Almost all of these websites or platforms are doing these massive cleanup to remove ai content from them. Well appreciated.
I wouldn't even have much of a problem with it - if these labs would be fair enough to humanity as a whole to provide the raw scans after the process is completed, and if they would limit themselves to books that have been on the market for more than 20 years.
Unfortunately, this would get them an even bigger copyright smackdown than they've already received.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book
> A stripped book is a mass market paperback that has been stripped of its cover in order to be recycled. The covers are returned to the publisher as evidence that the books have been destroyed and to obtain a credit on the purchase price.[1] The books are meant to be destroyed by pulping but some find their way to street merchants, sometimes by illegal means, and are resold.[2]
I grew up reading books with this ditty in them:
> If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Those books certainly weren't scanned before being pulped. Would've been illegal. Really, the big thing that destroys books is the copyright term being as long as it is.
What was going on recently was AI companies were specifically seeking out rare — or sometimes irreplaceable — books to supplement their data sets (and hopefully getting a leg up on their competitors). The destruction of the books wasn't the point, it was just a consequence of the business-oriented realization that they could scan the contents of more books faster if they just chopped off the bindings rather than investing the time to care for the books and keep them intact (plus supposedly playing along with copyright law by "only having one copy of the copyrighted material").
A lot of worthless books are rare. That was what people in the trade call "Clickbait"; in that it isn't technically a lie but it sure ain't the truth.
> The destruction of the books wasn't the point
It was to the people who shared the stories for clicks and outrage farming.
That does not really make it a law though.
Not just random output of who knows what model, from who knows what prompt.
I absolutely understand where you are coming from, and I agree to a point. If you're of an age where you actually read a printed encyclopedia, the tone and voice of the entire set was sameish as well. The difference is that it didn't sound LLMish like LLM text does. I know that printed encyclopedias would have been vetted by editors, and I feel this is the key difference. Editors not only knew grammar rules, but had that sense of good writing practices that's hard to write down as rules. A piece of text passed through a good editorial review will read human while LLM text reads as LLM text.
When we say AI sounds same-ish we mean all sources of content can sound the same - fiction and non-fiction, news articles and blog posts, marketing pitches and ai drafted personal messages, all sound kinda the same. That is a different situation, and that's before you get to "and that one sound is LLMish".
That is AI is a tool. I've driven screws with a hammer - it worked in a pinch, but it was not good. People have also used hammers to kill others.
That takes a lot of commitment, you really have to want that screw in pretty badly! And when you're done it ends up just being a worse nail.
I've seen these used to assemble wooden palettes (they are VERY hard to remove). A search on Home Depot reveals they may be used for certain types of siding as well.
I built a house with them. You really want to check twice if you're putting them in where you want them because getting them out is - as you noted - annoyingly difficult. But they're very nice for large surfaces that are going be battered by the wind, they're much longer than your typical screw and working with them is very fast.
Having a program constantly suggest "better" ways of phrasing things is stripping your personality from your language. Maybe this is needed if you are writing corporate PR pieces, but you should avoid it for anything else.
Of course AI can be used to check sources, get critical feedback and translate to languages. But content should be 100% human driven.