I know I am, though maybe not as visibly so as your parent. Us anti-AI Luddites are arguing against a massive propaganda machine with trillions of dollars on the line. It is not easy, and it is mentally draining. Especially since AI-companies are behaving in an obviously anti-human, anti-science, and anti-industry ways for their own short term profits.
And worse yet, we have seen this before (albeit on a lesser scale). GMO was supposed to solve global hunger, Carbon capture was supposed to solve climate change, etc. etc. These were obvious lies and propaganda back then as much as the lies where AI are supposed to help humanity today. It gets tiring, and at some point we simply crash out.
unfortunately technology will never fix humanity's tendency to ruin itself (see: war, climate change, etc; all of which we know the solutions for ie 'stop killing people' 'stop using oil' etc) but that is not a fault of the technology itself (gmo, carbon capture, crispr, llms, etc)
This is simply not true. Plenty of technology exists which has helped humanity unambiguously. But there is a difference between good and helpful technology and a grift. GMO could have been helpful but it was mostly just a grift, GMO solving world hunger was always an obvious marketing stunt, and it worked, even though many of us (particularly on the political left) saw it as such and called it out as such. Ditto Carbon capture.
AI is currently the grift of choice.
Also I fundamentally disagree that there is any tendency for humanity to ruin it self. There are perverse intensives, which rewards undesirable behavior, there are unfair, undemocratic, or otherwise hostile powerstructures which allows one class of peoples to exploit another class of peoples. And some technology sometimes plays a pivotal role in maintaining or furthering these hostile power structures/perverse intensives.
It turns out your an expendable commodity, and my computer system is predicting that society will profit from your annihilation, really sorry about that and I hope there's no hard feelings.
Do you recall reading many articles about the water usage calamity 70,000 new houses constitute?
The comparand here isn't "all the houses in Austin". It's "the number of houses Austin has added in the last 2 years alone". And it's vastly larger than the data center usage number we're discussing.
Before you buy the apologia that these books are not valuable or interesting: if they weren't valuable or interesting the AI labs would not be spending billions of dollars to purchase and scan them. Yes, everyone has a personal anecdote about pallets of garbage books but I have three insights for you that you may not have because you don't read or sift through pallets of garbage books:
1) The labs don't want garbage books, they want interesting books that are rare and unique. They want high quality training data, random permutations of language style are fine, but what you want is unseen information, unseen patterns of thinking, unseen ideas.
2) Most pallet of books contains lots of valuable and interesting works, maybe 1-3% but sorting through them takes time, money, and energy, that's why the labs are starting to purchase by the pallet, it's because they already have a fully automated process so they can always beat any bookseller small or large on cost to find the books of interest and value in a pile.
3) Many of these pallets may sit for years before being sorted, and many of the books may sit for years before being sold, but these things actually do eventually happen, valuable books are found, and they eventually make their way to interested readers, this is the business model of used bookstores. Most books of value don't get destroyed or thrown away.
Destroying human art, knowledge, and culture is an essential part of the business plan for frontier labs, it is not enough to steal and regurgitate all the art and information in the world, you also want to make it inaccessible through any other means than the regurgitation machine. Don't expect the book burning to be an isolated incident, they are coming for every other form of stored human knowledge or art, and yes, unfortunately while scanning it they will have to destroy the original copy. And attacking the past is only the beginning.
I have sifted through everything from piled up junky independent book shops, to cast offs from research libraries, to dumpsters of end of life books. Most books really are not worth the paper they are printed on.
> Most books of value don't get destroyed or thrown away.
Of value to who? Most used bookstores are boutiques that over-curate and will happily refuse or recycle books that they deem are inferior/irrelevant. This is a big reason why I prefer Half Price Books over most any other used bookstore, they sell most everything.
> Most books really are not worth the paper they are printed on.
Yeah, but like I said in the comment you are replying to, somewhere around 1-5% of books are worth the paper they are printed on and far more, and those are exactly the books the labs are trying to scan and destroy, they are not buying pallets of books and scanning them in order to scan the june 1995 tv guide for the 800th time, they want unique, interesting, and high quality text, because that's what feeds pretraining.
(3) is doing almost all of the moral lifting, in that it assumes that relatively few of the books get pulped in the first place:
> 3) Many of these pallets may sit for years before being sorted, and many of the books may sit for years before being sold, but these things actually do eventually happen, valuable books are found, and they eventually make their way to interested readers, this is the business model of used bookstores. Most books of value don't get destroyed or thrown away.
This contradicts base reality, as the vast majority of the books in such cases were already queued to be pulped.
> Destroying human art, knowledge, and culture is an essential part of the business plan for frontier labs, it is not enough to steal and regurgitate all the art and information in the world, you also want to make it inaccessible through any other means than the regurgitation machine.
Even if Anthropic wanted to make the books publicly available as a form of moralwashing, they legally can't do that. Their current process rides the line of fair use, in that it obeys the requirement of medium shifting to be considered legally defensible.
Don't like the outcome? Change the law to allow for digital archival without requiring destruction.
> why the old books could really be relevant
> it can barely be about the information in those books (that would be very often outdated),
LOL, not being rude: have you ever read a book outside of what they forced you to read in school? Most old books are not O'reilly's manuals for Visual Studio 2014, they don't go out of date.
They are interesting to human beings for the same reason they are interesting to the labs. If it was just about quantity of text then the labs could generate text with the prev. gen model and use that alone to scale to the next model, there is something of immeasurable value contained in books (hint: it starts with an i and rhymes with bin formation).
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