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.”
Combine this mass burning of humanity’s canon with the onslaught of AI generated nonsense and think about what is doing to do our history and knowledge going forward.
Humanity is being dragged into a black hole by tech-fetishist demons.
It’s a second dark age approaching. It’s slow, maybe not in our lifetime but with the enormous pressure of climate and demographic crisis add the regression of human cognition and destruction of researchable truth and you will get a collapse of the global economy and a shift in priorities (survival first) that will bring a dark age.
If they are successful in destroying all print sources of knowledge, technically we are already in the dark age.