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AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

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Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#31

Post by tptacek »

These stories are weird, because actual professional specialized book dealers pulp books by the millions. People keep pointing out, and it doesn't seem to sink in, that model trainers only have use for a single copy of a book. Even if they were literally burning these books to spite you, they'd be destroying an infinitesimal fraction of the books the book trade already destroys.

It is not natural in the industry to preserve books! It's tricky to even give most books away. Our library has big donation boxes, and my understanding is: most of those books are destroyed.

The copyright thing I get, sort of (I mean, it's galling, because it's such a total special pleading argument from a cohort of people who otherwise have absolute contempt for copyright on anything other than code). The model trainers are getting away with something other people haven't gotten away with. OK, sure.

But this seems like the AI water use story, where the reality is that existing industries do whatever the bad thing is at scales cosmically larger than AI ever could, and we're zeroing in on this weird little slice of it that AI does. Like, let me know when we stop growing pecans in the California desert, and then we can talk?

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#32

Post by breezybottom »

shakna wrote: post #13

I wholeheartedly believe the AI controversy on destroying books is being stirred up by the companies themselves. Copyright law requires you destroy a book, if you format shift it. If you digitise, you need to ensure its not a "copy" but that your one license went with the book. So... If enough people complain, they get to pressure for copyright changes. Which will just so happen to have massive carveouts to let them…

Since when do AI companies care about the law? Most of their training data is pirated.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#33

Post by alightsoul »

RajT88 wrote: post #14
ezfe wrote: post #2

I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…

The articles I've read on this are not clear, but I strongly suspect "rare" is not the definition you and I probably use for the level of rarity of books actually being destroyed. These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.

There's just a few copies in a single library worldwide which is probably a national or a university library

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#34

Post by glimshe »

The very first paragraph is fascinating: "Several AI companies are acquiring large quantities of secondhand books through intermediaries, scanning and destroying them, all to obtain training data “untouched by machines” from before 2022."

Is the corpus of human knowledge useful for high quality AI training now essentially frozen in time? Also, how useful old books really are for AI training besides helping AI acquire knowledge about history?

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#36

Post by alightsoul »

breezybottom wrote: post #26
parineum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are "forced" to do this because that's what they have to do to abide by copyright law. They can't create a digital duplicate without destroying the original.

Since when do AI companies care about copyright law? They're destroying them so their competitors can't use them.

Since they had to pay 1.5 billion for it

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#37

Post by cm2012 »

ezfe wrote: post #2

I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…

Yes. I dont understand at all what AA is worried about. One copy of a book is no big deal? good will and used book stores throw out a lot more than that.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#39

Post by alightsoul »

rpdillon wrote: post #22
jacobo37 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is plainly stupid ... many of these books are likely to have no current publisher nor any way to "reprint" the book. "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...

Wait: the entire premise of copyright is to prevent someone from publishing a book, and a competitor buys a copy, clones it, and sells copies way cheaper because they don't have to pay the author. Now, in 2026, we're acting like cloning a published book is not technically feasible? That doesn't track. With publishing on-demand, it's easy to imagine a business with digital copies of all these works that they make avai…

This is not a technical problem at all. This is a copyright problem. Anthropic thought it was just a technical problem until they had to pay 1.5 billion after they lost a copyright court case

Op means a lot of those books were made before computers were used for that purpose and the publishers and probably authors no longer exist, so there is no digital copy to just reprint, unless someone scans it themselves and publishes it, risking copyright violation when done at large scale due to possible exceptions to this rule

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#40

Post by eru »

runarberg wrote: post #27
RajT88 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The articles I've read on this are not clear, but I strongly suspect "rare" is not the definition you and I probably use for the level of rarity of books actually being destroyed. These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.

At this scale, there are no guarantees of anything. There very likely will be unique copies in there. If these were expert archivists a lot of damage could be prevented, but given the malice and indifference of AI companies, there very likely will not be an expert archivist involved, and unique copies will be destroyed unceremoniously.

My personal wastebook at home is so rare, it's unique. That doesn't mean it needs preservation.
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