Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI companies are shredding rare books

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 559 posts

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#381

Post by rubyfruit »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #356
greenlimetea wrote: post #260

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 poi…

> What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing. It is the copyright thing. Despite what people say about scanning, the fact is, non-destructive scanning machines have been built and perfected long time ago. This was preferred in the past, back before some major kerfuffle with the publishers during COVID, but that incidentally happened to be before LLMs became a thing, so AI com…

[flagged]

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#382

Post by dgellow »

sosodev wrote: post #364
Aurornis wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And no, no AI company has ever come to us and asked to run training on all of our scanned copies The value of most very old books for AI training is very low. You don’t really want your AI training data to start biasing toward outdated writing styles. Most of the valuable knowledge has been covered again in modern texts in more depth and detail. There is interesting value in old texts and it’s important to have the…

If you only care about facts, maybe. Even then I'm sure there are countless facts not described outside of old books. I have a hard time believing that text valuable to humans would not be valuable to AI.

Agreed, in addition LLMs are trained on a lot of useless data, such as the whole Reddit dataset which has to be at least 90% Reddit garbage, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem. I don’t see why ai labs wouldn’t want to also train on older data

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#383

Post by rubyfruit »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #275
greenlimetea wrote: post #260

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 poi…

They're destroyed for 3 reasons: It is the cheapest way to get them scanned. It is the fastest way to get them scanned. It doesn't need to be safely archived for another century until it is resold to someone that has not yet been born.

Or they change info then destroy the source.

Is that possible at all or nah?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#384

Post by rubyfruit »

ianm218 wrote: post #276
greenlimetea wrote: post #260

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 poi…

> What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing. The main reason is the machines they use to scan books at scale destroy the books in the process.

How convenient

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#385

Post by monknomo »

reorder9695 wrote: post #327
monknomo wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years to make some money, and then we set the work free for the public benefit. If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights.

It also solves the issue of potentially not knowing when the author died, with a fixed period (the number isn't so important imo so long as it's sane), a work is out of copyright x years after the first known copy was published.

reduces the ownership hunt problem, as well!

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#386

Post by monknomo »

marcosdumay wrote: post #352
monknomo wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years to make some money, and then we set the work free for the public benefit. If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights.

Either that or some exponentially increasing tax so that Disney can keep their vault. (I'm perfectly fine with them keeping it if they pay some proper taxes.)

the important thing is that copyright serves the public good, I do not think it currently does, at least not as well as it could

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#387

Post by ctoth »

shimman wrote: post #231
phoghed wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you instituted this, the commenters of this very website would surely decry it as a prime example of government overstep and waste.

Commentators on this web site work for some of the most evil organizations on the planet and have beliefs that 95% of the population rejects. You can safely ignore the YC cohort of devs and be fine.

> Commentators on this web site work for some of the most evil organizations on the planet and have beliefs that 95% of the population rejects. You can safely ignore the YC cohort of devs and be fine.

1. Why are you here?

2. What is the purpose of this comment?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#388

Post by altmanaltman »

monknomo wrote: post #300
giancarlostoro wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CL…

20 years to make some money, and then we set the work free for the public benefit. If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights.

But this must then follow for all forms of works, why just books? Every company whose original creator dies must be converted into a public company within 20 years of founder's death for the public benefit as well if that's the case.

If I wrote it, I own the copyright on it, why should I or my future family give away something I worked really hard for? Why do only authors must care about public benefits?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#389

Post by breakyerself »

dpark wrote: post #366
cestith wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One doesn’t need to pulp the pages after scanning though. After scanning, they could be rebound and put into a library.

That would be a clear case of copyright infringement under current law. You can’t make a copy of a book and then give the original to someone else.

If it's copyright is expired why not?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#390

Post by [deleted] »

oliwarner wrote: post #101
_m_p wrote: post #73

Librarians were already doing this at scale in a process euphemistically called "weeding": https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...

This is a bizarre comparison. Weeding is the natural process of disposing of less-demand books. Like the rest of us, libraries operate in finite space, so if they want new books, they have to remove ones their users aren't using. Most libraries will try to sell books before disposing of them in any destructive way. What similarities do you see here?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN