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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

#911

Post by etdznots »

margalabargala wrote: post #107
bulbar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They probably won't be erased from the face of the earth by the judicious and proportionate actions of, of a few, AI companies? I don't see why not. Pretty sure it's gonna happen. Doesn't matter if a hundred copies still exist somewhere , if access or discoverbility falls below a certain threshold, it doesn't matter, because those books become practically inaccessible to the world.

Right, but if an AI company buys some vanishingly uncommon book, digitizes it, shreds it, and adds the information it contains to their permanent digital library and digests its contents into an AI that is then publicly accessible...are they making that book less accessible, or more?

I am compelled as well, I will offer up all the children of the village to be consumed by the LLM, in that destructive brain scanning machine. At least this way the poor saps have some hopes of being used by someone and in a small way living on forever, instead of being resigned to a hopeless life of relative obscurity.

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

#912

Post by etdznots »

margalabargala wrote: post #599
fluoridation wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have the book, you have someone else's interpretation of the book's contents, re-expressed into a language you can read. Both steps can involve a loss or distortion of information, either because the translator doesn't fully grasp the original language or context, or because in the re-expression they chose to leave out details that were relevant to you. The more distant the original language to yours, the m…

That sounds to me like fuzzily having a version of the book. That is, it's more like having the book, than having nothing would be. You seem to be arguing that a translation, etc is not literally having the book, which is something that has always been my stance as well.

I agree having a book is something fuzzy, I for instance consider that if i have even one word from a book, then i sort of have that book, idk it’s not black and white there are shades of grey!

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

#913

Post by etdznots »

enraged_camel wrote: post #60
RajT88 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The articles I've read on this are not clear, but I strongly suspect "rare" is not the definition you and I probably use for the level of rarity of books actually being destroyed. These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.

Also, a lot of these "rare books" are stuff like TV programming magazines from October 1994.

Those are the rare books you come across in your life because of the way you choose to live, if you were literate and in the habit of reading literature, mathematics, science, you would realize that there are many texts that are at present exceedingly difficult or impossible to get your hands on

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

#914

Post by etdznots »

tptacek wrote: post #784
svachalek wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preservation would be cool but what does that have to do with anything? The system is that the remaining copies have private owners and the private owners can do anything they want with them, including sell them or shred them. Most of these owners aren't doing anything particular to preserve them, they're stacked up with 10,000 other TV Guides in a hoarder's moldy basement. Anyone interested in keeping October 1994's…

I don't even think ownership rights are the principal component of this situation. It's true that in a different copyright regime, Anthropic could simply publish an archive of every book they scanned (and I think they likely would do that, if they could). But the primary reason these books get destroyed is that nobody cares about them. Old, rare books are a garbage disposal problem, not a cultural one. To me the most…

Yes, and this justifies the destruction of books on an industrial scale. I propose next we do children, ever tried dropping off an innocent child at a supermarket before? There’s a good chance they’ll just send them out into the streets!

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

#915

Post by etdznots »

azan_ wrote: post #129
unleaded wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whose job is it to dictate what is and isn't worth saving?

Well for example yours - if you don’t pay for these rare books and don’t store them in good condition, then you have decided that they are not worth saving. Many of these rare books would run you like I don’t know, 1 buck?

Yes! and for the same amount of money ($1) you could save a starving child in Africa, but I guess you didn’t..

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

#916

Post by etdznots »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #379
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…

Exactly, also all those physical books would anyways get molded, eaten by moths or just naturally decay. It's not like the AI companies are obliterating every copy of every single book.

We should actually thank the AI companies for helping us get rid of our trash!

Thank you anthropic! Thank you OpenAI! Thank you Google!

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

#917

Post by tptacek »

etdznots wrote: post #914
tptacek wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even think ownership rights are the principal component of this situation. It's true that in a different copyright regime, Anthropic could simply publish an archive of every book they scanned (and I think they likely would do that, if they could). But the primary reason these books get destroyed is that nobody cares about them. Old, rare books are a garbage disposal problem, not a cultural one. To me the most…

Yes, and this justifies the destruction of books on an industrial scale. I propose next we do children, ever tried dropping off an innocent child at a supermarket before? There’s a good chance they’ll just send them out into the streets!

If you weren't complaining about libraries doing it last year, I'm going to have a very hard time taking you seriously when you complain about AI companies doing it at a much smaller scale. You don't care about what's actually being done, you just care about who's doing it.

The argument wouldn't hold even if you had been on the library's case, because it misconstrues the normal lifecycle of a book. But we don't even get there unless you've been consistent about this, rather than instrumentalizing it at just this precise moment to jump on a trend story about hating AI.

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

#918

Post by SideQuark »

ndiddy wrote: post #824
SideQuark wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> suit is mainly over whether controlled digital lending is legal at all No, it was not, even supported by the quotes you pulled. Libraries right now, with publisher blessing, offer all manner of controlled digital lending. The suit was because IA did it buy undercutting the publishers copy rights to that legal market. Had IA simply done what every other library has done to provide controlled digital lending, there w…

"Controlled digital lending" is not a generic term for "lending digital items". It specifically refers to the practice of a library digitizing physical materials in its collection, then lending them digitally based on a 1:1 owned-to-loaned ratio. The idea is that the library should be able to treat digitized versions of a book the same way it treats the physical book, and the total number of physical and digital copi…

Agreed. But there are reasons it is perfect legal for a library to digitize physical copies they own, and then can lend, also under the legal name of "Controlled digital lending". Clearly public domain works are fine, and US law also has exemptions for preservation where a new copy cannot be obtained at a "fair price", and perhaps some other things.

So making it seem as if all "controlled digital lending" is not allowed under current law, even under the description you give, is not that simple.

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

#919

Post by etdznots »

quietsegfault wrote: post #793
pibaker wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. It is common for academic books to have publication runs in the low three digits. You may argue these books are not important. But how do we know if we fail to preserve it?

Is there evidence that these mythical low-print-run books are being purchased by Amazon and friends for destructive scanning? I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense.

> Is there evidence that these mythical low-print-run books are being purchased by Amazon and friends for destructive scanning?

Is there evidence that they aren’t? All of the common works are already on libgen, if these books are worthless repetition they will contribute little to the training corpus, labs want high quality interesting texts and they have unlimited budget to spend on it. Paying $300 for something rare with millions of tokens of interesting and original text for training is definitely fucking worth it, spending $1,200 to get all the copies and block your competitors from getting it is most definitely worth it!

> I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense.

Do you think it would be OK to rail against for example, a genocide if I wasn’t substantially contributing to some effort to stop it? This sophistic (and uninteresting) bit of rhetoric boils down to: if youre not trying to fix it yourself, dont complain!

(reminder that one of the basic principles of a democratic society is that each person has some concern outside of their personal affairs)

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

#920

Post by zahlman »

joshstrange wrote: post #786
zahlman wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book. I genuinely don't understand how it's possible for someone to type that out in all sincerity. Have you ever held a physical book?

Have you held a kindle? What does that even mean? I vastly prefer digital books to physical ones. I own many physical books (as well as their ebook equivalent) but the physical books on my shelves are nothing more than art to me, I won't read the physical books because the experience is infinitely better when reading on my (jailbroken) kindle.

> but the physical books on my shelves are nothing more than art to me

…Does it really need to explain why people would be up in arms over the physical destruction of physical art?

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