Destroying books to feed AI models (Historical researcher's viewpoint)

Reddit r/artificial News

Summary

A historical researcher criticizes the practice of destroying antique books by cutting their spines for AI model training data, arguing it causes irreversible loss of valuable historical information and data that cannot be recovered.

My opinion is only from my own perspective, but I'm sure it will resonate with many others. When I first heard about this story, what's infuriating is that when you post information about this story on social medias such as fb, their internal servers kill any form of suggestion pushing (their way of pushing your content to a wider audience based on similar interests), so when you usually get 1k to 5k views will get only 400 to 500 views. I feel this is an incredibly serious issue to address where no oversight are given. The thing is that machines CAN scan books without chopping up the spines, but those options are slightly more expensive because of it being time-consuming, but because they chop up the spines, the means of putting them back together is impossible, therefore; they are destroyed. and the way they chop up the spines is diabolical, they cut literal inches, not milimeters, into the books.. and many antique books pre 1800 have no margins, so significant data is lost. Many books may contain valuable invisible data which can only be seen under ultraviolet light or from rubbed out writing, an imprint only detectable via directional lighting, you also have DNA and flower-presses.. Iv'e also just realised whilst writing this; antique books were often re-binded using pages from already one of a kind antique books, so these spines are INCREDIBLY valuable, spines that may contain information from 10th to 15th century manuscripts. I fear that if governments don't act now to force companies to not chop up spines and discard everything after use, humanity will be much poorer as a result.
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AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them by cutting spines and shredding the originals, facilitated by ISBNdb, with a federal judge ruling it fair use. This irreversible destruction of cultural artifacts has sparked outrage.

@interjc: don’t be evil

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AI companies are buying and destroying physical books, including rare copies, to train their models, raising ethical and legal concerns about the treatment of cultural artifacts.