EA0707

>trillions

No need for hyperbole.

The point you are missing is that those books get consciously thrown in the trash. Somebody evaluated them and decided they weren't worth saving. Will some fraction of these be the result of poor taste and those books were indeed worth saving? Sure. But most it's reasonable to assume won't be. In any case, they will still have been deliberated on by an actual human being.

By contrast, these AI companies are doing none of that. They are blanket buying books, scanning them and then pulping them. No human evaluation happens at any point.

> prissy

I don't think you know what that word means. But that aside, everybody is making a lot of assumptions about what books are being destroyed. Excess copies, outdated user manuals, etc etc. I'm sure there's some of that, but there's also probably lots of other books that are most certainly not that.

Anyone who isn't even a little concerned that millions of books are being blanket destroyed without any hint of concern about what those books are - they are just being blindly scanned and pulped by the truckload - is revealing themselves to be a bit soulless imo. There's really no other way to put it. Things have meaning outside the material. And I certainly don't trust these AI companies to have the best interests of humanity in mind when it comes to any of this. The fact that some or maybe even most of these books may be unworthy of preservation isn't the point. We don't know what's being blindly pulped. And neither do they. And neither do they care. There's just something gross about the whole thing.

Books like that are not what I am talking about.

The issue people have with it isn't about copyright. It's about how offensive it is that AI companies are mass buying and then destroying physical books by the millions. It's the same reason people were outraged when those two fools chopped down the ancient Sycamore tree at Hadrian's Wall. "But it's just a tree!"

No, it isn't. It's much, much more than that. There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature. Whether they paid people for the books is completely besides the point.

I'll check that out. Thanks for the link.

Very long, but an outstanding article. I wish he'd blog more. That one is from 2019. Would love his take on the state of social in 2025.