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

annas-archive.gl

131–140 of 961 posts

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

#131

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.

No, US copyright law allows them to keep a single digital copy. The hypothetical issue is with them maintaining two copies, one digital and one physical, when they only purchased one.

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

#132
>It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible

No its not.

>but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.

Its only a crime if they dont also upload the scans to the internet.

>After AI companies massively scan and destroy physical books, they become the only ones in the world with digital copies. Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.

This Law on the other hand is a crime against humanity.

>Anna’s Archive needs a plan to combat the destruction of physical books by AI companies.

No it doesnt.

>If every person scans a book, and there are 10 million volunteers worldwide, we can obtain 10 million pieces of invaluable wealth.

This however is an unvarnished good.

Look, piracy is the only realistic media archive we have.

We should be inviting, and working to eliminate opposition to, AI companies to assist in piracy.

This US v Them mentality is weird. If Anthropic has 10 million books scanned, get a copy. Thank them for the copy. Spread the copy.

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

#133

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.

If that's true, then why did they pirate so many books?

Is your complaint that they follow copyright law, or that they don't follow copyright law?

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

#134
post #104

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.

On a similar topic are all those artifacts kept in museum storages for literally eternity. Maybe AI money can crack open access to it.

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

#135
post #123

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?

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.

Bad at quoting, good at digesting and regurgitating. The concepts are preserved even if quotes aren't.

I'd rather a digital copy exist in someone's hands than a rotting physical copy.

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

#136
post #118
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I have one of those I got second hand also. :)

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

#137
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…

>On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people.

Which exists to enrich Disney and other large corps, while they hide behind artists as a human shield.

>Artists need some form of reward.

Right, as do artists who use the work of other artists as their starting point. Copyright holders aren't bill and bob artist, they are massive corporate trolls throwing around the weight of almost 100 years of our cultural heritage, sucking the marrow from its bones.

>On the other side, buying and destroying copies of rare books is quite scary. We would lose access to those books if they weren’t digitized. They are creating walls around knowledge that they acquired because there are no laws in place to protect authors.

The books are getting digitised into a permanent record of all our cultural heritage. It just sucks we don't have control over it. If only there was a way we could get them digitised AND control our cultural heritage. HMMMMMMM.

>Do not believe Anna’s claims, since physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write.

The incentive to write is being killed by slop groups like 20Booksto50K and Kindle which predate AI by at least a decade. AI just lets them work faster.

>We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free

Excellent

>But there would be no human writers left.

Unlikely, but there would definitely be no Disneys or Conde Nasts left, which is a massively pro social outcome.

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

In a world with all books digitised and accessible to read? A huge huge huge incentive. I already partake if books are too expensive where I am. It would take me the rest of my life to read all the books I already want to read. What kind of inane dribble is the idea that copyright makes it interesting to read? I havent even read all of Howard and he's in the public domain (in cool countries at least)

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

They're buying the books from resellers, not rescuing these books from dumpsters. Stop being an apologist.

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

#139
post #86

This whole situation is such a disgusting consequence of copyright law. The most frustrating part is that its so artificial. It is 100% the consequence of stupid laws.

I mean, everything about intellectual property is kind of inherently artificial tbf.

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

#140
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…

They pulp books that have many copies surplus to requirement, not the last few copies in second hand book shops.

What if people like food more than AI? Have you considered that?

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