ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Uh, yeah it is. That’s terrible, but also very typical for capitalism. It’s the logic of planned obsolescence taken to its conclusion. It’s not just that being sustainable isn’t profitable enough to capitalism; it’s that sustainability is in direct competition with the capitalist model. If we can hang onto things for decades and still get use out of them, lots of businesses simply can’t have a reliable profit model. So this is one form of destroying something that exists in order to make themselves the only provider of it. Capitalist businesses have been doing this kind of thing for a long time.

It only makes any sense as the logic of monopoly and consolidation of power, aka: the logic of accumulation of capital. Otherwise, it sounds perfectly unhinged. It’s not even like feeding more novel training data to a model intrinsically makes it better. It matters to an extent, but it’s not a magic pill like “more novel training data = more intelligence.”

So I will call this what it is: capitalism operating on the usual logic of monopoly. It has little to do with AI itself.