For reasons not entirely clear, a seminal Société Jersiaise history book has been released from academic obscurity and thrust into the strange, shadowy world of Silicon Valley.
In the fast-moving world of AI ethics, ‘A Biographical Definition of Jersey: Volume 2’ by Francis L M Corbet is the book that everyone who is anyone is talking about.
Although Hollywood are still playing it cool on the film rights, the text – described by one Facebook user as an “indispensable tool for understanding 20th century Jersey” – has caught the attention of some of the world’s most behemothic tech giants.
Eyebrows were first raised when the last available copy of the niche title was purchased by an overseas client from Walden Books – a bookshop in Camden Town, London – last month.
“Why exactly they wanted it is difficult to know,” David Tobin, the owner of Walden Books, told Express. “He just asked me what sort of book it was and I sent him some pictures.”
After receiving a slew of similar orders for “obscure” history books, he said he began to question the motives of his mysterious client.
In the end, he realised that he wasn’t dealing with a Channel Islands history buff, but rather a tech company set on using the Société Jersiaise tome for “dystopian” purposes.
It is believed that that companies are buying books like ‘Biographical Definition’ and feeding their highly individualised and ephemeral content to train artificial intelligence language models such as ChatGPT and Claude.
“Why exactly they wanted it is difficult to know”
David tobin, walden books
Mr Tobin speculated that the book is going to be destroyed and used to help AI models learn Jèrriais, the traditional Norman-French language of Jersey.
For Theodore Stone, a doctoral student at the University of Exter studying the history of democracy in Jersey and other crown dependencies, the trend of AI companies buying up esoteric Jersey-related texts “is a cause for concern”.
He argued that a book like ‘Biographical Definition’ would be “better-served in the hands of somebody with a genuine interest in the Island”.
“Jersey’s history is complex and exceptionally nuanced, in a way that LLMs are unlikely to appreciate,” he noted.
“A lot of older histories of Jersey are exceptionally rare, and its purchase and destruction to develop an LLM is a cause for concern.
“I bought a copy of Roy Le Herrisier’s study of the development of the Government of Jersey between 1771 and 1972 from the same bookshop a couple of years ago – and I can’t help but feel relieved it wasn’t on the shelf last month.”
