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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

#121

Post by knowaveragejoe »

altcognito wrote: post #66

What evidence do we have that they are "destroying" books? I'm not saying this in their defense, but as someone who has worked at companies who has scanned books at scale, and generally speaking, I wasn't on site there, but I knew we/they were pretty delicate with the books. And while the kneejerk reaction might be "hey, why would they go through the effort?" -- my guess is that they are following or even hiring peop…

Yes, we know they're destroying the books. Whether this is actually a problem or another convenient "AI bad" trope remains to be seen.

https://www.techbrew.com/stories/2026/01/28/anthropic-ai-boo...

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

#122

Post by silcoon »

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.

> Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read?

Because there would not be human written books about the present. All books would be about the past. But literature is not stuck in time. Today writers talk about topics and feelings that writers of the last century might never know or experienced. Many people read books to better understand the today world (non-fiction) and to better understand their today feelings (fiction).

> People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money.

Agree, but most of the writing that we have from the past still came with some form of financial incentives. Shakespeare didn't write all of the compositions just because he wanted to express himself. He was making money with theater performances. Many religious writing got patronage by the church. Dante Alighieri had a career as politician, Plato came from an aristocratic family. Writing was reserved to elites because education was expensive and people had to work for food.

Today we are lucky because education is accessible and printing is cheap.

> they created literature before copyright was a thing.

Copyright wasn't a thing because replicating content was hard. Try to manually copy a book...

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

#123

Post by Natsu »

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?

AIs are weirdly bad at quoting stuff in my experience.

But you'd think that the Library of Congress and such would actually prevent stuff from vanishing just by collecting it themselves.

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

#124

Post by scarmig »

jscd wrote: post #115
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.

Relinquishing copyright does not imply any of the labor you're suggesting. It's the opposite: you're just committing not to perform the labor of pursuing legal action against someone who does digitize and freely distribute the work.

Anna's Archive, for one, would be more than happy to host at no cost to the author.

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

#125

Post by asaddhamani »

scarmig wrote: post #103
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.

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.

But that scan is never made available to us in its original form. So it getting scanned by the AI company does nothing to preserve the book.

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

#126

Post by monocasa »

GPerson wrote: post #116
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?

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

They're absolutely keeping the digitized copies. They're not going to just train a single model.

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

#127

Post by scarmig »

asaddhamani wrote: post #125
scarmig wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that scan is never made available to us in its original form. So it getting scanned by the AI company does nothing to preserve the book.

Dumpsters also don't typically come equipped with a robot scanner and network uplink built in.

Like, I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books. They don't get sent to some magical library in the countryside if unpurchased where they are carefully maintained forever (next to where Rover spends the rest of his days). They are very literally thrown into the trash.

That said, I'd be thrilled if the US government required AI companies to make them available to the public. I'd even settle for the US government making it legal for them to.

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

#128

Post by ipaddr »

willy_k wrote: post #82
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.

Is there a specific book from 40 years ago you have in mind? Asking out of curiosity.

Books by Zolar are interesting hard to find all editions. The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse probably still has 100s of copies available but hate to see it lost.

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

#129

Post by azan_ »

unleaded wrote: post #119
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.

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

Well for example yours - if you don’t pay for these rare books and don’t store them in good condition, then you have decided that they are not worth saving. Many of these rare books would run you like I don’t know, 1 buck?

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

#130

Post by emtel »

“Rare books” usually refers to rare editions of books. Any books out there where there are only a few extent copies of the text itself, are probably not of very much interest or social value, since almost no one is able to read them, by definition.

If you think there is priceless knowledge locked up in books so rare that it is on the verge of being lost forever, then AI labs are not really the problem!

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