4 ms·
this is rich coming from the company that shreds books for training data
by internetguy 2mo ago
this is rich coming from the company that shreds books for training data
- inigyou 2mo ago[flagged]
- Lerc 2mo agoThere is a really weird perception of the importance of books as if there is a important property to be preserved in every book. This was hilighted to me by a librarian friend if mine, She said they destroy books all the time in her job, and got rather angry when people suggested that it was intrinsicly bad, because there is nothing sacred about simply being a book. It is about the replacibility. They had a program where, if they destroyed a book they would receive a replacement from the publisher for a tiny cost. If a book got damaged it would be much cheaper to get a freshly minted replacement than it would be to spend time repairing. If there was a glitch in the matrix and 30 billion Gutenberg bibles suddenly fell in the middle of the Amazon(the wet one), most would be destroyed as an environmental hazard. I see a lot of comparisons to book burning when the AI scanning is mentioned, but the point of book burning is a symbolic act to indicate that the information within the book should not be shared. Destroying the book to capture the information within sits at the polar opposite reason for destroying a book.
- chrisldgk 2mo agoThe difference here I think is that the company (Anthropic, not OpenAI) was specifically selecting rare books for training (and subsequently destroying). I think the value proposition is a much different one in this case. In your example the books are still available in high enough amounts that replacing it is cheaper. If the book is rare enough to not have been digitized for training data yet (which is why Anthropic is interested in it), keeping that book around is much more important. If Anthropic subsequently released the digitized version of it we’d be having a different discussion, but for obvious reasons they’re not.
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoThey did it due to some weird copyright argument about copying and destroying the original seeming like a transfer and not copyright violation, which is insane and apparently is mot always interpreted in said way. So they are literally taking a copyright gamble they might lose.
- Lerc 2mo agoIt is fair use to train on books you buy. The anthropic case established that. The destruction of books is just cutting the spine so they have individual pages to scan.
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoDestroying a book to argue fair use is not accepted as a fair use act is what I was saying, so they're needlessly destroying rare books.
- Lerc 2mo agoThey are not destroying any books to make any claim. They are doing it so the pages fit in the scanner. Without an example of an actual rare book that is shown to have been destroyed, all there is is the is the claim they have the capability to do that. The closest I have heard is the possibility of rare books purchased in bulk orders of cheap second hand books. This is a similar risk to melting down someone's wedding ring from a batch of scrap metal. It could theoretically happen, but the knowledge of the items presence is absent and it was not requested. What other allegations have there been? I'm prepared to look at actual examples of you have them.
- Lerc 2mo agoI have heard allegations that they might be destroying non replaceable books, but only as a hypothetical. Replacibility is the standard tbat matters in this which I mentioned in my post. I haven't heard of a specific instance of an occurance of destruction of an irreplaceable book, but I'm willing to look into cases if you have a link.
- UltraSane 2mo ago99.99% of printed books are worthless.
- trentor 2mo ago99.99% of stuff is worthless for most people.
- palmotea 2mo agoAlso what's worthless to you is very much not worthless to others. A pretty obvious example is genealogical archival records. My family only cares about a few dozen pages out of millions for each US census, but every family cares about a different few dozen pages.