zlacker

>>bayind+(OP)
> In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI

Oh boy. The more I learn about how genAI companies work, the more detestable they appear to be.

>>JohnFe+x3
You got suckered by the clickbait. Destructive scanning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning#Destructive_scan...) isn't unusual for books that are common enough that an individual volume is of no particular value.

>>Throwa+P6
I mean, they could have gotten e-book versions of the books, or even preprint PDFs.

In an era where people are starting to calculate the environmental impact of the jobs they run on the cloud and start to optimize it, adding that much load on recycling system is not a wise choice, but only a selfish one.

>>bayind+68
No, they probably couldn't have. eBooks are notoriously DRMed and the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent an effective copy protection mechanism even if you otherwise have legal access to work. Furthermore, first sale doctrine doesn't apply to any digital files and they can't be obtained legally in bulk.