AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late
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AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books to their shadow library before this cultural heritage disappears forever.

TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.

  • wax@feddit.nuEnglish
    2·
    17 hours ago

    I was in that situation with a textbook costing about twice that. Ended up borrowing from the library and digitizing it myself using a camera mounted on the back of a hardwood chair with the book lying flat on the ground. In hindsight it would have been good with a glass plate to press the pages, but I unwarped the pages automatically using some open source software. In the end it turned out quite good, but probably spent 6 hrs or something on the ordeal.