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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

#441

Post by Goronmon »

snickerbockers wrote: post #436
Aurornis wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, These comparisons are starting to get ridiculous. Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, that it’s sitting in the warehouse of a bulk book reseller, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy? Your local library throws out books every year and nobody tho…

>Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy? Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed? >Your local library throws out books every year and nobody tho…

As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices.

What happens when the books don't sell?

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

#442

Post by Razengan »

Ideally, governments or international organizations should be doing this: "harvesting" all the media output by humanity and making it available for everyone, similar to the Library of Congress etc.

Heck even YouTube should be legally obligated to preserve videos, given how they now hold the largest visual documentation of human history.

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

#443

Post by dbspin »

mistercow wrote: post #390
pshirshov wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most old books that are rare and unpreserved are so because their value is marginal, so nobody has bothered to collect and preserve them. But where did you hear that they’re buying “all copies”? And to what end?

This is a classic mistake. We have no way of estimating the future value of a given book. It's perceived current value (a large part of which is simply obscurity) may be low. But it's future value - to historians, ethnographers, to researchers seeking a specific fact or example of language use or a hundred other things - is literally inestimable.

To take a crude example in a different medium - new york in the 90s - widely documented right? Yet, if you want to find high definition video of street life in a given burrough on a given day or year, you're faced with an enormously difficult task. There were some HD test videos done in Manhattan in the late 90s (which have been posted to Hackernews before), but there's no equivalent for the other burroughs. Your best best would be finding original negative out takes or location scouting footage from feature films, a very hard task. That's only 30 years ago. Outside of the focal points of the worlds attention - English language, rich countries, places in the news, contemporaneous sources for 'non notable' events (lifestyle, how people spoke dressed etc) is surprisingly poorly preserved.

Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.

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

#444

Post by jscd »

jeroenhd wrote: post #259
jscd wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The law is currently forcing these companies to destroy the books after scanning them.

No, the law is stopping them from digitally sharing their scans. They are perfectly capable of reselling or donating or storing the books they buy. (Wasn’t Amazon originally a book seller?)

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

#445

Post by famouswaffles »

srj wrote: post #416
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.

Why are the companies legally required to shred the books? That's the most surprising part about this to me. Surely if they bought them second hand they could donate or resell after scanning. I'm wondering if the scanning machines are damaging the books.

You're not allowed to make copies of copyrighted work. Of course this law was made long before the reality of digital books.

The argument for the digital era is that you can make a digital scan and it's not a 'copy' so long as you shred the original and don't attempt to distribute it.

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

#446

Post by fc417fc802 »

himinlomax wrote: post #426
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…

They're not destroying rare manuscripts or incunables. They're destroying one (1) copy of a mass-produced item for each AI company. Public libraries destroy millions more yearly as a matter of routine. This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic, along with the water use nonsense, and similar with the soviet-aligned moral panic that destroyed the civil nuclear industry 40 years ago.

I was with you until the water use. You're misinformed. There were at one point at least several data centers set to use evaporative cooling on well water.

Notably since all the controversy many data centers are very loud about being closed loop and with significant consideration given to other local impacts as well.

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

#447

Post by brookst »

jdiff wrote: post #352
flatline wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They cannot scan the books then resell them or donate them under current US copyright law. It’s not clear to me that they could warehouse them if they wanted. In the recent Bartz v Anthropic case the judge ruled this destruction as legal, saying > The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. So that there was still only one “copy” of the book. This is in compliance with the DMCA. You can make a personal…

Nowhere in this description did it require destruction of the physical book. This is being done because it's easier to scan a shucked book, and this explanation is circulating because it's easier to blame it on the law and that pesky meddling government.

Citation please? Bartz v Anthropic seems pretty clear, see also Authors Guild v Google and RIAA v Diamond Multimedia.

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

#448

Post by WarmWash »

Mudbugs wrote: post #428
hypendev wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today) Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books ins…

I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing.

The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.

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

#449

Post by Leynos »

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…

If you tell people who need digital text from books that they need to destroy books after scanning them, they're going to use destructive scanning and destroy the books.

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

#450

Post by jonhohle »

snickerbockers wrote: post #436
Aurornis wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, These comparisons are starting to get ridiculous. Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, that it’s sitting in the warehouse of a bulk book reseller, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy? Your local library throws out books every year and nobody tho…

>Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy? Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed? >Your local library throws out books every year and nobody tho…

The average lifespan of a library book is 26 loans. For a popular book that could be less than a year.
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