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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

#181

Post by skeledrew »

guax wrote: post #167
skeledrew wrote: post #163

Maybe begging the question here. If a physical book is rare, doesn't that mean it wasn't available to many in the first place? It seems to me providing its knowledge via LLM, even if it's a private company, benefits more people than if it were sitting in a library somewhere maybe read by a few, or worse in some private collector's set. I can't help feeling there's some hypocrisy or something here with this call to be…

I think is the scanning for profit and destroying them in the process that angries people. If they we’re just kept where they were you can always say they’ll eventually be scanned or have that potential. I do believe the issue is a bit overblown but the core of it sounds reasonable to me.

Shouldn't they be allowed to do whatever they want with the copy they bought, and so legally own? Isn't that the entire purpose behind "copy right"?

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

#182

Post by philipswood »

I'm interested in learning/teaching technologies. Naturally science fiction examples are interesting.

I have found that often LLMs are familiar with the contents of SF books.

But I feel poorer, almost deprived, by the fact that all the LLMs I've checked with have NOT been trained on the contents of Eon by Greg Bear.

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

#183

Post by dukeyukey »

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.

If it were legal they may well do that as a public branding exercise. Google already tried and got punished for it!

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

#184

Post by dukeyukey »

mslt wrote: post #120
tptacek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's more that, we don't need to preserve a million copies of the same mundane book. Losing a few copies to AI training is fine.

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

#185

Post by michaelmrose »

margalabargala wrote: post #113
scarmig wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#186

Post by fenomas »

customguy wrote: post #156
fenomas wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simila…

> my first thought is that one could find similar polls from the 80s and 90s about satanic cults or alien abduction.. There are were polls about people being "more worried than hopeful" about satanic cults or alien abductions? With the youth being the most worried about satanic cults? Just like that knee-jerk "it's the bigger bubble", that makes zero sense. As per the GDC 2026 State of the Industry poll, "52% said ge…

[dead]

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

#187

Post by dukeyukey »

runarberg wrote: post #71
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you read "rare books", what are you thinking these are? The 404 article that spun this story up goes into more detail. These are like vanity press books. They're rare because nobody cares about them. The book industry already destroys these books .

I am thinking about a long essay Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson wrote to his pals abroad, and were left abroad. I am thinking about a photo book by an Indonesian naturalist who is famous on Bali, and took amazing photos of wildlife on Sulawesi in 1926, and colored in, and somehow ended up in New Jersey in the 1980s. I am thinking about a collection of essays written by a teenage J.D. Salinger who he left unsign…

Can you explain why AI companies destroying these is worse than a library or bookseller destroying these?

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

#188

Post by guax »

tene80i wrote: post #170
HedonicEscal8r wrote: post #11

The piracy organizations are playing 4D chess while everyone else is playing checkers. The irony of this entire situation - AI companies being legally required to shred books due to kafkaesque copyright laws, then used as a marketing tactic by Anna's Archive - is a work of art. I support Anna's Archive, by the way. Information wants to be free.

Plenty of written works aren’t “information” but rather art. Most piracy is just about people preferring not to pay for novels, TV and film.

Or not being able to. Regional licensing, missing and shuffling content.

To watch the world cup I had to spin up a VM in Brazil to watch it with Portuguese narration because the free transmissions are region locked.

I would gladly pay 5 bucks for it if it was possible otherwise and avoid the hassle.

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

#189

Post by guax »

skeledrew wrote: post #181
guax wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think is the scanning for profit and destroying them in the process that angries people. If they we’re just kept where they were you can always say they’ll eventually be scanned or have that potential. I do believe the issue is a bit overblown but the core of it sounds reasonable to me.

Shouldn't they be allowed to do whatever they want with the copy they bought, and so legally own? Isn't that the entire purpose behind "copy right"?

They are, they are in no risk of being arrested. But that does not make it free of moral judgement.

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

#190

Post by dukeyukey »

Sha1rholder wrote: post #111
alightsoul wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I imagine they know the public would react like the public is reacting. Like obviously this is not worse than what libraries and thrift shops do daily, but it is bad optics.
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