Besides, this so-called goodwill is an illusion. Opposition to AI in the PR space is entirely dominated by motivated reasoning. Attempting to satisfy people with random things is simply going to shift complaints to "take the commons, chop it up, and give it back to us"; "Should AI companies be the arbiters of what is worth preserving?"; and other such things. These kind of public-relation gains are entirely fictive and neither the supposed beneficiary nor the supposed benefactor is fooled by the theory.

"Oh so they suck up all our water and burn our planet down and we're supposed to be happy that they chop up people's books (that humans spent years creating) just so they can give us digested slop back?". Everyone knows that this sentence is waiting in the wings, and that the entire effort is clearly bait so that someone is foolish enough to pull a Google Books and get sued into oblivion for it.

And that's saying nothing about this so-called "hoarding" of things in a world where we pulp tons of these hoarded things every day and no one cares to scan them.

This project is scanning those maps and adding the information that modern mapping software needs to show them alongside other geographic information. Where the old paper maps overlap, they work to cleanly stitch them together rather than showing the edges of the paper.

Later: The project is sort of for people looking for the old maps, so I can see why the introduction doesn't spend a life of time explaining them.

They are building computer programs that other people can use to then post online maps from old paper sources. For example, from the Sanborn map collection.

Those maps can be browsed as "overlays" on top of other maps, so you can easily compare how several maps show the same places on Earth.