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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

#361

Post by gruez »

tele_ski wrote: post #348
CamelCaseName wrote: post #319

You ask "Why destroy physical books?" I ask "Why save physical books?" If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere. Owning and storing physical books is not free, there is a real cost. Even owning and storing the scans is not free, especially when IP rights and challenges get involved, since a scanned book with no distribut…

So these books are not worth anything because they have so few copies but they are still worth including in only their models? Seems a bit contradictory

Not really. A trivial example: smut novels. I'm sure AI companies want them for training so their models work better as AI girlfriends/boyfriends, but I doubt much would be lost if the bottom 50% (by readership) of such books went into a woodchipper.

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

#362

Post by Joel_Mckay »

jeroenhd wrote: post #300
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Lossily stuffing books into a model through a training process has so far been deemed legal Not in the EU, UK, or US. "AI" companies were already forced to settle their piracy cases, but often they get a free pass by law enforcement via regulatory capture. The problem is a book author contracted publisher does not assign legal rights of duplication to a company/individual that buys a legitimate print. It can take ov…

The piracy lawsuits have so far only deemed that obtaining books through pirating is a violation of copyright. Training the models on them and reselling model access has yet to be ruled illegal, from my understanding, even though there has been plenty of opportunity to. Anthropic's crime wasn't stealing the contents of books and making a derivative work of it, but torrenting a shitload of books. Had they bought all t…

>I don't think the lawsuit would've gone anywhere

That is not how copyright/trademark/contract laws treat similar works. Most LLM know about Disney Mickey Mouse, and LLM vector search space proximity results will gravitate more accurate reproductions of protected works regardless of granularity of data.

OpenAI simply canceled a popular service to avoid Disney wrath.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-openai-sora-di...

Also, trying to escape directly ripping off notable famous people with nonunion talent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004

I would say the "AI" firms will keep buying time with all that borrowed cash. Everything that could be scraped has already been stolen, and thus the problem should begin to self-correct. The Shrek movie release market correction history correlation is funny, and a new film is due 2027 in July. =3

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

#365

Post by skeledrew »

impossiblefork wrote: post #281
skeledrew wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they buy the books then if they can't do what they want with them? Just leave them wherever they are to rot and eventually be unceremoniously dumped anyway, without being preserved in any form. Some things are just unavoidable.

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…

You can't compare an island or food to books though, because the former are only really valuable in their atomic form. Like if you take detailed pictures, people can't live on or eat those pictures.

You scan books though and all the value they provide is still fully available in bit form, because books merely contain information. And of course being in bit form means they can be trivially copied, technically. But there's also the legality, which determines how many copies it's legally permissible to retain. The latter becomes the bottleneck for your preservation of "culture" because said culture could be made trivially available to anyone with an internet-connected device, if only rights holders weren't screaming foul (remember what happened with Internet Archive during/after Covid?[0]).

Ultimately there's no destruction involved when books are scanned, just a change of format which helps to ease management and for legal compliance.

[0] https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/internet-archive-loses-...

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

#366

Post by pshirshov »

cladopa wrote: post #343

It is not a big deal. Since the invention of the printing press any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity. By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there ar…

Read more about this. Depends on the definition of the "big deal" but from what I can understand the problem is that they buy rare things - which exist in just several copies - and they tend to buy _all_ copies.

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

#367

Post by hypendev »

ziyadb wrote: post #299

I was surprised to read that Anthropic (and probably other data / model companies) are doing this and it's extremely disappointing, as working towards the benefit of humanity is not an exclusive right / domain of theirs but rather, is a shared responsibility and mission carried by all of humanity itself as a collective responsibility. Thus, the preservation of this knowledge, its availability, and accessibility are t…

>From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge.

How tho?

Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take them home, so the seller doesn't have to pack them for the trip back. Just the other day, there was a whole bin of books in front of a shop, offering them for 50 cents a piece. They will be destroyed anyways.

Unless they are buying and destroying really old, rare books or important small-print books, it is not much damage. It is not like they will buy "all copies of all of the books", just one. And its just that the data in physical print most likely hasn't been used for training, so this can help you find more unmined quality data. Nobody is stealing your books, preventing you from buying more or destroying all copies of a single book.

And some of these books would rot out of circulation or be destroyed anyways. Some people throw away 80-100 year old books on the regular, as they might just be unimportant to them or the world in general. And once the last copy is thrown or rots, that book will die forever. This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.

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

#368

Post by gruez »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #358
CamelCaseName wrote: post #319

You ask "Why destroy physical books?" I ask "Why save physical books?" If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere. Owning and storing physical books is not free, there is a real cost. Even owning and storing the scans is not free, especially when IP rights and challenges get involved, since a scanned book with no distribut…

> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere. The Gutenberg bible is rare, its content is not rare, and some would argue that the content itself is not valuable, and yet the Gutenberg bible is valuable. Same can be said about many books.

So old books are valuable because old paper is valuable? I understand why the Gutenberg bible might be valuable but do we really need thousands of mass paperback novels?

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

#369

Post by dataflow »

pshirshov wrote: post #366
cladopa wrote: post #343

It is not a big deal. Since the invention of the printing press any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity. By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there ar…

Read more about this. Depends on the definition of the "big deal" but from what I can understand the problem is that they buy rare things - which exist in just several copies - and they tend to buy _all_ copies.

Where did you see they tend to buy all the copies? This comment is the first time I've heard of this.

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

#370

Post by dqv »

shrubble wrote: post #349

AI companies could certainly release the scans of any book that is no longer covered by copyright in the USA, for free download and get some positive publicity for a change. I do wonder who is running PR at the major AI companies, as they seem rather insensate to how they are perceived...

The other thing they could be doing is using some of that lobbying money to try to reform copyright law to allow them to release the scans that are still covered.

It would likewise earn goodwill from a lot of people.

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