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

AI companies are shredding rare books

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 559 posts

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#441

Post by dpark »

pfdietz wrote: post #435
dpark wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These models are trained on way more than just books. GPT-3 was trained on about half a terabyte of filtered plaintext and the training corpuses have grown significantly by then by all accounts.

I imagine that compresses by ~90%, and current top commercial models have a couple of trillion parameters, don't they?

They aren’t trained on compressed plaintext so I’m not sure of the relevance there. But regardless it’s my understanding that’s modern models are trained with orders of magnitude more storage than their parameters require. But it’s possible I’m incorrect. This is getting to the fringe of my knowledge of concrete LLM details.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#442

Post by skeledrew »

andrepd wrote: post #186
thechao wrote: post #4

Which book that was rare was destroyed? I'm interested to know a few titles.

Rare or not, destroying books is in itself a morally repugnant act. I don't know man, it's not so long ago we used to view nazi book burnings as an archetype of evil. Today companies are offering book-burning-as-a-service and it hardly causes a stir. Bearded German man was right.

Is it destruction or format shift? Technically the books still exist; just that they're now digital. There's no content loss (what I imagine comprises a "book") unless any digitization is then deleted.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#443

Post by [deleted] »

pfdietz wrote: post #361
ComputerPerson wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is mold. Sealed plastic bags for old books is a recipe for mold. At least they're individually stored, so they would develop mold at independent rates. (And maybe the seal allows airflow.) Most books have some mold by the time they're ~100 years old, it's just not enough to cause a serious problem. Sealed enclosures (wrappings, bags, tubs) are a nightmare situation. Even packing books too tighly on shelves…

If I did that I'd seal them with silica gel to keep the humidity down.

[deleted]

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#444

Post by palmotea »

qingcharles wrote: post #406
pfdietz wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I did that I'd seal them with silica gel to keep the humidity down.

I would think this totally dries the pages out and then they just turn to dust, from experience.

>> If I did that I'd seal them with silica gel to keep the humidity down.

> I would think this totally dries the pages out and then they just turn to dust, from experience.

They used to sell Boveda two-way humidity control packs that would keep a bag at a constant low-ish 32% humidity, but last I looked those were discontinued (it looks like they've pivoted pretty heavily to marijuana storage and higher-humidity products).

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#445

Post by qingcharles »

pu_pe wrote: post #50

From what I understand, the rare books in question are not some historically relevant medieval manuscripts, but rather some relatively recent books (still under copyright) for which there are few print copies available for purchase. I am not sure that physically destructing one copy of this type of book to preserve its contents digitally is so bad. Pretty much anything that is still under copyright should be valuable…

This works only if the digital copy is made publically available. I actually agree with destructively scanning a copy of a work that is in single digits as long as that excellent digital scan is made available.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#446

Post by WorldPeas »

compass_copium wrote: post #285
butlike wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every innovation since the microprocessor isn't worth saving in the grand scheme of things. When today's algae evolve enough into tomorrow's sentient creatures, they're really only going to need up to the industrial revolution and should probably stop right before that.

I'm personally a fan of more than 50% of children surviving past the age of 6, something that didn't happen until the 20th century.

the mass-market-ification of: clothing(world clothelessness used to be a severe problem, paper clothes existed for a reason), AC, light vehicles, solar: all things after the 20th (and even 21st century) that are worth saving. Even with the seeming doom, things do get better.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#447

Post by WorldPeas »

lousken wrote: post #16

That's why archive.org should have never been sued for lending books they had physical copy of. This is the result. Publishers should be more careful what they wish for.

> Publishers should be more careful what they wish for. you think they don't like people destroying their books? if you destroy a book, that increases the value of the others and the unpublished holdings (unfortunately)

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#448

Post by Ekaros »

monknomo wrote: post #300
giancarlostoro wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CL…

20 years to make some money, and then we set the work free for the public benefit. If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights.

I agree 20 or 25 years should be plenty of time to protect artistic work. No other industry or line of work has anything like that protection. A work published today by 10 year old could stay in protection for nearly 200 years. If that person was to live to 140, theoretically possible with medicine in future.

We do not continue to pay for most things once they are created. Unless they are continuous services. Artistic works should not be any different.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#449

Post by Ekaros »

this_was_posted wrote: post #370
thdr wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> copyright should just die with the author That would have a few undesirable consequences... for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are. The complexity of our legal system is in many cases justified. The problems are often the numbers (duration of copyright protection etc.)

Then just make it the rule that the copyright expires after 30 years or when the author dies, whichever comes last.

I am fine that estate gets to keep rights for whatever period is left. If estate is dissolved ofc rights would also end. So they can't be orphaned. Either someone has them or they are public domain.
Post reply on HN