Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
I really hope the AI bubble pops soon and takes at least some of these stupid companies with it. They’ve been operating at a GIANT loss for years at this point, how much longer will this go on?
Investors are starting to notice that it’s all smoke and mirrors in terms of the profits. I am reasonably sure it will pop this year. I will be utterly shocked if it doesn’t pop by the end of next year. It’s just so comically and obviously unsustainable.
This is gonna go down as the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, I swear.
Biggest Ponzi Scheme so far
I dunno, the GameStop Bros are still waiting for MOASS. So I’d say the wealthy have more ways to keep the plates spinning than we wish they did.
At least GameStop is profitable though.