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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

#521

Post by voidhorse »

hypendev wrote: post #367
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 t…

> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.

But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, training is a lossy, noninvertible transformation. The LLM cannot legally produce the book verbatim, it will only spit out a regurgitation of the information, chopped and mingled into a broad information space.

Furthermore, these "magic machines" are not the property of the public. They are owned by a handful of corporations who want to charge you continuously for every token output by the machine. So, not only is the original text locked away forever behind company walls, you now need to pay for access to an approximation of the original contents which you can no longer even verify as being correct because the source is no longer accessible.

If you are cool with this, from a cost perspective you are cool with a deal whereby I trade you access to a definite resource for a one time fee of $N for, instead, a perpetual cost of $M to you every month/day/hour for access to an amalgam in which you cannot even determine what proportion of the resource you are actually getting. You're basically saying you're cool with me selling you some unknown portion of wine for a monthly subscription price instead of selling you a definitive amount of wine for a one time fee. lol.

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

#522

Post by andsoitis »

dd8601fn wrote: post #518
brookst wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s the hyperbolic reaction clickbait wants from you. Not all rare books are valuable. Someone’s self-published junk sitting in the garage is NOT analogous to the library of Alexandria. Many, most, maybe all of these “rare” books are being scanned instead of just being recycled. Not a big Reddit fan but there was a great post there from someone in the book industry talking about how non-industry people often g…

I don’t think any of these people know. All I’ve read, as far as sources go, is a number of rare book sellers saying they’ve had a big uptick in huge orders with no price haggling. Apparently that’s peculiar. And some of them seemed a little concerned. Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince. And I don’t have any reason to think so…

> Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince.

Then they should list the names of these books otherwise I say they're alarmist.

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

#524

Post by voidhorse »

starkd wrote: post #404
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…

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.

You don't know that. A major part of the problem here is the lack of transparency.

Keep in mind we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.

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

#525

Post by himinlomax »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #446
himinlomax wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's possible for a datacenter to use scarce well water irresponsibly.

They don't have to, and the vast majority don't.

The lie and moral panic is that all datacenters necessarily waste precious drinking water; it's patently false and used by agitators to push, unwittingly or not, a Chinese Communist Party agenda.

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

#526

Post by nazgulsenpai »

titzer wrote: post #508
thread_id wrote: post #494

I don't see any mention of Project Ocean - AKA Google books. Before AI they endevoured to digitize books in a massive online library. This inccluded rare and out of print books many which are archived at libraries. Because they had to preserve the books and return them in the condition they received then they created elaborate technology to accomplish this. The project was met with significant legal challenges from a…

Like all things, Google will eventually realize they cannot make significant ad revenue and they will eventually give up and discontinue serving this, though I doubt it's more than a scratch in terms of disk space. It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.

They are also an AI company now. Why would they stop?

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

#527

Post by bethekidyouwant »

I don’t get this latest anti AI talking point. They are digitizing the books preserving them forever.. are you upset that you don’t have access to it? Because you didn’t before either… stop whining and give AA some money.

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

#528

Post by andsoitis »

voidhorse wrote: post #524
starkd wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't know that. A major part of the problem here is the lack of transparency. Keep in mind we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.

> we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.

Pretty feeble investigative journalism if they cannot give us the names of even 5 such books we are supposed to be outraged about.

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

#529

Post by dumb_notsmart »

hypendev wrote: post #367
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 t…

Oho you think they're buying common books? Books they can find online already?

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

#530

Post by jjkaczor »

brookst wrote: post #440
leonidasrup wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small change in the copyright law would fix this problem. Something like: If a company is scanning material protected by copyright, it has to send a digital copy of the scanned material to Library of Congress within 5 working days.

Wait, so the library of congress is suddenly responsible for probably petabytes a day of incoming scans? To what end? Do they have to index it and make it available? Do they have to check the accuracy and integrity of the scans? How does this help anything, except create more work to throw in the trash?

Actually - most jurisdictions that issue a publisher a unique root ISBN number have a stipulation that anything new published using that number must have a copy sent to them.

Looked into this a decade ago for publishing eBooks via my personal corp when eReaders and ePub were starting to hit big in the mainstream.

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