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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

#111

Post by Sha1rholder »

alightsoul wrote: post #39
rpdillon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pub…

> Anthropic thought it was just a technical problem

Did they? Then why did they "don't want anyone to know about this"? Or do you think their lawyers are dumb?

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

#112

Post by scarmig »

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?

You've got to compare it to the alternative. Books have a half-life, and the vast majority of these books being purchased are grody, moldering ex-lib copies of books that no one has read in decades. Their other likely outcome is mulching.

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

#113

Post by margalabargala »

scarmig wrote: post #112
margalabargala wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You've got to compare it to the alternative. Books have a half-life, and the vast majority of these books being purchased are grody, moldering ex-lib copies of books that no one has read in decades. Their other likely outcome is mulching.

Right, that's my point.

These generally are not books people care about. The information contained therein was doomed.

Now the information has been digitally preserved and a digestion of the information will be made publicly available.

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

#114

Post by mslt »

card_zero wrote: post #69
enraged_camel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, a lot of these "rare books" are stuff like TV programming magazines from October 1994.

So, have you tried finding out what the programming was in October 1994? Or what cultural ephemera appeared in the TV guides of that era alongside the schedules? Either there's a copy for the week you want in an archive, or somebody's got one for sale, or most often neither. This can piss you off, if as it happened you had a reason to care.

To play devils advocate, completely on the terms of your argument, would it be better for that particular human artifact to be shredded and its contents melted into an anonymized data pool, or for it to exist in a museum archive, in its original form, such that future generations can better understand what it was like to be alive in 1994?

I’d personally choose the latter, especially given that the 1994 tv guide is not going to meaningfully improve the utility of the language models.

Direct access to pre-digital history is drying up rapidly, why accelerate that for incremental benchmark gains in a domain that isn’t even relevant to the most useful forms of a nascent technology?

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

#115

Post by jscd »

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…

Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense?

Also, who’s forcing AI companies to “ingest” books in such a destructive way?

Also also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from AI scrapers, it’s that they’d never scan the exact same thing multiple times at the expense of public access to the resource.

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

#116

Post by GPerson »

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?

They’re not supposed to be storing a copy. What they’re doing is destroying their copy after training a model on it.

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

#117

Post by margalabargala »

halsafar wrote: post #110
margalabargala wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having or not having a book is absolutely fuzzy. If you have a translation, do you have the book? Even if, like the Odyssey, there are hundreds of wildly varying translations? What about an abridged copy? What about the Sparknotes version? If you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, do you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice? Certainly more so than if you have neither.

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

#118

Post by winrid »

pkaye wrote: post #106
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.

I have a copy of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (it's like 1k+ pages) with DESTROY written in red on the sides. I appreciate that someone saved it and sold it to me for cheap :)

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

#119

Post by unleaded »

enraged_camel wrote: post #60
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.

Also, a lot of these "rare books" are stuff like TV programming magazines from October 1994.

Whose job is it to dictate what is and isn't worth saving?

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

#120

Post by mslt »

tptacek wrote: post #77
card_zero wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, have you tried finding out what the programming was in October 1994? Or what cultural ephemera appeared in the TV guides of that era alongside the schedules? Either there's a copy for the week you want in an archive, or somebody's got one for sale, or most often neither. This can piss you off, if as it happened you had a reason to care.

That would make sense as an argument if the natural endpoint of these copies was preservation, and AI was disrupting that. But the natural next step for virtually all these books is to be recycled, not preserved. Books are generally not preserved . It is extremely normal for them to be pulped. Millions and millions of books are pulped every year.

Might as well grind up the tablet of complaint to Ea-nāṣir and make cement out it, right? What use could there be in preserving the mundane facets of everyday existence?
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