[oliwarner]

This is a bizarre comparison.

Weeding is the natural process of disposing of less-demand books. Like the rest of us, libraries operate in finite space, so if they want new books, they have to remove ones their users aren't using. Most libraries will try to sell books before disposing of them in any destructive way.

What similarities do you see here?

[Jweb_Guru]

People are very desperate to try to claim that something that's somewhat obviously morally wrong is actually highly nuanced, because it makes them feel uncomfortable.

[pfdietz]

No, we're just telling you your moral intuition is absurd.

[Jweb_Guru]

Yes, clearly it's completely absurd to think that shredding rare books to more cheaply train LLMs is anything but a moral good, which is why there is this entire thread is full of people jumping through hoops to explain how it's technically legal (and therefore fine) and "you wouldn't have bought those books anyway" (I suppose we don't have the choice anymore!) and, most amusingly, "they're actually becoming digitized and searchable this way" (are LLMs stochastic parrots or aren't they?).

[pfdietz]

Given that in the US we dispose of 640,000 tons of books each year, this attempt to inflate outrage is just ridiculous. Books are not things of intrinsic moral value; they are morally neutral physical objects.

To the extent the information in a book is something to preserve, this scanning is a good thing.

[03284782470]

People are very desperate to try to claim that something that's highly nuanced is actually obviously morally wrong, because it makes them feel self-satisfied.

[streetfighter64]

I would disagree on the "obviously morally wrong". What's the alternative for the books if they were "saved" from the fate of being scanned and shredded? How many rare books have you personally brought in the last year? Not everything that's ever created needs to be preserved forever.