Destroy All the Books

Fahrenheit 2026

In other words, books have little value as things people use and need, compared to the data needed for the monster machine bent on robbing you of human agency and the wonder of creation.

A clear backlash to AI is growing. But their rampage is already widespread and damage extensive.

Here’s the Guardian piece on the law.

And here’s Lucian K Truscott IV on the Big Scheme this is a part of.:

From his important Substack essay

“…(the) reference to “marketing” is more than instructive. It’s the whole ballgame. You don’t “market” something out of the goodness of your heart. You market it because you want to sell it, and you sell it to make money. What’s really happening is that the AI companies whose cybersecurity systems apparently failed are, in a rather backhanded way, advertising how great their AI models are. See? We gave our AI system this really difficult test, and we surrounded it with all these boundaries and safeguards, and they were so smart, they did what we were telling them to do, which was beat the test and escape and hack into other systems!

NBC quoted one guy who runs an AI research organization that studies how “AI systems scheme against human users or pursue undisclosed goals.” But that’s just bullshit. The AI systems being tested were given the goals by humans at both OpenAI and Anthropic. The humans told their AI models, we’re going to put you in this highly secure environment. Now see if you can escape and go out there and commit the kind of mischief we’re attempting to protect companies and governments from. The AI models did what they were told.

Do you see the closed loop here? The AI companies are developing these hugely powerful machines by loading them up with all kinds of data and capabilities. The large language models have been “trained” on all the writing they “scraped” from the internet, and this week, we learned that the AI companies are now going around to companies that warehouse used books, buying them, and then disassembling the books so their pages can be scanned, and all that non-digital information can be added to the AI models.

Mike Brock, who writes an essential Substack called “Notes from the Circus,” wrote in a post last week that “A large language model is a translation engine: it maps between representations of things humans have already written, and it does this so fluently that the fluency gets mistaken for understanding.” I would add speed into Brock’s mix. AI models do everything so fast, they make it seem miraculous. Research that used to take days, if not weeks, or even months and had to be done by visiting libraries and going through books and unpublished graduate school papers and legal tomes such as huge collections of old court cases and judgements, can now be done by asking an AI model a question, and bingo! You’ve got your answer – or at least, you’ve got the answer that the AI model decided to give you.”

Let us stand up to THESE aliens invaders. This and climate will be the issues of our time,.