Aren't the AI companies just buying one copy of each book? And this is supposed to be concerning?
The blog post is about rare books. Meaning, AI companies scanning and destroying rare books.
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
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the solution to the water issues can be found in any introductory textbook on the subject: a water price. > 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. Please pardon the tangent: that's what always bothered me about the Borg in Star Trek. Why do they need to assimilate whole species? I'm sure there are enough volunteers in the federation…
Knowledge of every member of a species is better than few samples? LLM became better due to its huge dataset instead of just few samples.
You hit diminishing returns pretty quickly. And LLM training only bothers with a single copy of each book; they don't even need to destroy the documents. (Eg they didn't destroy the American declaration of independence to train on it.)
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the solution to the water issues can be found in any introductory textbook on the subject: a water price. > 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. Please pardon the tangent: that's what always bothered me about the Borg in Star Trek. Why do they need to assimilate whole species? I'm sure there are enough volunteers in the federation…
> Why do they need to assimilate whole species? So then they're gone :) When the borg is threatened ("threatened") by a race, they choose to effectively end their way of life one way or the other. That is done by assimilation or by death. If only a single outstanding member of a species becomes a threat, that's a strong signal for their overall potential; therefore everything needs to go, the sooner the better.
I thought the Borg wanted to get better and better? Leaving the species essentially intact, and absorbing a few members every so often gives you much more material to work with than a one time infusion: they are still evolving and changing.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are giving me too much credit: it's made up evidence. It's an illustration that rarity doesn't equal value, and doesn't depend on whether I actually own a wastebook or ten.
Your point is understood but the crux of the issue is a bit similar to capital punishment, the argument is that risk of losing even one innocent person or useful book isn't worth taking; specially considering the value created for society as part of such risky undertaking, whatever it is exercising capital punishment or scanning and destroying books.
Whenever you build a highway or a bridge or a power plant, your engineers have to put a money value on human life, or at least the worth of a statistical human life. Just to make ordinary engineering decisions.
And refusing to do this exercise just means that you behave as-if you put a really silly number on the value of human life, and probably not consistent between different parts of the project.
So I don't quite agree with these taboos in the absolute.
(I'm still against capital punishment on practical grounds.)
For books it's similar: if you taboo book destruction for the AI training folks, that doesn't rescue books from their ordinary pre-AI life cycle of getting destroyed all the time in the course of running a publisher or a library or a second-hand book store.
In fact, the AI craze is what's giving rare books _value_ and incentivises people to dig them up and preserve them. Or at least preserve them long enough to be scanned.
The scanning might destroy the physical copy of that book, but they save the contents. That's the whole point of scanning after all.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#255I 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…
RE "...Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest...."
Why are AI companies forced to shred books?
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#256Earlier 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.
The scan and destroy method is what a judge allowed to do in order to have a copy of the book in the training dataset. With the physical copy destroyed there's still only 1 copy in circulation. Once "inside" an LLM I don't know if anyone decided unequivocally that it's copyright infringement or not, and if that counts as a second copy.
There's no technical reason why an LLM couldn't reproduce verbatim some of the training material. It's sort of a lossy statistical compression engine. Enough of the info will survive to the output in the original form. With the amount of data and the commercial nature it's hard to argue fair-use. But nobody tested this in court. I'm not even sure the US wants to ever test this. Why even attempt something that has a non-0 chance to sabotage your most promising industry/bubble in ages?
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
Notably, Shakespeare lived in a time before copyright and famously ripped off plots from his contempories. I dont think he's a great reference for the argument that there would be no writing about the modern world if you removed copyright.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#258I 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…
RE "...Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest...." Why are AI companies forced to shred books?
They want to have a digital copy and the judge ruled they can only keep one copy.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#259I 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.
AI companies are buying the physical books, they can turn them into confetti if that's what they want to do. If the physical books are running out, the authors can print and sell more. Or they can sell digital copies so the information is not lost.
The law is currently forcing these companies to destroy the books after scanning them.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#260Earlier 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.…
> I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books.
In the UK at least, people usually take them to a second hand / charity shop, who sort through them and send the valuable ones to auction (typically early editions, 100+ years old) and then either sell them themselves (for recent books that are easy to get rid of) or sell them to specialised second-hand bookshops.
Most of the specialised second-hand bookshops rarely throw books away, usually if nobody buys them after a couple of years they end up in the extreme discount piles (20p, 50p etc) and probably only trashed if they still don't sell from there.