I know it’s evil… But that’s how money and physical ownership work. They have it and nobody else can have it…
It’s a bit interesting thinking about Fahrenheit 451 in this new twist of reality.
Not only that…
They use this fucking incredible argument:
“We destroy the book because when we scan it - that’s a new copy. If we destroy the oroginal - only one copy (the scan) remains”
As if the model doesn’t get copied over and rented out in bajillions of instances. Its product - by all AI service ToS’s made free to use and copy royalty free (unlike say, every single library in this world, which universally forbid the photocopying of lent out books). Meaning - copyright infringement of the worst kind in any sane interpretation. Shame this world is insane.
Such an incredible spin on the rules. Using them as the excuse to go against the core cultural, civilizational and moral imperative of archiving, while going against the spirit of the concept of what copyright was initially made to do - give authors the path to a livelihood from their work and denying it to parasites such as publishers.
Copyright truly is dead. Indeed - the global copyright rules were on their last legs before AI and used only as anti-consumer protection for publishers (not authors!), but now they’re a sinked ship - the mask is off. It’s all plainly visible what they’re here to do now.
Right, but they could keep them in a private Library. Shoot, throw them in a tote and stick them in a closet. Deliberately destroying rare books isn’t just regular profit motivated evil, it’s over the top. I’d say cartoonishly evil if it didn’t piss me off so bad. Seriously, are they going to drown bags of puppies next? Burn down an orphanage?
Honestly - just uploading to archive.org or their spinoff of Google Books would be acceptable. At least the stuff out of copyright.
Or they could have pirated them. This is what copyright does to people and corporations.
In fact, Anna’s Archive has a special offer to AI companies. Probably much cheaper and much less destructive than destroying books.
Too little, too late. The billion dollar lawsuit was already handed down. The Top 0.001% authors got the last major payday they will ever get. The message to AI corpos is pretty clear: Buy the physical media, consume into AI, burn it down just to spite them!
Is it evil? Yeah, sure. But, people who understand how power works understand that this was going to be the inevitable result after that lawsuit.
Agreed. But this is late stage capitalism where there is zero place for socialist values. And keeping those books available for the future is totally socialist / communist way of thinking.
It’s a bit interesting thinking about Fahrenheit 451 in this new twist of reality.
that combined with the AI driven panopticon we’re currently self imposing on ourselves makes it clear that fahrenheit 451; animal farm; and 1984 were instruction manuals.
It’s mostly shitty books from not important authors, if some hacker feels like blowing past their Cheeto cyber security download the scanned books and send them to Anne Archive would be amazing
It’s best for the AI companies if there are no sources other than their AI.
So…?
Destruction of precious resources in order to create a monopoly is not good for society.
Okay, that’s true. Sorry, I just expect the worst takes from people coming from piefed.
Books printed before 2022 are free from AI slop which makes for uncontaminated training data. SMH, I hate this timeline.
Why can they not only do that once and share the scans with everybody?
Oh right… copyright and they want to keep the advantage for themselves





