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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

#141

Post by npn »

glimshe wrote: 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…

No but with 100% clean data you can easily train a model to filter ai generated content.

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

#143

Post by sieve »

Physical books and digital content is special in that you can mostly archive their content almost permanently for cheap. Buildings, paintings, idols, living things, natural features of the environment ... not so much.

So the solution is:

- mandatory copyright registration and renewal with links to where the work can be acquired

- a blanket carve out for any non-commercial trust-style org so that they can scan books etc and keep the data on their servers. They should be able to issue digital membership cards for a fee so that patrons can access the archives. Any work that is "live" based on the registration database will be locked. All "dead" material can be shared with members.

In this way, a hundred digital preservation societies can bloom.

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

#144

Post by wotamess »

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…

"want to ingest"

Not "need to ingest"

Copyright holders are capitalizing on laws on the books just like Jeff Bezos companies buying their own copies to shred

So in the end it's really a Congress problem as usual

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

#145

Post by customguy »

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…

> force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.

Nothing forces them to shred books, they do it because it's slightly cheaper that way.

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

#146

Post by scarmig »

soperj wrote: post #138
scarmig wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The magical library in the countryside, to be painfully explicit, does not exist.

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

#147

Post by userbinator »

winrid wrote: post #118
pkaye wrote: 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 :)

That's an example of a "very much NOT rare" book, as you can easily find dozens of sources of scans online.

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

#148

Post by postepowanieadm »

customguy wrote: post #145
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…

> force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. Nothing forces them to shred books, they do it because it's slightly cheaper that way.

By destroying them they don't copy only convert them into another format.

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

#149

Post by hparadiz »

customguy wrote: post #145
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…

> force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. Nothing forces them to shred books, they do it because it's slightly cheaper that way.

There was a court case where they said that if they copied the books it's not fair use because they didn't own it but if they bought physical copies and then destroyed them then somehow it was fair use because it fell into the niche of personal backups. I forget the details but basically they buy one time prints and destroy them immediately.

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

#150

Post by userbinator »

imperio59 wrote: post #3

Getting 10 million people to do anything is really, really hard. Getting 10 million people to spend hours scanning a book (which takes a really long time with a home scanner) sounds impossible :(

In the context of books, "scanning" is now more commonly something that should be called "camming" --- you simply point a camera at the book, and take a picture of every page.
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