alt Hacker NewsSo, have you tried finding out what the programming was in October 1994? Or what cultural ephemera appeared in the TV guides of that era alongside the schedules? Either there's a copy for the week you want in an archive, or somebody's got one for sale, or most often neither. This can piss you off, if as it happened you had a reason to care.
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To play devils advocate, completely on the terms of your argument, would it be better for that particular human artifact to be shredded and its contents melted into an anonymized data pool, or for it to exist in a museum archive, in its original form, such that future generations can better understand what it was like to be alive in 1994?
I’d personally choose the latter, especially given that the 1994 tv guide is not going to meaningfully improve the utility of the language models.
Direct access to pre-digital history is drying up rapidly, why accelerate that for incremental benchmark gains in a domain that isn’t even relevant to the most useful forms of a nascent technology?
The BBC has both in some cases, but we know for sure what was broadcast when:
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/about
Historic TV guides are also the sort of strange ephemera that people collect. They ought to be digitized like newspapers and other magazines, but this was always the purview of libraries anyway.
That would make sense as an argument if the natural endpoint of these copies was preservation, and AI was disrupting that. But the natural next step for virtually all these books is to be recycled, not preserved. Books are generally not preserved. It is extremely normal for them to be pulped. Millions and millions of books are pulped every year.