Link: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/japanese-used-bookstores-see-5x-sales-surge-as-books-are-being-bought-by-the-ton-one-50-ton-order-sent-to-the-us-for-ai-scanning-and-destruction-multitude-of-suspicious-bulk-buys-thought-to-end-up-in-foreign-ai-scan-and-shred-facilities

Cross posted from https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/59514737

I hate the description of books, but why is an American company buying that many Japanese books? AI being used to translate language is actually a good use of technology. As long as it isn’t “creating” art, including dubbing Japanese media. (Amazon tried that with the animated Banana Fish last year, it was terrible, and we should never let media companies forget it was terrible.)

I’d like to one day visit Japan and be able to understand people. Apple has been promising real time translation for a couple years. They aren’t there. Google has thrown their hat into the ring, but I’m not in the Pixel ecosystem. They need to come off those sorry ass Tensor chips that rival the iPhone 11. The new Snapdragons (what Samsung uses) show real promise.

The anti-AI argument is to pay a person to do it, but hiring a full time translator is not something I’m ever going to be score to afford, so I’ll dream of my phone doing it one day, because it sounds cool.

Big Tech be like: How can we be more evil tho?

The problem here is they destroy the books too.

Oh, absolutely.

I think it needs to be understood that the most efficient way to scan a book is to slice off the spine and feed the sheets through a feeder or hopper or something. That doesn't excuse destroying books, though. There may be no ethical way to scan a book, unless it's a mass-market paperback nobody really cares if you destroy.

They are specifically going for rare books, looking for stuff that is nowhere to be found digitalized.
We have the non-profit Internet Archive working with donations and scanning rare books to make them available for everyone without destroying any. And then we have those trillion dollar companies destroying rare books so no one gets access to them and only their databases can use it.

Destroying the book spines is purely for speed of use. It can be done in more time ethically. Destroying physical information and charging people to access the parts you allow is pure evil.

Edit- lone downvoter, explain your position coward.

The modern day book burnings have begun