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

annas-archive.gl

41–50 of 961 posts

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

#41
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…

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

#42

The piracy organizations are playing 4D chess while everyone else is playing checkers. The irony of this entire situation - AI companies being legally required to shred books due to kafkaesque copyright laws, then used as a marketing tactic by Anna's Archive - is a work of art. I support Anna's Archive, by the way. Information wants to be free.

You can donate with over 20 different payment methods after making an anonymous account.

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

#43
post #14
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.

Quite possibly not many, and no copy held in any form by the copyright owner either. Say a few hundred copies of some obscure book from 40 years ago. They probably won't be erased from the face of the earth by the judicious and proportionate actions of, of a few, AI companies? Hmm.

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

#44

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.

> They're destroying them so their competitors can't use them.

That's pretty silly. My competitor can't ride my bike either, and I didn't have to destroy the bike for that to be true.

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

#45
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…

If you're buying second hadn books by the lot, you'll get a lot of duplicates and its eaiser to scan wholesale and dedupe in the computers than it is to try to run a sorting operataion on "things".

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

#47

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.

A little meta - I want to point out demagogic/populist comments like these that try to clear all nuance and brush a topic in black and white tend to come from a really small portion of the users here, but the same user (whose account is only 4 months old), dominates posts like this by posting many many bait-like comments in the same post that deviate the discussion away from meaning and insight.

This is just one example, but it has become unfortunately common across all social media platforms.

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

#49
post #34

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…

> Is the corpus of human knowledge useful for high quality AI training now essentially frozen in time?

No. They also use lots of other methods to get training data.

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