AI binge

I just read an article from the Helsinki Times.  Second hand book sellers  across Europe are experiencing large  orders of books that are unrelated to one another. It is suspected that AI companies are buying up the books .

Of course, this leads to all sorts of questions as to how the information is being used, modified, and what is happening to the old books once  the information is processed.

A quick search provided this information on Snopes: the idea that AI companies are buying up old, hard-to-find books and then shredding them so they can scan the pages for their programs is currently rated as: "mostly true."

Snopes: Anthropic and other AI companies "destructively scanning" old books.

Recently, the one political blog I read had a commenter who likened this process to "burning the Library of Alexandria, again."

There are organizations such as The Gutenberg Project and Archive dot org that are trying to scan and preserve old (AKA, public domain) books, magazines, periodicals, and other media so that their contents become available at no cost to everyone, everywhere, for all time. I suggest you visit and support them when you can.