The world’s biggest AI companies are buying antiquarian books en masse so they can be scanned to train their large language models (LLMs) before being destroyed.
As a sad consolatation prize, In some cases this might be the only way certain old books survive. Some books from when I was young were just OK and they basically cant be found anymore. Try finding a complete collection of the ubiquitous “choose your own adventures” books. There were 184 of those published. There were 49 TSR Dungeons and Dragons Endless Quest books (basically choose your own adventure in d+d) and those are like 20 bucks each now, if you can find them at all. They are 50 years old. Anyone Remember Mountain of Mirrors, Pillars of Pentegarn, or Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons?
Good Times.
Except they’re not surviving, are they? They’re being harvested for semantic associations and then destroyed.
Anthropic could easily offset the PR blow by offering a free digital library of all the works they’re destroying, but of course that would require them to actually pay a fair price to the owners.
As a sad consolatation prize, In some cases this might be the only way certain old books survive. Some books from when I was young were just OK and they basically cant be found anymore. Try finding a complete collection of the ubiquitous “choose your own adventures” books. There were 184 of those published. There were 49 TSR Dungeons and Dragons Endless Quest books (basically choose your own adventure in d+d) and those are like 20 bucks each now, if you can find them at all. They are 50 years old. Anyone Remember Mountain of Mirrors, Pillars of Pentegarn, or Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons?
Good Times.
Except they’re not surviving, are they? They’re being harvested for semantic associations and then destroyed.
Anthropic could easily offset the PR blow by offering a free digital library of all the works they’re destroying, but of course that would require them to actually pay a fair price to the owners.
Space Hawks!