Why not force them to release their records? Some legislation would help. If they are scanning the world's books, the results should be open.
AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
401–410 of 961 posts
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#402It 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…
I think you may be greatly underestimating the long tail. Several times a year I read sources that reference older books that I can't find online. When I am able to locate them, they often cost at least several hundred dollars, sometimes into the 10s of thousands.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#403I 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…
> working towards the benefit of humanity is not an exclusive right / domain of theirs
That's not their goal or else they wouldn't be burning books. Their goal is making money no matter the cost to the society.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#404I 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 t…
Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#405I 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…
They have already gotten to Archive.org. Books that were available to borrow are no longer 'available'. SMH
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#406It 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…
Beware that the notion of "quality" is entirely different for AI companies: they don't seek entertainment, but sentences in a language to train an LLM.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#407How is Anna's Archive getting around the copyright violations of hosting all these books for access to all? I suspect it won't be long before they get sued and are forced to shut down. I spent some time reading the web site, and it doesn't look to be a well thought out project. Even the way it is organized leaved much to be desired. There's much more to library science and the organization of a vast collection of books than meets the eye.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#408the irony of scanning rare books to preserve them while the scanning pipeline is what's destroying the physical copies is going to be a great trivia answer in 50 years
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#409I have a year membership to AA now, been meaning to contribute for some time, archive.org is next on the list
Much like the pushback we are seeing from the citizenry against things like Flock and AI datacenters, we can push _forward_ too by ensuring important institutions (legal or otherwise) remain funded
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#410But scanning the books also helps those AI companies because ultimately they want more data. Yes, they also destroy rare books to sabotage competitors, and thus also damage global society - a reason why these evil companies should be disbanded - but the article seems to not put any thoughts into things here, other than the superficial "they destroy books".
I guess they just cut the spines to speed scan the pages with a machine and then the resulting pile of papers is no longer worth anything, so they just dispose of it.