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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

#851

Post by BeetleB »

merely-unlikely wrote: post #840
BeetleB wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Almost none of the books you donate to the library get to the shelves. If they can sell it, they will. Otherwise they are thrown away. I even read on a web site of a librarian that their library had stopped accepting donations because "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash".

> "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash" That makes me a lot sadder than AI companies destroying the books but at least preserving (most of) their knowledge.

It's the reality. If you're old enough to remember when people subscribed to magazines ... how often did you throw out a magazine?

How often have you thrown out manuals for products you don't use any more?

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

#852

Post by himinlomax »

toephu2 wrote: post #789
himinlomax wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not destroying rare manuscripts or incunables. They're destroying one (1) copy of a mass-produced item for each AI company. Public libraries destroy millions more yearly as a matter of routine. This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic, along with the water use nonsense, and similar with the soviet-aligned moral panic that destroyed the civil nuclear industry 40 years ago.

> This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic I've heard people say this, but I haven't seen any evidence for it. Do you have any evidence?

I didn't claim it was orchestrated by them, it may or may not be, but it is evidently aligned with their interests.

Exactly the same as shutting down perfectly fine German nuclear plants was aligned with Russian interests.

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

#853

Post by himinlomax »

pfdietz wrote: post #726
8note wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nuclear was killed by russian nat gas money. running nuclear plants were shut down while running just fine

Nuclear in the US was killed by Russian natural gas money? What other nonsense do you believe?

It demonstrably was in Germany.

Look up Greenpeace Energy, and what cushy corporate job Schroder got after leaving office.

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

#854

Post by lkbm »

ezfe wrote: post #2

I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…

With many old books, a big part of the problem is that it's non-trivial to determine who owns the copyright. Sometimes the contract would say the copyright reverts to the author after a certain amount of time out of print,but you have to go dig through old contracts to figure out whether that's the case for any given book.

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

#855

Post by shakna »

tkel wrote: post #239
shakna wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headlines about destruction came not soon after they got rapped on the knuckles and told "no more pirating".

No, the destructive book scanning was happening before that.

Right. Because that's the easiest way to comply with the law. I'm not arguing that.

I am, arguing that they're using it to make headlines, and stir up anger, as a wedge to trigger changes to copyright. Easier to make more than one change, once the door is opened up.

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

#856

Post by voidhorse »

quietsegfault wrote: post #796
rvz wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, it IS destroyed and it is a big deal. Hardcover copies of books especially 1st - 2nd edition ones (even with mistakes) are rarer than digital scans. Maybe the Bodleian Library at Oxford University should give all their rare books to AI companies to scan and destroy them since it is not a "big deal" anyway. Except that when they did do a pilot with OpenAI to scan these rare books, [0] they did NOT destro…

Why is it a big deal? Do you think there's no difference between the books curated at Oxford University and the crap that Amazon is buying?

Why would amazon buy "crap"? Surely they want their model to succeed and they want to train it on valuable input, no? They have more than enough resources to determine whether or not the books are worth buying. They have been in book selling for a long time.

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

#857

Post by lkbm »

cube00 wrote: post #748
qarl2 wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Companies discovered that they can pour tends of billions into clean energy and still be hated for destroying the planet. They can use a small amount of water and be blamed for draining the Great Lakes.

Why would they avoid doing things people dislike if the PR outcome is the same?

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

#858

Post by voidhorse »

demibabs wrote: post #822
wasmperson wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good article, but I still feel unsatisfied because even it cannot find an example of a book that’s actually been lost because of the destructive scanning frenzy (it only lists books that hypothetically could be lost because there’s not many physical copies available for sale online.). If anyone has an example, I’d love to hear it.

Since we don't know what was actually purchased and what was actually destroyed, how do you expect us to furnish an example? This would require the destroyers to admit it, and beyond that it would require all of them to admit it since more than one of them might have been responsible for the extinction of one text. Seeing as they were already keeping this operation under wraps, I don't see that happening. "possibly extinct because no copies available online" is probably the best we can do.

The distributed nature of the problem and the utter lack of transparency are huge factors here too.

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

#859

Post by voidhorse »

famouswaffles wrote: post #501
dbspin wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would film be any different in any capacity whatsoever?

Believe it or not, what matters here is the message and access to the message, not the medium.

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

#860

Post by shagie »

ktm5j wrote: post #834
shagie wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physical books that were scanned by Google were returned to the libraries. https://btaa.org/library/programs-and-services/book-search/f... > Will scanning harm the books? > No. Google developed innovative technology to scan the content without harming the books. Any book deemed too fragile will not be scanned by Google, but may be treated by expert library staff. Once scanned, all print volumes are returned to th…

> The AI training isn't borrowing from libraries and returning from libraries Perhaps that's an important distinction here, I was really just trying to explain what I thought the commenter was trying to say. Calm down with the copy pasta walls. But I still think that AI companies could make a very similar argument to the one Google made in your copy-pasta. The laziness I refereed to earlier is the fact that they have…

My copying and pasting is twofold.

First, in today's environment people will state AI hallucinations as fact or "google it yourself" as the reference. If someone doesn't know where to find that information they're left with the "someone on the net said XYZ".

Secondly, I'm not always certain that if I do provide a link to a large document that people will find the relevant section in there. And second and a halfly, if someone comes back to it in a year or two or five that the link will still be live. I've had situations in the past where I've provided a link and then the domain changes hands and the new owners of the site put up a retroactive robots.txt and make it inaccessible on the wayback machine.

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The question for an AI company that can't return, sell, or donate the material after it has been scanned - are they then to pay to store it in a warehouse indefinitely?

After they've format shifted the content and retained the format shifted content for continued use in training, it becomes at least a very gray area to donate the original.

And even if the books were scanned like Google Books did, and they could donate them to libraries - the libraries don't want those books. These aren't rare books in that people would expect you to wear cotton gloves while handling them... they're books that have mostly disappeared from availability.

https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_... provides an example of what is being seen in a used book store:

> 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.

Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 is technically a rare book. https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe...

If you had a copy of it, I would challenge you to find a library that would accept it as a donation.

In the event that you wanted to read a copy of it, there is a copy of it in the Library of Congress. https://search.catalog.loc.gov/instances/b220c9bd-63ad-5a8b-...

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