This is the kind of rationalization hoarders use. The inability to get rid of things because it could turn out to be something we want in the future for reasons that we cannot currently describe.

It's a loss avertive instinct that I think is misplaced. Treating every printed book as priceless is intractable. It's not how we treat these books at the moment. Apparently, today we don't even care enough to spend a few hours per book nondestructively scanning them in.

Let's say we, instead of destructively scanning this books, nondestructively scanned them. What would you propose doing with the copies afterwards? Sell them? To who? They're valueless individually for the overwhelming part. Warehouse them? Why? For who? Do you want to go and look through them? Why haven't you done so already? Have you ever shown interest in consuming an undigitised book a single time in your life to date?

It feels like the anti-AI crowd here have to tie themselves in knots here to make the loss minimization work.

I am however OK with destroying one of the remaining 50 children's books of which only 300 copies were ever printed in a small town in Ohio in the 1970s as a test run for a failed book which was subsequently never commercialised.

1. At some level of critical information-withholding mass, a leak or disclosure similar to SciHub is inevitable because of the commonly held opposition to hiding knowledge.

2. Availability via Google Books or similar.

3. Availability via AI model reference.

4. Failing any of the above, better AI models that are more capable of doing more things, at the expense of books that were likely to go unread (revealed preference, rare books are often rare for a reason). This will obviously be a nonstarter if you don't want this to happen, but I think it would be good for the world if it did.

I think category of old books that were going to be read or otherwise become important parts of human knowledge that have not yet been digitised and now will never become so because they are instead being shredded and will never make their way into the light because of AI company data hoarding is a small category.

Indeed, I think there's a high chance that this process increases preservation of the most relevant part of the media - the actual content!

There are tons of old rolls of film slowly rotting away in warehouses that were never digitised. Even for beloved media, the BBC occasionally tracks down an old lost episode of Dr Who.

For now these books are in corpuses of training data, but eventually I trust they will make their way to the rest of us.

The irony of this comment is that leaning back and snarkily accusing someone of "playing internet" is precisely the kind of disengagement you're complaining about.

Yes yes, I know, folder/file naming convention dating from...

But it's current year now

The comment section was full of AI-generated edits to this image which exaggerated it or changed the setting in various creative ways - making his leg even longer, making his leg extend over a giant chasm, adding a bench behind him so he was performing a Bulgarian split squat. I giggled my way through the comments.

This form of humor - of being able to take human in-jokes and run with them - was not possible before artificial intelligence, and it was very funny! Memes are about to get so much more varied and funny as the effort requirement drops. We're nowhere near the effort ceiling in terms of making great memes, most people just simply do not have the time, resources or patience to actualise their mind's eye. It reminded me of exactly the kind of dumb joke and rehashing that made YTPs so special in the first place. I don't know if this is high art, but it is art, and I don't think YTPs were a particularly special form of comedy outside of our rose-tinted memories of childhood.

There's still the capacity for human labor and uniqueness to be embedded in AI-generated media - only the first breaths of low-quality algoslop lacked that. Expression and mimetics will change, and I think children born today will get to enjoy richer and funnier content than we did now that they are unshackled from GMod stop motion.

Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.

My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.

The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.

The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.

irony