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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

#751

Post by wasmperson »

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.

I was also skeptical of this claim but managed to find someone who explains it:

https://downtownbrown.substack.com/p/five-fallacies-ai-and-d...

It's not that individual companies buy all copies of a given book, but that there's more than one book scanning company, and they aren't sharing the scans with each other. The result: books that were rare but nevertheless easy to find for purchase (thanks to the internet) are now vanishing off of the market, becoming de facto no longer accessible to the public.

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

#753

Post by ceasesurthinko »

snickerbockers wrote: post #720
p-e-w wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are thrown away, which has been happening since forever, and nobody ever gave a fuck until AI got involved.

I think it hits different when you're buying large quantities of used books with an eye towards ones which aren't readily available online, and with the specific intention of destroying them. If all these companies were doing was burning star wars tie-in novels and harry potter sequels nobody would care. That's not their goal because they already have those in their training set. The whole point here is to find rare…

Realistically the vast majority of those books haven't been touched for half a century and won't ever be read by a human again. It is a price to destroy these, but it's a price I would pay for progressing models towards AGI and the billions of lives it will save.

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

#754

Post by janpeuker »

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…

The irony of countries blocking Anna's Archive (UK, Italy, Netherlands etc) but then it's the hackers who conserve and steward the books. Because governments can't stop AI companies from shredding history like they did with Google Books _because_ they actually tried to do it _by the book_.

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

#755

Post by arttaboi »

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…

With all due respect, I would say it wouldn’t hurt not to downplay this.

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

#756

Post by mtkd »

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…

>It is not a big deal

have you ever held and read an old book?

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

#757

Post by anon84873628 »

cube00 wrote: post #745
allturtles wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then at least there would be outrage to drive the passing of the needed legislation which otherwise hasn't come to pass anyway.

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

#758

Post by iLemming »

What's infuriating about the book digitization is that you'd think: "Oh, great, this would allow finding a fact or a piece from just about any book ever published..."

OMG, finding a verbatim quote from any given book these days is nearly impossible. Every LLM would state "tis a copyrighted material and I can't share it as is". And search engines now all being AI-driven won't find it either. WTF are you even talking about? I'm not trying to steal the whole plot of the book for my dissertation, I just need the exact quote from the book, just like the author intended, don't give me your "rephrased" adaptation of it. What happens in a few years when every single quote is some misinterpreted shit and nobody even knows what the original quote ever was?

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

#760

Post by ceasesurthinko »

infecto wrote: post #476
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.

Puts the burden on government to store what is probably 90% worthless material. Copyright should really be amended so that once out of print and a grace period it’s free use. I am probably more of an anarchist in this regard. Similar to my belief that anyone should be able to ingest any data you put online, once a book is no longer being print it should be able to be used for commercial or personal use for free. Simi…

You don't need a massive government program for this.

Just post on r/DataHoarder: "Free 16TB NVMe SSD to anyone who indexes and mirrors the entire out-of-print 20th-century physical archive." The problem would be solved by next Tuesday. With probably 10x redundancy and people willing to do it for free for fun.

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