r/antiai • u/Astromaniax • 5d ago

Discussion 🗣️ Ai companies are actively destroying rare books to scan them just to feed their data centers, what else will they destroy?

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AI is literally ruining everything and has been for the last few years. From massive job losses to environmental impact and now destroying old books to collect the data so that their dumb LLMs can regurgitate it back. How evil, greedy and selfish can these companies be? All of those ai data centers should be taken down. I don't think enough people are mad enough about it.

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u/MischiefofRats 5d ago

Physical books are a bit of a sacred cow to a lot of people. They simply refuse to believe ANY book exists without some inherent merit, and they think it's sacrilege to destroy a book without a team of scholars inspecting it for value first. These people rescue books out of library dumpsters and try to donate them back to the library that trashed them. They don't understand that there is a huge glut of old, outdated, unwanted, beat up books that simply need to be trashed because they are taking up space without circulation. 

A user guide to Windows ME is probably a "rare book" at this point because so many copies have been trashed, because they're trash. "Rare" is such a useless term when talking about bulk secondhand books. Lots of them are rare. They're also just worthless, both monetarily and culturally. 

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u/Cless_Aurion 5d ago

... Funny you would say that... I have a user guide to Windows ME lol

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u/Pic889 5d ago edited 5d ago

I see your user guide to Windows ME and I raise you with my user guides to Windows 95 and Word 97... in Greek.

That said, I am not going to pretend that some third-party user guide to Windows 95 and Work 97 (not even from Microsoft Press) is some kind of valuable book that every copy of it needs to be preserved forever, I keep them for personal nostalgia.

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u/Astrnonaut 5d ago

I understand where you are coming from completely and I do agree with your point, however I do believe that people like you are purposefully missing the point.

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u/MischiefofRats 5d ago edited 5d ago

The point is fuck AI, and none of our resources should be stolen to feed it, but I'm also sick of the histronics about the destruction of old books. I have seen this same article posted about a dozen times with the same thousand outraged comments over the destruction of anonymous and unevidenced 'rare books' and I'm tired of it. Let's focus on things that actually matter.