From 1984: "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
AI companies are shredding rare books
161–170 of 559 posts
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t trust or expect AI companies to serve books at all. That’s not what they are scanning them for.
Not in a traditional sense, but obviously on the surface, they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back. The point is that even under the best intentions, hallucinations occur. Then there's the fact that most models have an ideological bias programmed into them. The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order?
> they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back.
Sure, in the same sense that they regurgitate any other text they consume. LLMs by definition do not have the full training dataset available, though. It’s far larger than the resulting model. So they can’t reliably reproduce full text without an external source (or if it’s in the training data repeatedly). ChatGPT actually refused to give me a bible quote the other day, presumably because I ran into some general “book regurgitation” safety net.
> The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order?
Honestly, yeah. The idea that people or corporations should hold onto books forever because of a cultural “ick” about throwing out books is a bit ridiculous. Most books end up in landfills.
They aren’t feeding Da Vinci manuscripts into this pipeline. They are feeding still-in-copyright books.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My wife worked for a company that specialized in rebinding paperbacks for schools and libraries. It makes more economic sense to do that for niche use cases rather than make all print runs more expensive.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#164They should be forced to publicly release the books as an Ebook.
Leave it up for anyone to download and then compensate the copyright holders later.
In fact if ingesting these books for LLMs is fair use, us commoners should be able to read them for free. Maybe restrict commercial redistribution though.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I pre-empted this - my argument does not apply to texts where the physical object is a major part of the historical value of the thing. No, I'm not saying to destroy one of the four remaining Magna Cartas that were meticulously copied by hand. But even if I was, we're only dealing with texts here that are irrelevant enough to have never been digitised already - we tend to digitise most things of value and so the Mona…
> I am however OK with destroying one of the remaining 50 children's books of which only 300 copies … What if the perception of those books change over time and are considered masterpieces later on? Moby Dick was out of print when Melville died 1891 and not a huge success until it got a revival in the 1920s
When was the last time a formerly undigitised book that was printed but fell out of print suddenly became a success after being discovered in the last, say, 50 years? Is once in 100 years the sort of level of frequency we're talking about?
This is the kind of rationalization hoarders use. The inability to get rid of things because it could turn out to be something we want in the future for reasons that we cannot currently describe.
It's a loss avertive instinct that I think is misplaced. Treating every printed book as priceless is intractable. It's not how we treat these books at the moment. Apparently, today we don't even care enough to spend a few hours per book nondestructively scanning them in.
Let's say we, instead of destructively scanning this books, nondestructively scanned them. What would you propose doing with the copies afterwards? Sell them? To who? They're valueless individually for the overwhelming part. Warehouse them? Why? For who? Do you want to go and look through them? Why haven't you done so already? Have you ever shown interest in consuming an undigitised book a single time in your life to date?
It feels like the anti-AI crowd here have to tie themselves in knots here to make the loss minimization work.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#166This was known a long time ago? https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#167Maybe 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,... .
Yeah, I was thinking along these lines...
Let's say one of the books to be digitized and destroyed is the sole remaining copy of a book from 1850, which is now considered public domain.
On one hand, hoarding such a book, stealing its content from the public domain, locking its content behind a for-profit machine, and destroying the only remaining copy is clearly wrong. It's equivalent to stealing a public resource, just like mining minerals or oil on public lands without a permit or mineral rights. Pure extraction.
On the other hand, taking care to digitize the copy and making it available for free in perpetuity, as well as being required through regulation to provide access to that content through, let's say a public utility LLM/AI available for free through libraries and online... and perhaps after fair due diligence being required to preserve physical copies in a public archive of rare books of which there are no known remaining physical copies...
That seems much more reasonable to me at least. I can imagine there are many who would not see it that way though. Do we see it happening or gaining regulatory, moral and/or public support?
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#168If true this is basically unforgivable. The wanton destruction of history is the stuff of the Third Reich and the Taliban. You simply cannot profess to care about knowledge, culture, or civilization while destroying the physical manifestations of the same.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#169And 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.
It’s even noted they’re looking for text pre 2022 as afterward, it’s tainted by their own shit, they don’t believe in the crap they’re making.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nowadays, academic libraries are moving their books to archival storage. New publications are electronic only. You need to be a formal member of the university community to access it, unlike in times past when any member of the public could stroll the aisles of physical books and journals.