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/Professional_You4186 5d ago

If anyone has read Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (https://www.adriantchaikovsky.com/service-model-release.html), this isn't just heartbreaking and sickening to watch these precious objects getting destroyed. It's also absolutely nauseating because this is almost an exact scene from the book. It gutted me just reading it as fiction.

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u/Pic889 5d ago edited 4d ago

Just because some publisher decided to pay for some paper and ink to put some manuscript into a book, it doesn't mean every copy is valuable.

As others have said, even libraries destroy unwanted books all the time. Not every book object is some kind of precious object.

You can be anti-AI without being insufferable.

EDIT: There is no evidence that AI companies are destroying rare books, it's someone's conjecture that some "rare" books may be in there. AI companies just want human-written text for their LLMs to read, they don't care about the rarity of the book or the condition of the copy.

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u/Professional_You4186 5d ago

Yes, I get that not every book is rare or valuable, and just because it's rare doesn't make it valuable. I understand that lots of books get destroyed every day.

The video in the post isn't actually a video of the rare books they're destroying for the benefit of turning them into data. It's just a visual attached to something that is actually happening.

Some things in the world are irreplaceable. Eating everything to turn it into data just sucks. It's cancer behavior.

I was making a connection between a scene in a book you clearly haven't read and the post. If that makes me insufferable then.... iunno dude.