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World's largest open library calls for volunteers to scan and preserve physical books as AI companies buy, scan, and destroy them — Anna's Archive says ‘time is running out’ as ‘knowledge is permanent (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna's Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record.

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[–] 4 points 2 months ago (8 children)

the AI ran out of Reddit slop material to scan, because reddit has been purging alot of content/accounts even suspected of spamming, so they go for physical books now.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    gigo.

    books are better sources imho.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    pretty much why they go for books.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (5 children)

    that's what I'm saying. I've never understood the hoopla of reddit selling it's corpus, aside from being fucking gross (spot on for spez) it's a shitton of garbage. there's gold in there, but it's absolutely buried in shite

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    For an AI to troubleshoot problems with your computer (something it's really good at today), it needs content like reddit's. Books don't and won't detail weird software issues and their workarounds. One the current training set becomes irrelevant to whatever software people are running, this is a specific area where Reddit's data is way more valuable than books.

    Of course Reddit locking down access to that information leads to fewer people contributing. Reddit is dead, it's just struggling to go down.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    there’s gold in there, but it’s absolutely buried in shite

    yep, there is a lot of nuanced depth, but measured against the overall sea of chuds lol... and yep, the moment they started putting up walls and controlling the community it was doomed. it's gonna thrash for a while then, when the only ones left are advertisers and bots, it'll shit itself and stop twitching.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    im guessing reddit has been banning so aggressively lately, that AI scraping isnt getting as much "useful data" as much anymore (chatgtp/google dropped "references for reddit in thier slop summaries). so they are trying to force logins now to keep up with the user generated content so they can squeeze every last penny they can from reddit, i dont think ads were ever a big presence in reddit? its the data. people try to post content, like posts, subreddits, those can instantly get removed by redit filters. i think lost alot of traffic recently to, which was likely AI scraping.

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