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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

#861

Post by voidhorse »

qarl2 wrote: post #833
ForHackernews wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You think someone's picking up a first edition Steinbeck and destroying it so it gets into the next training corpus? I doubt the low-paid workers stripping, scanning and shredding the books are checking what anything is. I'd imagine they are dumped with a big crate of old books and an hourly quota they have to rapidly process. Arguably old technical manuals with limited print runs are even rarer or more valuable to…

> I doubt the low-paid workers stripping, scanning and shredding the books are checking what anything is. You don't think they are, at the very least, checking to see if the book has been scanned before? A search like that could very easily be extended to check for rare books too. Why do you assume it's not being done?

Why assume it is?

We don't know, and the fact that the process is so opaque and would have been totally undisclosed if not for journalists doesn't exactly make me confident they are "doing things by the book" on this one.

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

#862

Post by voidhorse »

demibabs wrote: post #706
Mudbugs wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because destroying the book makes it possibly inaccessible permanently because we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know that.

If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up. Hopefully someone will at least be able to purchase their digital scan and hopefully the scan is of decent quality and clearly indicates the provenance of the text.

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

#863

Post by tempestn »

VanTheBrand wrote: post #580
brookst wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s the hyperbolic reaction clickbait wants from you. Not all rare books are valuable. Someone’s self-published junk sitting in the garage is NOT analogous to the library of Alexandria. Many, most, maybe all of these “rare” books are being scanned instead of just being recycled. Not a big Reddit fan but there was a great post there from someone in the book industry talking about how non-industry people often g…

If they have no value why are they being acquired and scanned?

Any original text has value for the purpose of AI training. The argument is that they have no other value.

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

#865

Post by merely-unlikely »

mrweasel wrote: post #216
tene80i wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of written works aren’t “information” but rather art. Most piracy is just about people preferring not to pay for novels, TV and film.

There is also a ton of tv shows, movies, music and books that you cannot buy, for now real good reason. I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions. With things increasingly only being available on streaming platforms or behind DRM in other ways, we risk looking back on the current era as a black hole 50 years from now. My concern is that less…

> I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions.

I can already think of a couple examples I've run into in the audiobook world. I have copies of Douglas Adams himself narrating his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent books. As far as I know, these recordings are not available for purchase anywhere. I got them because someone was kind enough to upload them. I would have preferred to buy them but didn't have that choice.

Some of Iain Bank's audiobooks were only available in Europe for a time (and maybe still are). For those I was able to convince Amazon I was buying in Germany at least.

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

#866

Post by ktm5j »

shagie wrote: post #860
ktm5j wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So you're a lawyer and a librarian now? If a library really won't take the books for whatever reason you're imagining, I'm sure there are other organizations that would.

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

#867

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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…

>Since the invention of the printing press any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units.

No, every popular book has been duplicated thousands of times. This is not the same thing as important. They're orthogonal. When an important book is popular, it is safe. When it is not, it is in danger. Only fools assume that important books are recognized often enough to become popular.

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

#868

Post by hughlilly »

quietsegfault wrote: post #791
afpx wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be greatly underestimating the long tail. Several times a year I read sources that reference older books that I can't find online. When I am able to locate them, they often cost at least several hundred dollars, sometimes into the 10s of thousands.

Do you think that you are somehow special and unique in needing these books? If the books cost in the 10s of thousands, then there's obviously value to other people. I've seen no evidence that Amazon or others are buying $10k books to scan into their corpus. All evidence I've seen is that they're scanning cheap books with no current value and no clear use to people today. I have volunteered with a library, and probab…

> I've seen no evidence that Amazon or others are buying $10k books to scan into their corpus.

Have you seen evidence that they’re buying only readily available books that are plentiful on the market?

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

#869

Post by demibabs »

voidhorse wrote: post #858
demibabs wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

These companies are buying from small book stores; surely these collector types would know if they lost any one-of-a-kinds? Or at least someone would be keeping track of extremely rare books disappearing (especially now since this matter has been public for weeks).

Regardless I feel like they gotta figure this out for optics reasons. “So and so books are lost forever to Anthropic’s servers” is much more outrageous than “Anthropic is destroying a bunch of books that have other copies” imo.

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

#870

Post by qarl2 »

voidhorse wrote: post #861
qarl2 wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt the low-paid workers stripping, scanning and shredding the books are checking what anything is. You don't think they are, at the very least, checking to see if the book has been scanned before? A search like that could very easily be extended to check for rare books too. Why do you assume it's not being done?

Why assume it is? We don't know, and the fact that the process is so opaque and would have been totally undisclosed if not for journalists doesn't exactly make me confident they are "doing things by the book" on this one.

Because you usually find out if someone is doing something before you get mad about it.

No?

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