Rare and valuable books are not going to be in the giant pallets AI companies are buying. Most public libraries do not have professional archivists or anything like that, not so charity shops, or booksellers.
> Most public libraries do not have professional archivists
Most reasonably sized library systems do in fact. Even small ones have trained librarians with an some degree in library science who took at least an introductory class in archiving as a part of their degree, and very likely has some idea how to prevent rare books from being destroyed.
* It's happening on a much smaller scale
* They're actually digitizing the books before they destroy them
This obviously isn't about the books. It's about people want reasons not to like AI companies.
As does the intention matter. The AI companies are doing this because they want to profit off of it. They don’t have to do this, and the fact that they do is part of what makes them bad for humanity.
I honestly don‘t understand what kind of a mission you are on here, and why you feel the need to defend AI companies by whatabouting libraries into this conversation. But whatever you are doing here, I think you have succeeded. This thread was supposed to be about the unambiguously bad behavior of AI companies, but now it is about libraries.
But OK. The numbers don’t add up. The 404 article talk about millions of copies, you mentioned hundreds of thousand. If we take these (extremely vague and unworkable) numbers at face value (which I am willing to do with the 404 article but not you because I trust journalists more than strangers on the internet), the scale of AI companies is one order of magnitude larger then libraries.
I still think this is a bad comparison regardless of the numbers. Seeking out books to destroy is worse behavior then not accepting donation. There is no equivalence in behavior here to compare.