Why? So their LLM’s can ingest the books and use them to churn out more AI slop?
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
230 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
86503 readers
4163 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Destroying the books too :(
You can only stave off model collapse so long.
It’s only a matter of time before most of the data going in to LLMs came out of one too.
Like I’m not even good at math or anything, much less computer science, but that seems obvious and inevitable to me.
Maybe someone smarter than me can chime in.
It's kind of sort of already happening. Emdashes are fragments of it, when a token saving strategies introduced by already trained on old books in the data sources. Model collapse is inevitable.
Yeah, pretty awful on so many different levels.
Brilliant decision to train their models on the worst content to begin with.
Bruh, this is literally like scientists scavenging metal from shipwrecks that predate the era of nuclear bomb testing, cause they need steel that isn't contaminated by nuclear fallout for certain measuring equipment 😵💫😵💫
Great analogy for the shit we're currently saturating our digital world with
A guy I used to know who would go to estate sales looking for blacksmithing equipment once told me the market for old metalworking stuff is disappearing because too much stuff is being bought by companies én masse for this reason.
I don't know if I believe that companies are buying small lot auctions and estate sales for old anvils, but he was sure convinced.
I like to joke I'm sitting on a pile of cash because my anvil isn't radioactive. (it's not a very good joke, but it carries some weight!)
According to Wikipedia, while a market for old, low-background steel was real phenomenon for a few decades, that's pretty much over.
World anthropogenic background radiation ... began to fall in 1963 ... and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels.[9] This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature.
So you may consider your friend's estate-sale theory in light of that time-line.
but it carries some weight
Did you know about !dadjokes@lemmy.world?
It sounds plausible enough, considering we apparently have physicists out there using lead from roman archeological artifacts in their contraptions 😅 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-lead-physics-archaeology-controversy/
Low background bullshit training data.
Fking nailed it.
The worst part is that they are destroying the books afterwards.
Reminds me of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, who sketched ancient artifacts in his personal notebook and then destroyed the originals.
We also have no guarantee these books will be available at a later date in these digitized formats, nor that they won’t be altered to fit certain narratives which is of course trivial to do with digital copies. At a minimum these need public verifiable checksums to be relied upon.
I don’t like this and don’t trust it one bit.
These AI companies already showed their hand in trying to corner the PC component market with an end goal of users no longer being able to own their own PCs. Now they’re potentially trying to do this with all written recorded information.
How long until Altman’s Firemen show up at your door to burn your books?
They even hve an economical incentive to destroy the books, because by doing so, they will get the data and prevent the competition from getting it for them
Anyone who is not in favor of killing them at this point needs to die too. Or is just out of a coma.
Literally Fahrenheit 451
Silicon valley needs to burn
I mean it's California so it just like does that so.etimes, but I mean the residents. The residents need to burn.
...why? Why?
More that they are destroying the books in the process of digitizing them, they basically cut the pages out of the book and feed them into a scanner with a document feeder attached.
It's worth pointing out that this is standard practice when digitising books in most places, if they're not irreplaceable. Mass-produced books would fall under that category.
Turning the page and photographing what's there is really only done for some books, which you can't afford to destroy.
From what I've read previously, they're destroying all the books, regardless if they're historic and one-of-a-kind or a mass produced paperback.
load more comments
(16 replies)
I'm waiting for the day when desperate LLM companies start paying people to post real human content, only for those people to just ask ChatGPT to do it.
This is already happening.
They are paying people bottom market rates to generate unique written content and people are just having AI write it for them.
Some kind of AI ouroboros situation.
(Non)Human centipede.
Reverse centaur centipede?
load more comments
(9 replies)
Nice that they're actually buying them this time instead of just downloading torrents of book collections again.
I imagine they already burned through literally all of the torrentable books
That would be all the books.
Ah fuck... No wonder old maths texts are a nightmare to get hold of recently...
They first crashed RAM prices, the SSDs, and now books too?! Oh fuck 😭
view more: next ›