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AI Companies Are Pulping Our Humanity
['Museum Of Contemporary Art Connecticut', 'Uw Neltje Center S Jentel Artist Residency', 'Institute For Contemporary Art', 'Virginia Commonwealth University', 'Mitchell Johnson']
Hyperallergic
And yet, as bizarre as Calvin’s motivations might have been, he’s still not as noxious as the artificial intelligence companies, including Anthropic, that have been involved in bulk purchasing, digitizing, and then pulping out-of-print books to train their large language models.
Calvin at least had the excuse of his God; AI companies don’t even have that.
A “hydraulic powered cutting machine” slices off book spines and removes the pages, which are scanned and digitized before being pulped.
The destruction of books, as Servetus’s case demonstrates, is hardly a historical rarity.
LLMs swell while the shelves starve, the result being an act of libricide, of corporate indifference to the obliteration of culture, ideas, and humanity itself.