Two things being overlooked here. First, buying and scanning books for AI training was judged legal, not illegal, according to the article.
Second, destructive scanning is a cool and useful service. I've used it myself to turn old books into PDFs. And this isn't Alexandria; these are all books for which many copies exist.
The problem is likely not the SVG aspect. It's the fact that LLMs don't have any real cross-training between visual concepts and the syntax that produces them. We have this problem with CSS, too, which LLMs are notoriously bad at.
It's actually easier to do bitmaps which is why the visual models create those. You can describe any painting with a few words about content and style but that doesn't give you the SVG syntax needed to represent those things as shapes.
It's really possible to build desktop apps with browser tech now, the holy grail for so many years. Proof is in something like Photoshop for the Web. Amazing.
The past tense phrasing of the title is perfect. And don't miss this gem of a sentence:
From its earliest days, surveillance has helped minimize capitalist dysfunction by regimenting labor, stimulating consumer demand, satiating Wall Street’s hunger for reliable returns, and indulging the security state’s demand for total information awareness.
Quantum physics has a similar parallel. Living things work with a macro interface and not the reality of quantum fields which cause those macro events to be observable.
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