This has been reported of other major ai shops. It is a little chilling that they're going after rare books.

For the record, i don't much have issue with llms and such.

But... the wholesale destruction of printed books is a bridge too far.

jimbob45 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Is it? They keep the scans (somewhere). These books would have rotted in bookstores and then been trashed once those bookstores went out of business.

There’s no giant “used” section at Barnes and Noble. Libraries only have so much space and they have to cycle through books as the years go by. This is easily the best fate these books could have received.

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tescreal 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They're removing knowledge from the public domain. I don't mean copyright: I mean the very information published is being destroyed.

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api an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If they were sharing the scans it would be great but they’re not.

	▲	bpodgursky 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They are literally not legally allowed to do this. Google Books tried. They lost. If you want this fixed, talk to your congressman, not Amazon.

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hexapus an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Bullshit...they aren't sharing them with the internet archive, and at least the inventory of the defunct bookstore might have ended up with a collector or something. These slop factories have a less sound business model than any given bookstore, and you think they'll preserve those scans and share them with the world? Corporations regularly delete media for utterly capricious reasons.

	▲	sandcat_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed. In fact I suspect that the destruction is the point. A book that Anthropic destroys the last copy of is a book that OpenAI will never have.

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an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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m4rtink an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It is pure evel and anyone involved in this is a criminal that should be harshly punished. Books are sacred.