Public libraries staff professional archivist, they take careful inventory and know exactly which book they are destroying.

AI companies buy boxes and boxes of books with unknown content staff anybody who can operate a scanner and have no idea which books they are destroying.

If a public library comes across a book they didn’t know they had, it is very likely that somebody will notice and know how to continue, to find out if this book is worth saving etc. AI companies will treat this book exactly like any other and destroy it to feed the plagiarist machine.

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kasey_junk 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is not what most public libraries do with donation books. They mostly just recycle them.

The very act of cataloging donation books takes a huge amount of resources that the collection managers don’t have.

Many public libraries don’t have a collection management department at all! They outsource that function entirely to vendors and those vendors mostly source new books and spend resources preparing them for the hard use of a library (changing bindings, uploading and cleaning metadata, tagging, etc).

Decommissioning is done by volunteers who just look at the condition of books and chuck the bad looking ones in a bin for recycling.

My wife worked in this industry on the vendor side, your model of public libraries is closer to a small subset of certain big city libraries narrowed to their rare and research departments. The median book bought by a library is a Danielle Steele romance novel packaged for library consumption and sent to a small town library system that will be lucky to have a single professional librarian for the whole system.

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tptacek 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At this point I believe you're just sort of making up a fantasy of what you think a public library should do, not what they actually do.

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dukeyukey 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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runarberg 7 hours ago | parent [-]

No, but they are going to be intermixed in boxes from an old estate, or a used books store which is closing up, etc.

> 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.

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tptacek 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, and what happens to those boxes from old estates are that they get put into dumpsters. The only difference here are:

* 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.

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runarberg 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The scale matters. It is disingenuous to just remove it from the equation as if it doesn’t.

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.

	▲	tptacek 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right: the scale matters, which is why it's very weird to take AI companies to task for something the public library system does on a far greater scale. And, in fact, the AI companies do have to do this: they're required by law to destroy these books.