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AI companies are shredding rare books

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Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#251

Post by flir »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #145
squidbeak wrote: post #114

I'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…

I think putting the works in a print-on-demand catalogue at an unreasonable price would be more likely.

But there are worse outcomes.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#252

Post by Gander5739 »

secretsatan wrote: post #169
extra-AI wrote: post #142

And 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.

> they don’t believe in the crap they’re making

A spurious claim; they simply want to avoid model collapse.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#253

Post by ascagnel_ »

kasey_junk wrote: post #124
squidbeak wrote: post #114

I'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…

You don't even need custom bindings —- library bindings are a thing, even if they cost significantly more then a typical hard cover binding.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#254

Post by gowld »

Everyone who refused to buy these books in the past was voting for the books' destruction by default. Authors don't owe you a copy of their work. Bookstores don't you real estate to hold a book you don't want and will never want.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#255

Post by lagrange77 »

Could someone explain to me, why rare books are so precious for them?

Say i feed the largest LLM a book of an alien civilisation, that it definitely hasn't seen before. Then this tiny piece of text muds the vast ocean (latent space) of the model minimally. It will not be able to cite from that book reliably after that fine tuning. Especially for rare books, because them being rare implies, that there aren't 1000s of other books, that encode the same information.

It's general language modelling capabilities might get an iota better, of course. But for putting factual information into it, wouldn't RAG be a much more solid approach?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#256

Post by Gander5739 »

andrepd wrote: post #186
thechao wrote: post #4

Which book that was rare was destroyed? I'm interested to know a few titles.

Rare or not, destroying books is in itself a morally repugnant act. I don't know man, it's not so long ago we used to view nazi book burnings as an archetype of evil. Today companies are offering book-burning-as-a-service and it hardly causes a stir. Bearded German man was right.

Well, there's a difference between destroying books to erase knowledge and control people, and destroying books because it's cheaper.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#259

Post by flir »

open-paren wrote: post #149
phasefactor wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not OP, but: If it's something I want to work from, I get a printer to slice the spine off and rebind it with a ring binding. That way it lays flat on the desk.

You've trashed the book (and its lifespan) but some books are for using, not keeping.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#260

Post by greenlimetea »

This is potentially very bad.

Like, Library of Alexandria or Council of Nicaea bad.

We may never be able to recover the information if, say, one of these AI companies copied or translated it wrong then destroyed the source material.

Maybe it's from bad OCR, or maybe from a bad actor - but there are a lot of ways history and information could change in this game-of-telephone like transfer of knowledge.

What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing.

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