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Who gets to decide what's "special"? Written works might be personal stories or expression of feeling. I've read a lot of unknown old literature that has littl
by voidhorse 27d ago
Who gets to decide what's "special"? Written works might be personal stories or expression of feeling.
I've read a lot of unknown old literature that has little to recommend it as far as literary history goes, but it all has a certain charm, and at the end of the day it was all the work of a human being who walked this earth just like we did and captured their thought on the page.
What if their family has an interest in the preservation of that text? What if they simply don't yet know of it, or couldn't afford it?
Yes all hypotheticals, but I think a lot of people are underestimating the potentially permanent damage being done to the public good just because the actions are not illegal.
Everyone should be uncomfortable with a single company unilaterally pillaging the public good for its own ends. Period.
IDK about you geniuses on hacker news, but I'd much prefer to pay a few hundred dollars for a rare book once to be able to read it than pay amazon token costs monthly to get the LLM's chopped and screwed regurgitation, without any recourse to even knowing where the information comes from.
- phyzome 26d agoMmm, you may have mistaken my point. I'm not an AI-lover and I hate that these companies are doing this. It would help if I could dig up the quote right now, but the example they gave is that some of these things are like... a walking guide to DC, or something like that. And not necessarily a good one! Many of these were churned out and weren't necessarily even special to the authors. But they did highlight that beyond the authors, these have a great deal of value to historians, and are really quite important documents in that respect.