ironically, this tweet and account appear to be complete AI slop
AI companies are shredding rare books
141–150 of 559 posts
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#142And this is the beginning of the end for content creators.
Why would I spend hours creating original content if Google can extract it and present the answer directly in an AI Overview? What is the incentive to keep doing the work?
If creators stop producing high-quality original material, the information we get over the next few years will increasingly be based on recycled, low-quality garbage.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#143I've limited sympathy for the publishers. It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright. And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are stil…
Books in the 17th and 18th century often didnt get bound by the publisher. They were done by independent binders for _custom_ orders. You’d see whole libraries with the owners binding/cover standards rather than per book. Books in that time were _luxury_ goods. Most people could not afford them. One of the ways that was changed was to introduce cheap, mass produced bindings that were lower quality than the bespoke ar…
I worked in an academic library that rebound pretty much every book they acquired. One of the biggest in the world, too.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#144The comments there are absolutely unhinged. There are some good reasons for being anti-AI, but why dilute it with this kind of bullshit: > It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control
You're right, it is arguably worse than book burning, not only are they seeking to deprive others of the books, they also want to profit off it.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#145I've limited sympathy for the publishers. It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright. And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are stil…
> When a publisher has no incentive to keep an edition in print, it should be available to any other publisher to print
How do you adjudicate that? And wouldn't it just lead to loopholes such as "Ghost Printings" (cf. Ghost Flights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_flight_(commercial_aviat... ) where the books are technically printed in the required volume but practically unavailable to customers through one method or another. Because, the cost of wastefully printing a few books to warehouse, is less than the potential losses of the IP rights, probably.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#146Maybe we can kill two birds with one stone: digitize rare books and reverse the damage from Authors Guild v. Google [1].
Let AI companies do this. But require them to make the digital copies public. Maybe with a multi-year delay, to give the original scanner advantage to doing it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#147That's why archive.org should have never been sued for lending books they had physical copy of. This is the result. Publishers should be more careful what they wish for.
The archive.org story was more nuanced than that. If I recall correctly the full story was that they used to lend digital versions of books they physically bought and scanned with DRM to enforce a sort of one to one at a time restriction. But during covid archive.org decided to just remove the limit and lend unlimited copies concurrently which started the debacle with the publishers.
Yeah that was it; if I got this right, US libraries got the right to lend out one digital version of a book that they had in their inventory. Archive.org combined those digital versions so that people could check out a digital book if any library in the US had it (digitally) available. But during the 'rona they removed this limit and just lent out books regardless of it being "checked out" digitally from a library.
This wasn't a very smart move of them. I get why they did it but they put themselves at a huge legal risk.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#148I've limited sympathy for the publishers. It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright. And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are stil…
> I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick
At the risk of stating the obvious, any poorly made books from then wouldn’t have lasted this long and so you would never see them.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why cut off the spines? Isn't that how you end up getting unattributed 'dead sea scrolls'?
Easier to send them through a duplex scanner (or put them in a flatbed one if they are fragile). Cheaper than buying the automated ones with the page turning robot arm. I have done it at home for my books since the mid-00s.
Do you purchase every book two times, or do you have a home devoid of physical books that you enjoy? Genuinely curious