Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

annas-archive.gl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 961 posts

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

#741

Post by TaLiTr »

warkdarrior wrote: post #283

> Our ideal is to scan and upload all the world’s publications before publishers completely block knowledge, and before AI companies scan and destroy all the world’s books and papers. Isn't this just doing the work for the AI companies??? Then the AI companies can simply download a copy of Anna's Archive.

> Then the AI companies can simply download a copy of Anna's Archive.

And so can everyone else. That's the ideal outcome.

Only Anti-AI types are against this, they probably don't even care about the books, it's just a proxy for trying to stop the "evil AI companies."

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

#742

Post by Teever »

qarl2 wrote: post #733
NishanStepak wrote: post #725

Nondestructive scanning can cost 10x as much. This is about cost. It is not about preservation. Google never destroyed the books it scanned. Amazon and Anthropic are attempting to save money. They are not considering whether or not a book is rare. They are treating books as a commodity. Rare books are rare. It is easy enough to identify when there are a limited number of copies of a book. The issue is saving money on…

Given all the bad PR around this issue - you'd think they'd do the 10 seconds of examination "is this rare" before putting it in the cutter. I'm genuinely surprised they don't.

I'm kinda surprised too, but also not, because they tried to hide what they were doing.

So that tells you that they know what they're doing is wrong / controversial and that they needed to shape their actions based on that fact.

The course of action they took tells you a lot about the people making these decisions.

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

#743

Post by nuancebydefault »

chefandy wrote: post #730
SkyBelow wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends upon what you want. For example, knowledge about how the book smells when you open it, something that reader do talk about enough I don't think this should be a strawman, is lost. But, that is about the experience of reading the book, not the knowledge of the book. The exact text? Yeah, I think that is largely lost as well. This is a summary. And for rarer books, it will be a particularly bad summary. The bas…

> But, that little bit of data is a bit more data than existed before, No, it’s not. Undigitized data is still data. Wording, style, nuance, type, artwork, binding, metadata, attributions, citability… all of these things are permanently lost, which is a fucking tragedy because they don’t have to be. Even if you’re not willing to take the time to scan every page in a cradle scanner, as rare books should be, (and don’t…

> Undigitized data is still data. Wording, style, nuance, type, artwork, binding, metadata, attributions, citability… all of these things are permanently lost

I understand what you mean but... "permanently lost" sounds dramatic. When I trow away old pictures, old drawings or pieces made by my son at school, they are lost as well. Not that I do that often, but it begs the question, should every 'ip' made by humans be preserved?

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

#744

Post by yipinwong »

alightsoul wrote: post #688
yipinwong wrote: post #681

The post reads like a propaganda. Evoking feeling over metrics or results ( e.g. > but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity. Who are you that you consider it a serious crime against humanity? What are you a saint? > Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers. Throughout human history, it's the knowledge/info that provide one with wealth and advantage over others. With the author's…

Isn't this what Dario does?

If Dario appeals to feeling, yes.

Provide more context if you want a better feedback not whataboutism.

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

#745

Post by cube00 »

allturtles wrote: post #684
ndiddy wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point Google Books was supposed to act as a clearinghouse for scans of out-of-print books. You could have purchased a scan of any book on the site for a reasonable price, and libraries could subscribe to a service where the full text of all books was available. This settlement then got shot down because some research libraries and authors argued that this was anti-competitive, and instead wanted Congress to pa…

Yes, this was a great tragedy. I was very sad to see academics at the time arguing against Google providing what would have been one of the greatest storehouses of readily available knowledge in the world, in favor of an imaginary alternative that didn't exist and never would.

> Google providing what would have been one of the greatest storehouses of readily available knowledge in the world

I'd be worried about how much they'd be charging for access once they had the monopoly on so many rare books.

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

#746

Post by spandrew »

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…

Amazon also did this for their "Look Inside" feature. To do this they had to spin up massive digital infrastructure——then realized that they could sell that infrastructure and make more money than from the books they were scanning.

This is was what ended up spinning up AWS as a business.

I dislike the idea of destroying rare books--but how rare? A digital copy has a lot more benefit.

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

#747

Post by bjornnn »

destructive book scanning is pretty standard, it's the only way to efficiently get a good flat scan of the pages without a tremendous amount of human labor to correct distortion on every individual page. i'm curious about what specific rare books are being destroyed and how rare they really are. and at any rate, anyone can go out and buy books and scan them or destroy them or set them on fire or whatever, they bought the book it's their own property. so now physical books are treated as the public commons while intellectual property is privately owned? are we in topsy-turvy world? i feel like there are much more egregious crimes that people ought to be talking about with ai companies, like impoverished black people having their city water supplies poisoned or the massive financial fraud that will destroy the economy or the massive co2 emissions that will destroy the world or just the fact that it's not even artificial intelligence at all and it's not even a technological innovation, it's just a google hack that dumbed down an existing neural network model enough for it to run on lots of nvidia gpus and produce an impressive-enough tech demo to show to gullible investors who don't know what to do with their massive piles of money.

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

#748

Post by cube00 »

qarl2 wrote: post #733
NishanStepak wrote: post #725

Nondestructive scanning can cost 10x as much. This is about cost. It is not about preservation. Google never destroyed the books it scanned. Amazon and Anthropic are attempting to save money. They are not considering whether or not a book is rare. They are treating books as a commodity. Rare books are rare. It is easy enough to identify when there are a limited number of copies of a book. The issue is saving money on…

Given all the bad PR around this issue - you'd think they'd do the 10 seconds of examination "is this rare" before putting it in the cutter. I'm genuinely surprised they don't.

> Given all the bad PR

Companies are immune to bad PR in this fast news cycle. Everyone has already moved on to the next injustice in less then 24 hours.

Surprisingly you'll even get downvoted for "living in the past" if you attempt to bring it up later.

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

#749

Post by cube00 »

odyssey7 wrote: post #624

Big AI companies are leaving an easy opportunity on the table for establishing goodwill with the public. Just publicize a rare books vault where you put the older editions that aren’t in a lot of library catalogs. Use non-destructive scanning for those. Align yourself with the image of safeguarding something. It seems like a no-brainer given various themes I’ve been hearing in criticisms of these companies. Maybe the…

> establishing goodwill with the public

Not sure even rare books will dig these big AI companies out of the hole they're digging for themselves.

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

#750

Post by ceasesurthinko »

alightsoul wrote: post #694
mjdv wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're scans. Those are human-readable. They probably won't make them available to the public, which is the exact same state they would be in if they bought the books and just put them on a bookshelf in a warehouse.

That was due to negligence. Now it is profitable to keep the books private, and actively deny others access to them.

Ah, yes, because we all know OpenAI and Anthropic are famously just front operations for the high-end antiquarian book trade.
Post reply on HN