Scanning books en masse is nothing new. In 2005, Google spearheaded Google Books by scanning out-of-copyright titles from an on-campus library using specialized scanners . The books were then returned. Presumably, Google made use of some type of V-shaped scanner, which lays a book out naturally so as not to disturb the spine and binding.
In the case of VGT3, 404 reports that employees cut off the spine of the book before scanning, presumably to feed the pages flat into an industrial scanner. The insatiable hunger for data in frontier AI models seems to be moving at a faster pace than Google's early book digitization efforts.
It's hard to say why a facility like VGT3 operates in this way, though it likely comes down to cost. As major companies like Meta and Anthropic have been caught with a library of pirated books, they now need to buy them. And when purchasing thousands of books at a time, it's probably much cheaper to get secondhand copies from marketplaces like Biblio than it is to spend full price on digital versions of those books (if digital versions exist in the first place).
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Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom\u2019s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-25/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Jake Roach Social Links Navigation Senior Analyst, CPUs Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom’s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors.
jabliese "Books by scanning out-of-copyright titles from an on-campus library using specialized scanners." Better would be "Books by scanning public domain titles …" Reply
GoofyOne I have a question … what if the books and documents they scan into their database are full of false, incorrect, and outdated information??? Eventually the so called AI just becomes giant database of useless drivel. The AI terminology is being overused and misused, it's mainly just a giant database with a fancy parser at the front end, and a inference engine that returns what it thinks you want to know, or rather tells people what it wants them to think. I an sure they can be useful for some things, stupid people obviously think they are great, but it's just fake pseudo intelligence coded by humans. Remember who it was that created and coded these things … humans!!! Therefore humans are much smarter. GoofyOne's 2c worth which may, or may not be, actually worth 2c. Reply
PEnns Another reminder how benign AI is, how it is really used for our betterment and is in the best interest of humanity….. to have rare books destroyed in its training. One day we will have libraries stuffed with nothing but cartoons and carppy books but hey, we have AI that can create all kinds of slop to entertain simple minds. Unbelievable! Reply
USAFRet GoofyOne said: I have a question … what if the books and documents they scan into their database are full of false, incorrect, and outdated information??? Currently, the main source of data for the AI bots is reddit. Which, as we all know, is full of false, incorrect, and outdated information…;) Reply
Key considerations
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- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/secret-tracking-device-placed-in-rare-book-ends-up-in-amazon-processing-facility-destroying-books-to-train-ai-models-is-all-the-vegas-warehouse-does#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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