cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73048134
Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one 3 weeks ago
To make the books publically accessable… Right? Right??!
A_be_seedy@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
To make us enter a digital dark ages that is way more than just a digital one!
Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
It’d be such an easy PR win to do this, but of course they aren’t. I guess for things they don’t have the rights to they probably couldn’t easily, but they could for older things. They could also create a database of it and release it when they become public domain too, which wouldn’t be that hard.
Kissaki@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
If they can publish a dataset of all of GitHub* then they can publish a dataset of all books.
* main branch head state, + some filtering and manual opt-out-apply logic
Midnitte@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
To pay authors a fair compensation for consumption of their book, right?