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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

#611

Post by rcarr »

Does adding an old book risk making the model worse? Off the top of my head:

- Reinforcing outdated, disproved or otherwise incorrect information.

- Reinforcing outdated forms of communication e.g purple prose.

You could counter both by giving more weight to recent text and I suppose the extra data may help for tracing references and the evolution of ideas through history. If this is what they are resorting to it does feel more like "marginal gains" territory rather than ASI imminent territory

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

#613

Post by anjel »

joshstrange wrote: post #544
voidhorse wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 informati…

Are you under the impression they scan the book, train on it, then destroy the digital copy? Because that's not what's happening. They scan it, and hold it forever to train future models on. The scan still exists, not available to the general public but that's no different than if they had bought the books and kept them in a private library closed to the public.

Destroying the physical copy inflates the value of the retained digital copy

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

#614

Post by michaelsbradley »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #556
michaelsbradley wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria Are you referring to the burning of the Serapeum in AD 391 or the warehouse fires in 48 BC?

Is there a difference with regard to the metaphor?

Depends on the point being made about “historical precedent” and the lessons to be drawn from such.

Also, helps to clarify what exactly the commenter was referring to and possibly help distinguish the centuries-spanning decline of the Library of Alexandria from the violent fate of the Serapeum.

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

#616

Post by karmickoala »

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…

They may have been made scarce by many methods, perhaps a low print run; court rulings; burning in a revolution to suppress dissenting views; scanning to avoid competitors to get the content and prevent other LLMs to reference, search, or train on it. Perhaps it's a particular edition that is rare (e.g., the first edition had a different description and was thoroughly changed in the second edition of the book, which may be important to have all the facts from someone's biography).

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

#617

Post by OtherShrezzing »

akk0 wrote: post #411

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 imagine they are only buying one copy of each book

The previously struggling second hand bookseller in my town has upgraded their car from a 15 year old hatchback Renault to a brand new Range Rover. Some Canadian company has been buying any book he can provide them for the last year. Their quotes aren't by number of books, or even weight, but by volume. As in, they pay him by the shipping container, and he sends several of those a month.

I think it's reasonable to assume the books in this supply chain which aren't destroyed in digitisation are just pulped and sold to Procter & Gamble for toilet paper manufacturing. I can't see any other fate for Anthropic's second and third copies of The twelfth edition of Vera Lynn's 1980's memoir "We'll Meet Again".

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

#618

Post by joshstrange »

ionwake wrote: post #607
joshstrange wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, let's begin with the trials for all the librarians who have destroyed/trashed books over the year! Nevermind that they do that because those books aren't being borrowed and no one wants to buy them. Destroying books to destroy knowledge is bad, destroying books because no one wants them or there are ample copies, _especially_ when those books go on to live forever as a digital copy, is a completely different sto…

bro if people on HN of all places are concerned of physical media being destroyed boggles ur mind then u need to read more about the damage caused to society by prior happenings. I wasn't even making an unusual or particularly strong statement Im going to try and be patient and explain my position. I just feel that actions that are destructive should always be seen through a lens of suspicion. IE, lets destroy this w…

Nothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book. It's a completely different story from "prior happenings", to which I assume you mean book burning and the like. Pretending they are the same is intellectually lazy.

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

#619

Post by Lerc »

andsoitis wrote: post #557
p-e-w wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is. The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.

> This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is. The internet has amplified voices who say things to signal rather than do things to change. That's orthogonal to knowing what "the right thing" is.

The increase in people who believe that perception is reality has the logical consequences of people shouting their opinions loudly enough so that it becomes 'the right thing'

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

#620

Post by pfdietz »

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.

Here we have another entry in the long list of "things described on the Internet that never happened".
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