World's largest open library calls for volunteers to scan and preserve physical books as AI companies buy, scan, and destroy them — Anna's Archive says ‘time is running out’ as ‘knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers’
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As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna's Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record.

As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna’s Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record.

  • Mordikan@kbin.earth
    2·
    1 day ago

    There is a glaringly obvious issue with this article that I see a lot of people in the comments seem to have missed:

    Only one copy of any given book exists The pretense to this entire thing is that AI companies are destroying the books both because of the process used AND to prevent competitors from accessing the book. There is more than ONE copy of that book. If you buy a book, that doesn’t prevent me from also buying that book. You can not like AI for a number of reasons, but this is just stupid.

    NOTE: If destroying the book actually prevented competitors from accessing it, that means that all of these AI companies are only going out on the weekends to used bookstores looking for good deals on second hand books.