all be all authority on this.

[Still-alive]

What the heck dude it says its ‘mostly true.’ Are you reading your own links?

“What's True
A review of internal documents at Anthropic, one of the most prominent artificial intelligence companies, revealed the corporation bought millions of books in bulk, with a focus on "less common" and high-quality books, to "destructively scan" them in the context of a confidential effort known as "Project Panama." A judge ordered that these documents be unsealed in the context of a copyright lawsuit.“

[purplepoppy]

I wonder how much information in these old books gets altered before the original evidence is destroyed. History was once written by the victor, now it's by evil companies.

[RachyRach]

So sad. I love physical books!