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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

#871

Post by demibabs »

voidhorse wrote: post #862
demibabs wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Books are considered super high quality training data. Anthropic has no reason to get rid of this data that 1. They’ve spent a ton of money on and 2. Will remain useful indefinitely for training LLMs.

> If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up.

The same applies for a digital scan? The information isn’t any more likely to be lost.

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

#872

Post by dukeyukey »

runarberg wrote: post #797
tptacek wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and what happens to those boxes from old estates are that they get put into dumpsters. The only difference here are: * It's happening on a much smaller scale * They're actually digitizing the books before they destroy them This obviously isn't about the books. It's about people want reasons not to like AI companies.

The scale matters. It is disingenuous to just remove it from the equation as if it doesn’t. As does the intention matter. The AI companies are doing this because they want to profit off of it. They don’t have to do this, and the fact that they do is part of what makes them bad for humanity.

AI companies are doing this at a far lesser scale than libraries are, are you implying doing it less is worse?

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

#873

Post by paulddraper »

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.

Cheaper than the next closest competitor

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

#874

Post by afpx »

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'm just stating that not everyone is reading the most popular million books. And, there are many, many millions of books in the long tail.

A few years ago, after running into this issue several times, I looked into the economics of it to see if there was a opportunity to republish digitally. I found the sales data for some, the ones that had value were selling on average for around $50-150 dollars. Because the typefaces weren't modern, OCR wasn't scalable. Because only 20-40 were transacted each year, it wasn't worth the time.

What kind of books are they? In my case mostly historical documents by some relatively unimportant person who was highly important for a very, very niche subject. They still contain valuable, irreplacable information.

An analogy: imagine you discover a really cool video game from 20 years ago. You love it and want to find the developer's previous work. But, you find out that the company was purchase by another company which was purchase by another, etc, etc. Sure, maybe the game still exists in some digital vault. But, more than likely it's gone because old things only seem have value these days if some influencer broadcasts it.

It's interesting that libraries are purging them. Several times, I've found that the only available copies were at some random university rare book collection in middle of no where, and basically impossible to access unless one fly in - which isn't worth it. They are often donated by a benefactor and stuck there - which is why they're never read. It's not that the content isn't valuable.

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

#875

Post by famouswaffles »

voidhorse wrote: post #859
famouswaffles wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The medium obviously matters. One was designed to be cheap and mass produced. Almost anything published has copies in the hundreds or thousands at least and the chances you are concerning yourself with the 'last copy' of some valuable information you can't get elsewhere is minuscle. Film most certainly was not like that.

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

#876

Post by quietsegfault »

voidhorse wrote: post #856
quietsegfault wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#877

Post by quietsegfault »

afpx wrote: post #874
quietsegfault wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm just stating that not everyone is reading the most popular million books. And, there are many, many millions of books in the long tail. A few years ago, after running into this issue several times, I looked into the economics of it to see if there was a opportunity to republish digitally. I found the sales data for some, the ones that had value were selling on average for around $50-150 dollars. Because the typef…

I think I get your point, and I’m sure there are ideas that will disappear forever.

The books we were disposing of were so totally inane that I couldn’t tell you what they were, but they weren’t taken out in like 30-40 years. Northeast US state R1 research university. Maybe we got rid of stuff that would come in handy!

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

#878

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

I don't know why you think all these irrelevant remarks somehow support your core thesis.

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

#879

Post by XorNot »

arttaboi wrote: post #755
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.

Sure but are we going to do anything sensible about it or is it just a convenient culture war vector?

This is happening because copyright means you can't scan these without destroying them as a format conversion.

No one's felt compelled to try and fix that so we can do this sort of digital archival and preservation, and copyright allows works to be frozen and undistributable because a claim might exist for decades without any actual use (I.e. the number of games which get stuck in legal limbo).

If the only desire is to sling mud at AI companies but not try and improve the legal situation, then it's worse then useless because there's no intent to stop it - in fact stopping it would remove a useful outrage tool.

The idea in the title here is point 1 of the blind leading the blind: it's illegal to scan and store these books without destroying them in many jurisdictions.

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

#880

Post by astrange »

LaGrange wrote: post #511
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…

> 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 Look, others talked about how this fetishising of paper books is quite silly (though I don't like it when the destructive scanning is just so one could feed it into a chatbot) but I have to say, all I can do after reading the above sentence is…

Anthropic is a PBC, so they're required to work towards a public benefit. They're also basically a religious cult dedicated to Claude.
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