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A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

irishtimes.com

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Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

#11

Post by luxuryballs »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #6

Is this a second form of AI psychosis, as in AI training corpus psychosis? The need for all the content, Moar!! Feed me. Is this the Paperclip Maximiser in the form of the Training Material Maximiser? Will it be that, in the end, the lack of "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" was the cause of driving rule hallucinations in all previous models? Will this finally get OpenAI back in front of Anthropic? Hurrah! We fo…

I was thinking the inverse the psychosis is that someone who sells books is alerted that they are selling more books, as if someone buying books needs to give an explanation. If I want to seed software with books why is that newsworthy? Print more books, maintain profitable margins on books, enjoy success as a book seller?

If a book is rare and you wanted to preserve it don't sell it so easily, increase the price, or put it into a contract system like Ferrari does with cars they sell.

Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

#12

Post by toofy »

vintermann wrote: post #7

> with a focus only on books with an ISBN number, the identification system introduced in 1966 So it's not likely to be rare and precious books. It's things which are already in the Library of Congress or its many equivalents. If they're forced by laws to destroy the results of the scans after training on them, as some have implied, that's bad, on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep…

> But if they keep the scans, or even the transcripts, that's probably an improvement on the status quo, to be honest.

only if they share the scans/transcripts and don’t hide it away.

Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

#13

Post by mapt »

jvanderbot wrote: post #3

An instant and obvious good these companies could do is to digitize these books ala google books.

Preservation rather than ingesting them into the gaping maw of an Intelligence Engine that preserves the soul of the book in crystalized neural network form? That would be a copyright violation.

Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

#14

Post by PunchyHamster »

femto wrote: post #9
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #4

This is a good thing to a point, right? They sell heaps of stock, some old / outdated stock (like "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" as per the article), in bulk, at full price, no questions asked. Retailer's dreams come true. (I don't believe them being digitized for consumption by AI will impact book sales much, as ebooks, google books, project gutenberg, etc didn't either)

As long as the AI devouring a book isn't making it harder for a person to get access to a copy of the book. There might not be many copies of some out-of-print books.

Would be nice to at least force them to open their scanned books data, after all they stole everything else, they can contribute some back

Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

#16

Post by PunchyHamster »

luxuryballs wrote: post #11
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #6

Is this a second form of AI psychosis, as in AI training corpus psychosis? The need for all the content, Moar!! Feed me. Is this the Paperclip Maximiser in the form of the Training Material Maximiser? Will it be that, in the end, the lack of "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" was the cause of driving rule hallucinations in all previous models? Will this finally get OpenAI back in front of Anthropic? Hurrah! We fo…

I was thinking the inverse the psychosis is that someone who sells books is alerted that they are selling more books, as if someone buying books needs to give an explanation. If I want to seed software with books why is that newsworthy? Print more books, maintain profitable margins on books, enjoy success as a book seller? If a book is rare and you wanted to preserve it don't sell it so easily, increase the price, or…

Till it hits books that are out of print, we already had news about AI scourge companies destroying rare books coz scanning them in destructive ways was slightly cheaper.

And as is happens in history, any time some entity mass destroys the books, they turn out to be bad guys

Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

#17

Post by woodrowbarlow »

vintermann wrote: post #7

> with a focus only on books with an ISBN number, the identification system introduced in 1966 So it's not likely to be rare and precious books. It's things which are already in the Library of Congress or its many equivalents. If they're forced by laws to destroy the results of the scans after training on them, as some have implied, that's bad, on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep…

letting companies train on books for only the price of a paperback and then forcing them to destroy their scans would truly be the worst of all worlds. (ps: the scanning process typically destroys the book too; they chop off the spines.)

Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

#18

Post by luxuryballs »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #16
luxuryballs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the inverse the psychosis is that someone who sells books is alerted that they are selling more books, as if someone buying books needs to give an explanation. If I want to seed software with books why is that newsworthy? Print more books, maintain profitable margins on books, enjoy success as a book seller? If a book is rare and you wanted to preserve it don't sell it so easily, increase the price, or…

Till it hits books that are out of print, we already had news about AI scourge companies destroying rare books coz scanning them in destructive ways was slightly cheaper. And as is happens in history, any time some entity mass destroys the books, they turn out to be bad guys

But anyone can mistreat or fail to care for a book, if it's rare and you don't want to risk it don't sell it.

Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

#19

Post by wongarsu »

jvanderbot wrote: post #3

An instant and obvious good these companies could do is to digitize these books ala google books.

And get sued even harder by publishers?

Publishing any out-of-copyright books would be awesome thing to do. But it seems none of the books in this order would fall under that, and it's unclear how many old books they are actually ingesting. Current reports are mostly talking about relatively recent books

Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

#20

Post by conartist6 »

discreteevent wrote: post #5
jvanderbot wrote: post #3

An instant and obvious good these companies could do is to digitize these books ala google books.

Then they would have to deal with copyright. AI is the washing machine that leaves everything spotless.

Remember kids, if you say "I was doing it for AI", it's legal. If you say "I was doing it for the good of humanity," well, we still remember Aaron Swartz.

But of course, unlike humanity, AI is really worth it!

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