571–580 of 961 posts
Clearly that makes assumptions about the function of government and the complacency of copyright holders.
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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.
> Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc.
So... something like Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 - https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe...
I make no claims that that's a such a book that's been ordered, but that's the type of book that the reddit post references.
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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…
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I am thinking about a long essay Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson wrote to his pals abroad, and were left abroad. I am thinking about a photo book by an Indonesian naturalist who is famous on Bali, and took amazing photos of wildlife on Sulawesi in 1926, and colored in, and somehow ended up in New Jersey in the 1980s. I am thinking about a collection of essays written by a teenage J.D. Salinger who he left unsign…
Can you explain why AI companies destroying these is worse than a library or bookseller destroying these?
AI companies buy boxes and boxes of books with unknown content staff anybody who can operate a scanner and have no idea which books they are destroying.
If a public library comes across a book they didn’t know they had, it is very likely that somebody will notice and know how to continue, to find out if this book is worth saving etc. AI companies will treat this book exactly like any other and destroy it to feed the plagiarist machine.
I imagine they are only buying one copy of each book, thus only significantly affecting the supply of books that were already unfathomably rare. That may still be bad, but doesn't really support the "scan every book you can get your hands on before they are gone" narrative. That doesn't mean I'm against that narrative; I'm a big supporter of shadow libraries and scanning every unscanned book. But connecting to the LL…
I doubt that corporations of this scale do that extra kind of… book-keeping. They more than likely buy books by the pound.
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It will probably be actioned off in the bankruptcy proceedings.
That’s an interesting angle. There’s probably some property value (though maybe not enough based on volume) to the books they purchased. I doubt there’s any value to the “backups” of those books. I’d imagine they’re normally transferable.
To legally retain these scans, you must own the original book. You can sell or give away the original book (sans binding) but it's legally dubious as to whether the scan can be transferred along with it. So if Anthropic has no interest in storing thousands of loose leaf books, they are likely destroying both the original and scan as soon as possible.
At the end of the day, the only thing of value Anthropic has is the trained model which is definitely transferable.
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You do not need to shred books to scan them. This only happens if you don't care about preserving the integrity of the books and you want to scan more cheaply.
But their legal framework for being permitted to scan the books en masse (they are "transforming" the book from physical to digital) requires destruction of the original. Otherwise it wouldn't be transforming, it would be duplicating.
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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 - w…
>Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc. I honestly can't and I think you can't either or you would have used an example with books/printed media rather than film, an entirely different ballgame.
Similar textual examples would be any text containing actual language as it's spoken in a given place or time. Or any factual textbook detailing the buildings present in a given location. Or any text book detailing a now defunct construction process. Or any text book (generally small run) detailing a niche interest, now missing ecosystem or the state of a particular political situation at a given time. Essentially all textual primary sources for events which are not currently considered important - but which we have no way of estimating the future importance of. One can continue to create countless counterfactual examples in this vein. My overall point is we cannot know what may be useful or even essential in the future, and knowledge should be preserved under the assumption that it is likely to be.
Historians frequently refer to this paradox - how everyday aspects of life are frequently not explicitly documented, since they're so obvious to the communities or communities of expertise that observe and carry them out. So it's actually incredibly important to preserve what seems like ephemera.
Hell we couldn't have AI training at all if we lacked the corpus of existing written literature - but there was no way any author could have anticipated this future utility more than a couple of decades ago.
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…
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…