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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

#101

Post by Cider9986 »

silcoon wrote: post #87

As much as I hate piracy in a sector in financial crisis like book publishing (because Anna’s project is piracy), I hate even more what these large AI companies are doing: privatizing human knowledge. On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people. “Information wants to be free” is bullshit spread by people who have never spent a minute in their lives trying to create somethin…

>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?

Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read? There's millions of books already written and it makes zero sense that people would stop writing. People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money and they created literature before copyright was a thing.

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

#102

Post by fenomas »

tptacek wrote: post #31

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…

More and more I feel like anti-AI is a bigger bubble than AI. It seems like every week it expands into a new dimension - anti-Flock protesters tearing down years-old traffic cameras that were used for research into auto accidents, etc.

Like, the current thing in the news cycle is a poll that young people are now more worried than hopeful about AI. Which sounds scary, but my first thought is that one could find similar polls from the 80s and 90s about satanic cults or alien abduction..

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

#103

Post by scarmig »

card_zero wrote: post #43
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.

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.

The hypothetical "heroic figure goes and buys last copy of a 1962 guide to Ford cars to carefully maintain it in an appropriately climate controlled library" is vanishingly unlikely. A ten or a hundred or a thousand times to one, it just goes to the trash. At least here it gets scanned by the AI company.

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

#104

Post by bulbar »

card_zero wrote: post #43
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.

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.

> They probably won't be erased from the face of the earth by the judicious and proportionate actions of, of a few, AI companies?

I don't see why not. Pretty sure it's gonna happen. Doesn't matter if a hundred copies still exist somewhere, if access or discoverbility falls below a certain threshold, it doesn't matter, because those books become practically inaccessible to the world.

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

#105

Post by alightsoul »

tptacek wrote: post #76
alightsoul wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The 404 story suggested that these are largely vanity press books and instruction manuals for things no longer sold. Implying that these books were almost certainly headed for the recycling center had the AI companies not snatched them up.

They are useful as a source of non synthetic data, replacing synthetic data consisting of rephrasings of common topics I assume?

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

#106

Post by pkaye »

WillAdams wrote: post #55

"Whoever destroys a book destroys a link in the chain of human knowledge" -- Thos. Jefferson

Public libraries destroy unsold book donations all the time. I often tried to give away some old books I have online and nobody wants them. Some of these books have some nostalgic value to me so I hate to see them just get destroyed so they just lie in my shed.

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

#107

Post by margalabargala »

bulbar wrote: post #104
card_zero wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They probably won't be erased from the face of the earth by the judicious and proportionate actions of, of a few, AI companies? I don't see why not. Pretty sure it's gonna happen. Doesn't matter if a hundred copies still exist somewhere , if access or discoverbility falls below a certain threshold, it doesn't matter, because those books become practically inaccessible to the world.

Right, but if an AI company buys some vanishingly uncommon book, digitizes it, shreds it, and adds the information it contains to their permanent digital library and digests its contents into an AI that is then publicly accessible...are they making that book less accessible, or more?

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

#108

Post by msftgreed »

Cider9986 wrote: post #101
silcoon wrote: post #87

As much as I hate piracy in a sector in financial crisis like book publishing (because Anna’s project is piracy), I hate even more what these large AI companies are doing: privatizing human knowledge. On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people. “Information wants to be free” is bullshit spread by people who have never spent a minute in their lives trying to create somethin…

>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read? Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read? There's millions of books already written and it makes zero sense that people would stop writing. People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money and they created literature before copyright was a thing.

The human tradition is storytelling. The idea that storytelling was something a company could own and other's weren't allowed to tell is very, very new in our history.

People write without any profit motive today. It's weird of the OP to think of writing in such a narrow space as commercialization.

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

#109

Post by visarga »

0x0000F8_ wrote: post #72
Cider9986 wrote: post #35

The AI companies should work with the Internet Archive to release the digitized copies once the copyright expires. Unrelated: So with this one copy BS are you not allowed to have backups of the data?

I entirely believe the litigation brought against Internet Archive was secretly sponsored by these exact organizations, because they want to monopolize information to train models. No data => No models => No competition.

Yeah, great logic, that way they are sure there are no extra copies around.

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

#110

Post by halsafar »

margalabargala wrote: post #107
bulbar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They probably won't be erased from the face of the earth by the judicious and proportionate actions of, of a few, AI companies? I don't see why not. Pretty sure it's gonna happen. Doesn't matter if a hundred copies still exist somewhere , if access or discoverbility falls below a certain threshold, it doesn't matter, because those books become practically inaccessible to the world.

Right, but if an AI company buys some vanishingly uncommon book, digitizes it, shreds it, and adds the information it contains to their permanent digital library and digests its contents into an AI that is then publicly accessible...are they making that book less accessible, or more?

Can you get the exact text back out with a prompt or not? Having or not having a book isn't fuzzy.
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