No, but they are going to be intermixed in boxes from an old estate, or a used books store which is closing up, etc.
> Most public libraries do not have professional archivists
Most reasonably sized library systems do in fact. Even small ones have trained librarians with an some degree in library science who took at least an introductory class in archiving as a part of their degree, and very likely has some idea how to prevent rare books from being destroyed.
The scale matters. It is disingenuous to just remove it from the equation as if it doesn’t.
As does the intention matter. The AI companies are doing this because they want to profit off of it. They don’t have to do this, and the fact that they do is part of what makes them bad for humanity.
Right: the scale matters, which is why it's very weird to take AI companies to task for something the public library system does on a far greater scale. And, in fact, the AI companies do have to do this: they're required by law to destroy these books.
I am going to have to see the numbers involved before I believe this. But even if it is true, it is still not a comparable behavior as I have argued above.
You didn't know it was happening at all just a few hours ago; you believed libraries had archivists on staff trained to preserve all the donations. You're in kind of an odd rhetorical position to be saying [citation needed].
Libraries do have archivists on staff. And I never believed libraries preserve all donations. I didn’t even mention donation, you did that.
I honestly don‘t understand what kind of a mission you are on here, and why you feel the need to defend AI companies by whatabouting libraries into this conversation. But whatever you are doing here, I think you have succeeded. This thread was supposed to be about the unambiguously bad behavior of AI companies, but now it is about libraries.
But OK. The numbers don’t add up. The 404 article talk about millions of copies, you mentioned hundreds of thousand. If we take these (extremely vague and unworkable) numbers at face value (which I am willing to do with the 404 article but not you because I trust journalists more than strangers on the internet), the scale of AI companies is one order of magnitude larger then libraries.
I still think this is a bad comparison regardless of the numbers. Seeking out books to destroy is worse behavior then not accepting donation. There is no equivalence in behavior here to compare.
> Most public libraries do not have professional archivists
Most reasonably sized library systems do in fact. Even small ones have trained librarians with an some degree in library science who took at least an introductory class in archiving as a part of their degree, and very likely has some idea how to prevent rare books from being destroyed.