zarkanian

Money is no object to AI companies. That's one of the things that alerted the booksellers, in fact---masses of books were being purchased without regard to price or subject matter.

Yeah, model collapse is worrying, but I don't see how they can do anything about it due to how LLMs work. There have been some articles written about this drawing an analogy to the grey goo problem in nanotechnology. The end result is that the free web becomes essentially useless and knowledge becomes balkanized and paywalled.

The answer is yes in all cases. Well, almost all. They don't want books printed after 2022, because those might have AI-generated text in them. Anything else is fair game.

Are you skeptical that the books being destroyed are actually rare? Or are you skeptical of the existence of rare books?

"Rare" means "difficult to acquire". Under your definition, the only books that would qualify would be ones in museums.

I'm only interested if I get AOC feet pics.

Especially since the articles make it clear that the AI companies don't care about rarity or quality. It's just a dragnet to get as many books as possible. Sure, a lot of the books are going to be garbage, but some of them are going to be valuable, too.

The AI must be fed, and the only criterion is the book has to be published before 2022.

I do most of my shopping through eBay, although some of the sellers use Amazon for fulfillment. They're hard to avoid entirely.

A digitized copy which isn't shared with anybody else? Yes, I would disagree.

These books were purchased from booksellers. Booksellers don't typically carry books that won't sell. That's why it's unlikely these are somebody's fanfics printed on CreateSpace or something like that.

Just because it's legal, that doesn't make it right. Corporations do terrible things all of the time which are perfectly legal.

If I was the owner of the only copy of an important book, I would have the legal right to destroy it, but nobody could argue convincingly that I did a good thing.

They're used as food because that's how people have been socialized. Nobody would willingly eat a dog, but they would eat a pig. Pigs are more intelligent than dogs.