4 ms·
A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jvanderbot 2mo agoAn instant and obvious good these companies could do is to digitize these books ala google books.
- discreteevent 2mo agoThen they would have to deal with copyright. AI is the washing machine that leaves everything spotless.
- conartist6 2mo agoRemember kids, if you say "I was doing it for AI", it's legal. If you say "I was doing it for the good of humanity," well, we still remember Aaron Swartz. But of course, unlike humanity, AI is really worth it!
- jvanderbot 2mo agoThere will be an Open AI / Anthropic leak eventually. One can only hope.
- mapt 2mo agoPreservation rather than ingesting them into the gaping maw of an Intelligence Engine that preserves the soul of the book in crystalized neural network form? That would be a copyright violation.
- wongarsu 2mo agoAnd get sued even harder by publishers? Publishing any out-of-copyright books would be awesome thing to do. But it seems none of the books in this order would fall under that, and it's unclear how many old books they are actually ingesting. Current reports are mostly talking about relatively recent books
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoThis is a good thing to a point, right? They sell heaps of stock, some old / outdated stock (like "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" as per the article), in bulk, at full price, no questions asked. Retailer's dreams come true. (I don't believe them being digitized for consumption by AI will impact book sales much, as ebooks, google books, project gutenberg, etc didn't either)
- femto 2mo agoAs long as the AI devouring a book isn't making it harder for a person to get access to a copy of the book. There might not be many copies of some out-of-print books.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agoWould be nice to at least force them to open their scanned books data, after all they stole everything else, they can contribute some back
- sobiolite 2mo ago"Open" it how, exactly? Make it available for free? As in violate copyright?
- femto 2mo agoPerhaps Anna's Archive will be the last bastion of some books, especially if they manage to acquire the internal collections of some of the AI companies, à la Spotify. (ie. the parts of the collections that didn't come from Anna in the first place.)
- timacles 2mo agoAnd what, potentially make things easier for a competitor? Not in capitalism sir
- abanana 2mo agoIt's great for the retailer, although I think that example was picked out because it's an extreme example of a book that'll never sell. But the volume of these orders shows another way the AI companies are pissing away their investors' money.
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoIs this a second form of AI psychosis, as in AI training corpus psychosis? The need for all the content, Moar!! Feed me. Is this the Paperclip Maximiser in the form of the Training Material Maximiser? Will it be that, in the end, the lack of "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" was the cause of driving rule hallucinations in all previous models? Will this finally get OpenAI back in front of Anthropic? Hurrah! We found it!
- luxuryballs 2mo agoI was thinking the inverse the psychosis is that someone who sells books is alerted that they are selling more books, as if someone buying books needs to give an explanation. If I want to seed software with books why is that newsworthy? Print more books, maintain profitable margins on books, enjoy success as a book seller? If a book is rare and you wanted to preserve it don't sell it so easily, increase the price, or put it into a contract system like Ferrari does with cars they sell.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agoTill it hits books that are out of print, we already had news about AI scourge companies destroying rare books coz scanning them in destructive ways was slightly cheaper. And as is happens in history, any time some entity mass destroys the books, they turn out to be bad guys
- luxuryballs 2mo agoBut anyone can mistreat or fail to care for a book, if it's rare and you don't want to risk it don't sell it.
- cwnyth 2mo agoThere's a very simple solution to this, but the people who rabidly argue for a copyright length of 70 years + the lifetime of the author won't want to hear it.
- carlosjobim 2mo ago
- vintermann 2mo ago> with a focus only on books with an ISBN number, the identification system introduced in 1966 So it's not likely to be rare and precious books. It's things which are already in the Library of Congress or its many equivalents. If they're forced by laws to destroy the results of the scans after training on them, as some have implied, that's bad, on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep the scans, or even the transcripts, that's probably an improvement on the status quo, to be honest. I've had family members in the used books business, and trust me the fate of the vast majority of these books was always to be pulped.
- iamacyborg 2mo agoThere are plenty of rare and precious books with ISBNs.
- abanana 2mo agoThere are, but, quoting from the article: > Anthropic said: "None of our data acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books." This statement was clearly carefully worded, using the words "rare or antiquarian" to mean "pre-1966, pre-ISBN". Their statement is answering a question that wasn't asked, so that (if they need to) they can claim in the future that they never said they weren't destroying books with ISBNs.
- bloak 2mo agoRare, certainly: there are plenty of vanity publications that were chucked into the bin by almost everyone who was unlucky enough to be given a copy. Precious? Well, with the help of an electronic friend I found ISBN 978-3-8365-7349-8. Apparently a copy of that book is worth about £40k. Can anyone beat that? (EDIT: I'm assuming "precious" means the same as valuable here to make the question easier to answer. In fact, of course, people usually say "precious" when they mean a personal or emotional attachment or cultural importance rather than economic value.)
- iamacyborg 2mo agoI’ve not followed the market much but I suspect some fine press editions of Stephen King’s work would be up there. Of course, tons of standard paperback editions of those that could be pulped.
- new_account_900 2mo ago[dead]
- ck2 2mo agoif they are going to just violate copyright blatantly and price is no object why not just every textbook for every subject in high school and college?
- paweladamczuk 2mo ago> “Under German law scanning books – regardless of the purpose – would not be permissible and constitute a clear violation of copyright law,” Excuse me, what?
- ZenDroid 2mo agohttps://law.stackexchange.com/a/93882 https://law.stackexchange.com/a/93882 "Individual reproductions of a work by a natural person for private use on any medium are permitted, provided they are not used directly or indirectly for commercial purposes …"
- wasmitnetzen 2mo agoGerman copyright law has no Fair Use. There are copyright exemptions for private or academic use, but commercial use has no such exemption. Books have special protection even according to § 53 (4) b). And yes, it's the duplication which is illegal, not the publication of them. [1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__53.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__53.html
- teh64 2mo agoIt does not have "Fair Use" directly, but things like parody or commentary are allowed to use portions of copyrighted work. There a quite a few paragraphs detailing exceptions: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urhg.html#p0321 https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_ur...
- lluisantoni 2mo agoI didn't think about this happening. It reminds me of the cross-border challenges with crypto. Each country has laws to control its author rights or money supply, but those are hard to enforce in the international setup.
- khalic 2mo agoNot exactly top journalism...
- stockresearcher 2mo agoIn the case of English-language books, they’re just working to legitimize the stuff they already obtained via, um, dubious methods. Public domain books - no need to bother, they’ve scraped PG and any other source and can do with it what they like. Used booksellers should raise the price of used books that are of no interest to any real reader.
- criddell 2mo agoWhen I hear these stories of AI companies buying all the books, I think back to Kevin Kelly in 2008 or 2009. He talked about how books are less expensive than at any other time in history and easier to buy and that could change so it makes sense to buy a lot of books. > [...] I was near to the point of actually digitizing and getting rid of all my paper books. > I was that close about five years ago, but then I had an epiphany. I went to private library, and I realized that books were never as cheap as they are today. They never will be as cheap, and that there's some power about having these things in paper always available, no batteries, never obsolete, and that if you made a library now, you would never be able to make some of these libraries in 50 years, so I decided to keep and to cultivate this paper library as something that was going to be powerful in the future. I remember seeing photos of his library but can't find them anymore. This is the only thing I could find: https://colossus.com/article/flounder-mode/ https://colossus.com/article/flounder-mode/
- breezybottom 2mo ago[flagged]
- criddell 2mo agoThe second paragraph in that story lays out the main bullets. He's worth paying attention to. For the past thirty years or so that I've been aware of him he's been more prescient than most.
- VladVladikoff 2mo agoI wish we had competent regulators. Force the scans to be purchased through an official repository. Save the scans and sell them to other companies who also want to train models. Force the companies to make all book requests through the official repository. Give some portion of money paid back to the publishers. This is a solvable problem.
- Oarch 2mo agoCan't these genius AI companies spend a few pennies to develop a non-destructive book scanner? What's the use of all this AI if they can't figure out this relatively simple task.
- sznio 2mo agono, because that's cost and everything needs to be the cheapest possible. only valid spend is money going to the shareholders. and chopping off the spine and putting the stack of paper into an automated scanner saves sooo much money over a $5/hr employee flipping pages all day i think that they might actually want to do the ram gambit all over again - buy up these rare books so that competitors can't get them. destroying them after scanning makes doubly sure that the competition won't get their hands on it
- jjice 2mo agoMy understanding was that they had to legally destroy the books after they processed them for whatever copyright strangeness was involved.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ilamont 2mo agoTwo American self published nonfiction authors I know reported large purchases of new books earlier this year, more than 50 units at a time, via Amazon. This is unusual because the books are not well known. Because the books do not sell well otherwise, they were very few used copies available for sale on Amazon. Here's my AI theory: someone is purchasing lots of books en masse to be packaged and sold for LLM training to multiple clients (not just a single company like Anthropic), but only scanning once and then reselling the scans while preserving a "chain of custody" proof that individual copies were purchased. Claude shot that idea down for reasons related to the intricacies of US first sale doctrine and copyright law, but had an ambiguous response when I proposed that it might be Chinese companies doing something similar for training AI models that are intended for possible resale to overseas markets.
- palmotea 2mo agoIf the orders are that obvious, someone should create some print-on-demand slop and fill the order with it.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo ago[flagged]
- mcphage 2mo ago> nobody wants books anymore I don't really think that's true.
- xerox13ster 2mo agoYour beliefs and attitude around this are incompatible with somebody who believes in Butlerian Jihad. You are essentially saying OK good to thinking machines being built. I cannot express appropriately on this forum in words how deep the disconnect is between your stated position and the position that you label yourself with. Nobody who believes in and would participate in Butlerian Jihad would be sitting here saying “yes good the books are to be destroyed, nobody wanted those anyway and I want to use a thinking machine to read my written material in the future.” In fact, everybody should be using electronic thinking machines to read their books. We should destroy all Thinking Machines, but everybody should be using thinking machines to read their books. Something tells me you never read the Dune books that you were only familiar with that phrase because of the films, but in the book they destroyed all electronics. Even calculators counted as a thinking machine. Come on
- ButlerianJihad 2mo ago1. Dune is fiction, and everything in Dune, every term and name and concept, was made-up and confabulated by the mind of Frank Herbert and his heirs. I greatly prefer A Canticle for Leibowitz, if you really want to know. 2. I am a guy who enjoys irony. I actually tried to read and watch Dune, and I considered it horrible, convoluted, mishmash of pseudo-religious pseudo-science garbage. But the sheer irony of bearing a username that belies my true raison d'etre, it was irresistible. Chef kiss. 3. I have personally seen "Butlerian Jihad" take form in real life. There are graffiti stickers and civil disobedience by people who actually adhere to this ideology. They have already physically prevented me from renting and riding e-Scooters once in a while. I consider them utterly futile, and I disdain their frivolous movement, as a Borg would disdain the Federation, and vice versa. 4. I am ambivalent to the cause of AI in general. Despite participating in building all this around us, I regret it, and I regret my identity as an IT professional. My contributions have caused the world untold pain and heartache. I would undo it all. However, (see #3); we live in a society, and chatbots are beneficial to me in the here and now, so why not indulge myself? Perhaps a combination of my cavalier attitude, my unpopular opinions, and my religious zealotry will give us all a bad name in the end! 5. Thank you for your sincere opinion. Your uniqueness shall be promptly ingested and added to the collective training corpus.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoRelated: AI companies are shredding rare books https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Kassandraripley 2mo ago[flagged]