World News@lemmy.worldEnglish · 5 days ago

AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them

novaramedia.com

285

AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them

novaramedia.com

rose56@lemmy.zip to

World News@lemmy.worldEnglish · 5 days ago

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.

Chat

humanspiral
Aquileo | link
Aquileo | fedilink
English
Aquileo | arrow-up
6·
5 days ago
The destruction part is for the scanning. Still a bad look, and copyright issues seem to apply.

World News@lemmy.world

world@lemmy.world

Create a post

You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !world@lemmy.world

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think “Is this fair use?”, it probably isn’t. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to “Mom! He’s bugging me!” and “I’m not touching you!” Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn’t USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you’re posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world

Recommendations

How to spot Misinformation and Propaganda

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link

Visibility: Public

This community can be federated to other instances and be posted/commented in by their users.

2.21K users / day
4.61K users / week
9.19K users / month
21.3K users / 6 months
1.33K local subscribers
57.4K subscribers
32.9K Posts
512K Comments
Modlog