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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.

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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.

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

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?).

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.

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