> “Under German law scanning books – regardless of the purpose – would not be permissible and constitute a clear violation of copyright law,”
Excuse me, what?
A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#22Earlier 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
There's a very simple solution to this, but the people who rabidly argue for a copyright length of 70 years + the lifetime of the author won't want to hear it.
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#23I didn't think about this happening. It reminds me of the cross-border challenges with crypto. Each country has laws to control its author rights or money supply, but those are hard to enforce in the international setup.
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#24Not exactly top journalism...
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#25> 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.
Yeah, we’re in a funny position. By all accounts it is fair use (at least in the US) to train models (and build search indexes, e.g. Google Books), but sharing the books dataset itself is absolutely forbidden (clear non-transformative copying).
Anyone that wants to train a model needs to procure and destroy their own physical copy of each book!
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#26> 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…
There are plenty of rare and precious books with ISBNs.
There are, but, quoting from the article:
> Anthropic said: "None of our data acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books."
This statement was clearly carefully worded, using the words "rare or antiquarian" to mean "pre-1966, pre-ISBN". Their statement is answering a question that wasn't asked, so that (if they need to) they can claim in the future that they never said they weren't destroying books with ISBNs.
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#27This 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)
It's great for the retailer, although I think that example was picked out because it's an extreme example of a book that'll never sell. But the volume of these orders shows another way the AI companies are pissing away their investors' money.
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
There will be an Open AI / Anthropic leak eventually. One can only hope.
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#29In the case of English-language books, they’re just working to legitimize the stuff they already obtained via, um, dubious methods.
Public domain books - no need to bother, they’ve scraped PG and any other source and can do with it what they like.
Used booksellers should raise the price of used books that are of no interest to any real reader.
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#30Is 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…
> The need for all the content, Moar!! Feed me
"MOAR input!!!"
- Johnny 5, Short Circuit. That was a great film. Seems it was unexpectedly prescient too.