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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

#701

Post by dukeyukey »

runarberg wrote: post #574
dukeyukey wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why AI companies destroying these is worse than a library or bookseller destroying these?

Public libraries staff professional archivist, they take careful inventory and know exactly which book they are destroying. 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 fin…

Rare and valuable books are not going to be in the giant pallets AI companies are buying. Most public libraries do not have professional archivists or anything like that, not so charity shops, or booksellers.

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

#702

Post by GreenLightGo »

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…

Honestly, it’s easier to find a good movie than a good book, because books are way cheaper to publish. These days, the quality of pretty much all kinds of content has become a problem...

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

#703

Post by TFNA »

FeloniousHam wrote: post #551
TFNA wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, art. And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Add up the cost of buying the DVD/Blu-Ray releases for the 1500 or so films that make up the canon of cinema. That's a sum of money daunting even for people in developed countries, let alone most of the world. Piracy is going to be the realistic solution. (And before you say "Use the library", you know well-stocked…

> And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Access to _all_ art and "culture"? For free?

Even if not all art, once something becomes canonical, it then becomes something that people should be able to easily familiarize themselves with for the sake of an educated and edified citizenry. And indeed, many countries subsidize public libraries and live performances for this very reason. But no state can manage to provide free or nearly-free access to the entire canon, so piracy helps fill the gap.

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

#704

Post by alightsoul »

Aurornis wrote: post #400
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, 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…

Does china developing ai powered missiles sound ridiculous? It sounds ridiculous to me because the US is surely doing the same, It would be boring if we knew the us was doing the same. It is emotional to think about china destroying the US when it is just the antithesis of American exceptionalism. It reminds me of what Dario said about their stance on open source.

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

#705

Post by dukeyukey »

breezybottom wrote: post #327
dukeyukey wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why AI companies destroying these is worse than a library or bookseller destroying these?

[flagged]

If someone was ok with Nazis killing Jews but not Soviets, I am going to think they don't believe it's the killing that is the problem.

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

#706

Post by demibabs »

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…

Also, why are people acting like Anthropic digitizing and destroying a rare book is what makes it inaccessible to the public?

If they were simply buying the books and doing nothing with them, the public wouldn’t be able to access their copies anyway.

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

#707

Post by mvlipwig »

nloomans wrote: post #383
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…

> a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere somewhere were we can't access it. as the article states: “permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers” the issue isn't that the physical copy is gone, it's that they are preventing people from making digital copies that are actually accessible by destroying the physical copies. > If you go to a recycling centre…

I wonder if Anthropic could rent or sell access to their collection to the internet archive? It would probably be a good PR move (which they probably need right now), but I'm not sure what type of legal shenanigans they would need to do in order to not violate copyright law.

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

#708

Post by TFNA »

tene80i wrote: post #606
TFNA wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, art. And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Add up the cost of buying the DVD/Blu-Ray releases for the 1500 or so films that make up the canon of cinema. That's a sum of money daunting even for people in developed countries, let alone most of the world. Piracy is going to be the realistic solution. (And before you say "Use the library", you know well-stocked…

If you're saying "piracy is justified in those parts of the world where access to any art or culture is prohibitively expensive", then that's a pretty defensible position, not unlike "It's ok to steal bread if you are starving". But that's not what many people defending piracy are doing. Many of them do indeed have great libraries nearby, and art and culture on demand at prices they happily spend having food delivere…

I don't know if you have noticed, but piracy has declined greatly since the introduction of streaming. The scene is a shadow of its former self. The communities today that are keeping high-quality releases of canonical music and films available are overwhelmingly based in regions of the world with a dearth of good libraries.

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

#709

Post by 8note »

himinlomax wrote: post #525
fc417fc802 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a Chinese Communist Party agenda

is it actually? it feels more like US propaganda that we have to let our oligarchs run roughshod over us because of what we imagine the big bad CCP might want.

i dont think the CCP cares whether there's data centers in rural america.

Regulation that requires closed loop cooling seems simple enough, same with lots of the other problems people have with data centers:

* sound and infrasound under x DB

* no air quality change

* must pay to build out electrical infrastructure

etc

its not to the CCPs benefit or loss to make sure the data centers are built well if they get built

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

#710

Post by runarberg »

tptacek wrote: post #650
runarberg wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume public libraries know what they are doing and know which book they are destroying, that they keep an accurate inventory and hire professionals maintaining said inventory and marking which books can safely be destroyed. I assume no such things of AI companies.

Obviously that's not true. Newark is literally telling people to talk all their old rare books to thrift stores, which will immediately throw them in dumpsters.

This is a bad comparison. Public libraries are trying their best to preserve rare copies, despite being overwhelmed and underfunded. If they come across a rare copy chances are it will be preserved. When an AI company comes across a rare book, it will not recognize it as such.

There is also a fundamental difference in intention. AI companies are seeking out old books and will destroy them. Public libraries are trying their best but simply don‘t have the resources to find rare books in every collection.

And finally there is a fundamental difference in scale. Public libraries are not buying millions of copies to destroy, completely eliminating the chance they will ever be discovered.

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PS. I don‘t like the anti-academic tone of your post. Librarians know what they are doing, their expertise is valuable, and when they act according to their specialized knowledge it does have a positive effect on the world.

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