I Eat Books
but LLMs eat more
A few months ago, in the cold of a California coastal Spring, I huddled in a library with a ragtag group of mostly women and conspired to destroy books with our bare hands.
This was not a flashback scene from a dystopian thriller, it was the Russian River Fungi Fest where I was teaching a poetry workshop. With an insightful nudge from a mentor, I leaned into what is essential about mushrooms and focused the instruction on decomposition, rather than get hung up in the composition of writing.
We sacrificed those books to ground our writing practice. (I'll describe how below so you can have sufficient evidence to judge my actions.)
Is it ever ok to destroy a book?
"AI" companies think so...
The excellent splinter-media group 404 Media recently published a distressing article about the AI-driven market boom in used books and its piles of torn, discarded leaves of pulped wood and paper. Anthropic and others are buying and destroying used books because they are a source of information not yet contaminated by "AI slop."
You see, LLMs are as imprecise as they are powerful. Large language models are the "AI" machines that are commercially available. While there are many cognitive science coding paths toward the goal of artificial intelligence, LLMs are the currently available tool. And they read scanned books really fast.
The broad advance of LLMs is spreading that imprecision too fast to contain. According to the reporting of Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media, AI companies not only consider the internet overwhelmed by the imprecision of LLM -generated content, but even consider all books published since 2022—with its November release of ChatGPT—to be contaminated by AI slop. And LLMs, insiders explain, fail when trained on compounded slop. Effect on humans was not commented on.
Luckily, AI companies have unlimited funds to pursue their ends, and by whatever means they see fit. Hence, a market rush to smash used books into reading machines. The waste in this post-industrial process is ripped up books.
The second hand book market jumped 10x between March and April of this year, and has held there since. To illustrate, sellers who sold 20 books per week in March and before, are selling 200 books per week in April and since. Apparently booksellers are doing very well as price is no object for the tech giants.
After Anthropic was named in a previous book IP violation, companies have now enforced NDAs on the scanning providers, so which exact language models are trained this way is not clear. Good money says, all of them are the using the option which rips the spine from a book and loads the loose pages into an automatic scanner—the approach is faster and cheaper by some percentage over preserving the books for future human readers.
A legal argument could halt the slaughter. Click on the article below for all the ins and outs. Follow 404 Media for razor sharp tech coverage.
Emanuel Maiberg
"Look at me, I promise its ok"
What have you done, Giotis??
Michael Giotis
So, about those those books I set out to destroy?
Here, now, you are likely reading on your phone, the most disruptive technology uncovered by humankind. More than nuclear energy or fire. More than the car. Until now. LLMs are seeping into everything and like our phones, you are probably using the AI machines even if you don't notice it.
I would suggest that those of us who want to have a sense of the world outside of the digital prism suddenly supercharged by machines that produce so much slop they risk systemic malfunction, that we living beings need to engage with the world viscerally together.
Fungi work by taking what has ceased to be and transforming it into the ground for what is to become. It's called decomposition. I took it as the theme of the poetry workshop.
Composition is formation of a thing that will last, a blueprint into a house, that secret hope of every creator to make something that lasts forever. It can hang people up, that meaningfulness of it all. Each little thing a precious moment. Our phones prey on that attentiveness. Our poetry relies upon it. There's the contradiction. Our strengths are our weaknesses, those ideas we hold most dear are those that call for the most scrutiny.
Enter the mushroom. In a room full of eager students with pencils waggling, I said these things about the nature of the mushroom, about how it breaks down things that are no longer useful into a medium for growth, often the things we are holding most tightly to. Then I handed out a single composition book, the kind from a college bookstore, and instructed each to rip out a page and pass the book. They did so with a wild-eyed twitter.
After a gloss of Burroughs' cutup method, we passed around my antique books, a set of mini-encyclopedia from 1928 that fits right in the hand. As we sat in a circle, it dawned on them, from my right to left, the sun sweeping the land. We were going to rip books.
Although I've had them for 35 years, the set is incomplete, the books have no value, not even to Claude, which I explained before they tore out the delicious leaves rustling like a forest floor. Looking around the room, I made eye contact with each student and promised it was ok. Someone asked if we were allowed to switch up the cutup method. Another answered, "The only rule I heard was no rules."
Some in the group happily shared out their poems, some gobbledygook from the method, others carefully reworked to capture an old thought in a new way. The moral of the exercise was to make poetry with our hands, the old interface where our most outrageous ideas are made into things in the world. In rich connection to the physical, non-human world, we find the ground on which make our stand as self-determined human beings.
Homework: Culture Jam a ScanBot
Those people closest to LLM technology now consider there to be AI contamination in every word, and by extension, every creation, every thought, since 2022. Was 2022 when history ended? Linage broken? The stories, the artifacts, the music, craftsmanship, the domestic arts, will now never be the same again? Now, when more Native kids get faster, more tailored learning on the wisdom of their ancestors from a chatbot than what an Elder can deliver. And the Elder has a small audience at best; the LLM has everyone. We are the LLM's perfect audience. Engaged, hard working, powerful, the real American dream.
A devoted populace will be curious about the impacts of their power, and in dialogue recognize when it is time to take action devoted to the general good. In short, culture jam your local book scanner. When you do, share the results with someone in IRL. Have a laugh, it's only human.
