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AI companies are shredding rare books

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Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#71

Post by Jolter »

vessenes wrote: post #13

I don't see any proof of shredding here. Most book scanners I'm aware of are from Google's scanning days, and those had cameras plus page turning. If we use 'shredding' to mean A book is laid flat, its cover is removed, and then a paper cutter cuts through the binding to create a flat stack of sheets, which are then fed to a sheet feeder, then I could maybe imagine this is better than a page-turning scanner. But, she…

The idea here is that the frontier labs are no longer willing to risk using the likes of Anna’s Archive, because they have already been held legally liable for that in the past.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#72

Post by dpark »

DarkIye wrote: post #63

This is the opposite of a book burning. These books which only a few would ever know the names of, let alone find, let alone read, are being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches.

> being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches

You make it sound like they are running a second Project Gutenberg. They most definitely are not making these available for electronic searches. At least not searches the public can participate in.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#74

Post by soco »

mc32 wrote: post #46
est31 wrote: post #8

> You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright? IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright…

Old rare books where there are single digit copies should enjoy some sort of patrimonial protection just like museum pieces. You can own them but have the state have the option to buy it if you’re about to significantly deface it or destroy it.

The only issue I see is, how could you tell which are those books?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#76

Post by soco »

chii wrote: post #51
tencentshill wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they're not valuable... except to AI companies. They should pay a fair amount.

> They should pay a fair amount. they should pay the marginal value that the next buyer would buy. Do you also think that a person dying of thirst ought to pay the maximum price they could possibly pay for water?

It might be me but I fail to see the equivalence of AI companies with thirst deaths. That', or maybe because it's a strawman.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#77

Post by b3lvedere »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #9

I think people are, on the whole, too precious about old things. In the case of books produced after major commercial printing began, I don't believe it is the paper that imbues the book with historical value. Indeed, I think there's a high chance that this process increases preservation of the most relevant part of the media - the actual content! There are tons of old rolls of film slowly rotting away in warehouses…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH96S4rBZbI

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#78

Post by trollbridge »

clickety_clack wrote: post #14
vessenes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the last great near-term predictor. I often wish he'd written more. To remind us all, he predicted shred and scan would be a short stop over done by villains on the way to nondestructive scanning. That said, supporting Anna's archive is one of the best things you could do for humanity long term in my opinion.

That’s digital though, so it requires the continued survival of readers for the data that is stored. The best thing you could for the long term is probably to buy a few hundred physical books to keep in a bookcase in your home.

Speaking as someone with dozens of bookshelves and tens of thousands of books... I kind of prefer the idea that continued survival means getting a bunch of 14TB drives and, you know, hosting certain files obtained from certain places. The reality is that most people's book collections are simply going into dumpsters, speaking as one of the people who go and try to buy these book collections at estate sales. (We can't do anything with the sheer volume of these books so most of them go into the dumpster. I cannot store hundreds of thousands of books, or millions, and no libraries want them.)

Also, holy cow, hard disks (as in the magnetic oxide kind) got a lot more expensive.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#79

Post by yeoyeo42 »

SirFatty wrote: post #15
ACCount37 wrote: post #10

The publishers sued AI companies for training on shadow library data, hoping to negotiate content deals for big $$$ down the line. Instead, they got analog hole'd. Turns out that buying an old book for $5 and destructively scanning it for $25 is way cheaper than paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers. What I don't buy is it being "rare, precious books". First, they're not after ancient texts - they're after t…

I see.. so the various AI companies are in the right on this?

yes. in the sense that they probably wouldnt want to do this but the law forces them to do an extremely dumb thing.

they're paying for the books, no shady things going on there. whether the publishers should deserve more than a single copy's worth is a separate question.

having the law such that its illegal to scan a book and then keep it, but legal to scan it and destroy it - gg no re there, law people retardmaxxed themselves as they tend to do with anything related to digital data.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#80

Post by classified »

ACCount37 wrote: post #28
est31 wrote: post #8

> You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright? IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright…

Scanning books by taking them apart into singular pages and scanning those pages is faster and cheaper. AI training is a numbers game, so they want faster and cheaper. What happens to the pages after? No one needs them anymore, so they get mulched and recycled. That would be the dominant scanning method even if copyright wasn't a thing. But then again - if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to sc…

It's the law, logic doesn't enter into it.
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