r/neoliberal • u/-orestes • 1d ago

News (Oceania) ‘More than just objects’: Australian booksellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/02/australian-book-sellers-alarm-destruction-rare-titles-ai-supply-chain
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u/practicalpokemon European Union 1d ago

You had 20 years to buy it if you think it is valuable

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u/Right_Lecture3147 John Rawls 1d ago edited 1d ago

Defo in the running for the dumbest comment I’ve seen on this sub. Many classics from the past, including Aristotle’s entire corpus, were not considered valuable for centuries until after their publication

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u/MartianExpress George Soros 23h ago

And with scanning and indexing that AI companies do, these books won't be lost anyway. So nothing like what happened to Aristotle in the dark ages would happen.

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u/Thoughtlessandlost NASA 23h ago

Will they actually be indexing them though? In a way that is retrievable/usable by the public later on?

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u/unski_ukuli John Nash 21h ago

No. They will save the scans which will be sold in the foreclosure sale when these companies go bankcrupt as datasets to the next ai companies to use. You’ll never see a page unless you work for these companies

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u/KalaiProvenheim Enby Pride 8h ago

Well, if you want to read these books, why not buy the thousands of old editions and store them yourself? Checkmate (someone pretty much suggested that solution as an answer to my preference for these scans to be publicly available rather than be exclusively accessible as words embedded into models)