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

In order to read them, presumably.

Just because they are for sale doesn't mean that no one else would have bought them. Destroying them obviously destroys them, which obviously destroys culture. After all, if the books is destroyed, it will not be read.

Think of it like this. If I buy an island, and there are bunch of people who live on it, maybe they're day laborers or whatever, is it right for me to expel them, if I don't want them? Can't that be straight up genocide, if they have some culture indigenous to the island?

The same is true for books. If you destroy culture, you destroy culture. There is no magic which triggered "but I owned the physical book" which means you didn't.

It doesn't matter what property relationship you have to a thing: whatever property relationship you may have to it, you still do what you do, i.e. you take whatever action with respect to it as you take with respect to it.

Another good example is food. If there's a shortage of it, and you still have a great deal, you may think "eh, what does it matter if I accidentally burn some, I save time through my carelessness" but if there are others who aren't getting any, you may be killing people, and may be despised for how you use "your property". The same is true here. Why should one not despise one who deprives others of rare texts, that may even be lost, and thus cause cultural destruction of some culture that may actually be rare, by treating the carelessly. That rare book on model building or whittling from the 70s may actually be important.

> Our ideal is to scan and upload all the world’s publications before publishers completely block knowledge, and before AI companies scan and destroy all the world’s books and papers.

Isn't this just doing the work for the AI companies??? Then the AI companies can simply download a copy of Anna's Archive.

At least there will be a copy left for us. The AI companies won't share these books in their original form.

Because it's illegal. That's the whole reason they are shredding books in the first place, because copyright law forces them to do stupid things.

Google wanted to share the whole of Google Books 15 years ago, too, but they were sued to hell, so now you get a watered down search functionality.

Yeah, which is completely fine. There's a major difference between:

A. Company destroys a book forever for training. Its scan is locked away forever in company records. In this case:

- This information is locked away in the improvisations of an LLM. It is no longer possible to directly access the information as written by the human being that authored it. This constitutes the loss of literary history, or at least loss of access to that history to the general public.

- The price of the book is no longer distinct from the general price of "inference". It becomes increasingly impossible to pay for specific information, instead you are charged by the meter for general machine inference, which doesn't even give you access to a specific text.

- The provenance of information is totally destroyed. This causes potentially unresolvable problems of authority and citation. If the original source is lost, how are we to know if a random LLM claim about an obscure topic or specific niche text is even true or just hallucinated?

B: Company uses freely available scanned copy of the text:

None of the issues above obtain, since anyone can still access the actual book. Most importantly, this reduces the power companies have to force everyone to continually pay for a derivative form of the book's information in perpetuity in the form of token costs.

I much prefer B.