4 ms·
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 actual
by RajT88 2mo ago
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.
- runarberg 2mo agoAt this scale, there are no guarantees of anything. There very likely will be unique copies in there. If these were expert archivists a lot of damage could be prevented, but given the malice and indifference of AI companies, there very likely will not be an expert archivist involved, and unique copies will be destroyed unceremoniously.
- eru 2mo agoMy personal wastebook at home is so rare, it's unique. That doesn't mean it needs preservation.
- runarberg 2mo agoLike I said, at this scale, there are no guarantees for anything. Very likely will there be a unique copy of an invaluable book or letter an the person feeding it to the scanner will not know and the book get destroyed. Like did Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson ever write an a book about Esperanto, and send the only copy of it to Halldór Laxness when he was in Los Angeles? I don‘t know, but it is certainly something he is likely to have done. If such a book exists it would be invaluable to both Icelandic culture and to Esprentists. It likely would have stayed in Los Angeles where nobody would know the significance of it until it ended up in an estate sale, a used book store, and then finally destroyed by an AI company never to be discovered. My hypothetical is just one of trillions of possibilities. At this scale very likely several of these possibilities will unessiseraly remain unknown unknowns forever.
- eru 2mo agoWell, at least afterwards the book is scanned and preserved digitally in their archives of training data. If the book was just rotting away in some forgotten bookstore, it would more likely be unceremoniously disposed off in the future without anyone scanning it first.
- asdfsa32 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
- eru 2mo agoYou are giving me too much credit: it's made up evidence. It's an illustration that rarity doesn't equal value, and doesn't depend on whether I actually own a wastebook or ten.
- asdfsa32 2mo agoYour point is understood but the crux of the issue is a bit similar to capital punishment, the argument is that risk of losing even one innocent person or useful book isn't worth taking; specially considering the value created for society as part of such risky undertaking, whatever it is exercising capital punishment or scanning and destroying books.
- eru 2mo agoWhenever you build a highway or a bridge or a power plant, your engineers have to put a money value on human life, or at least the worth of a statistical human life. Just to make ordinary engineering decisions. And refusing to do this exercise just means that you behave as-if you put a really silly number on the value of human life, and probably not consistent between different parts of the project. So I don't quite agree with these taboos in the absolute. (I'm still against capital punishment on practical grounds.) For books it's similar: if you taboo book destruction for the AI training folks, that doesn't rescue books from their ordinary pre-AI life cycle of getting destroyed all the time in the course of running a publisher or a library or a second-hand book store. In fact, the AI craze is what's giving rare books _value_ and incentivises people to dig them up and preserve them. Or at least preserve them long enough to be scanned. The scanning might destroy the physical copy of that book, but they save the contents. That's the whole point of scanning after all.
- asdfsa32 2mo ago
- card_zero 2mo agoYour what now? Made from your personal waste? That does sound unique. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wastebook https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wastebook Oh right. But anyway, nobody knows what needs preservation, it's a basic problem of life, somebody usually mentions the BBC throwing out boring old Doctor Who tapes to save archive space because nobody liked it any more at that point in time. Some things should probably be thrown out now and then, I suppose.
- eru 2mo agoThe alternative for many of these un(der)appreciated books is that they will get unceremoniously dumped in the future anyway. The publishing industry and libraries etc dispose off lots and lots of books. So at least with the AI companies they are scanning them and preserving them digitally. Not just in the trained weights, but also as raw training data for future runs. P.S. I'm not sure why you need to make fun of your own ignorance? Just look up the word you don't know and don't mention it?
- fmajid 2mo agoThe AI companies’ working assumption is that if someone found it worth printing, it has enough information content to help train a model. That assumption might be invalid with some of the more rambling self-published books, however.
- alightsoul 2mo agoThere's just a few copies in a single library worldwide which is probably a national or a university library
- tptacek 2mo agoThe 404 story suggested that these are largely vanity press books and instruction manuals for things no longer sold. Implying that these books were almost certainly headed for the recycling center had the AI companies not snatched them up.
- alightsoul 2mo agoThey are useful as a source of non synthetic data, replacing synthetic data consisting of rephrasings of common topics I assume?
- card_zero 2mo agoQuite possibly not many, and no copy held in any form by the copyright owner either. Say a few hundred copies of some obscure book from 40 years ago. They probably won't be erased from the face of the earth by the judicious and proportionate actions of, of a few, AI companies? Hmm.
- willy_k 2mo agoIs there a specific book from 40 years ago you have in mind? Asking out of curiosity.
- ipaddr 2mo agoBooks by Zolar are interesting hard to find all editions. The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse probably still has 100s of copies available but hate to see it lost.
- scarmig 2mo agoThe hypothetical "heroic figure goes and buys last copy of a 1962 guide to Ford cars to carefully maintain it in an appropriately climate controlled library" is vanishingly unlikely. A ten or a hundred or a thousand times to one, it just goes to the trash. At least here it gets scanned by the AI company.
- asaddhamani 2mo agoBut that scan is never made available to us in its original form. So it getting scanned by the AI company does nothing to preserve the book.
- scarmig 2mo agoDumpsters also don't typically come equipped with a robot scanner and network uplink built in. Like, I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books. They don't get sent to some magical library in the countryside if unpurchased where they are carefully maintained forever (next to where Rover spends the rest of his days). They are very literally thrown into the trash. That said, I'd be thrilled if the US government required AI companies to make them available to the public. I'd even settle for the US government making it legal for them to.
- enraged_camel 2mo agoAlso, a lot of these "rare books" are stuff like TV programming magazines from October 1994.
- card_zero 2mo agoSo, have you tried finding out what the programming was in October 1994? Or what cultural ephemera appeared in the TV guides of that era alongside the schedules? Either there's a copy for the week you want in an archive, or somebody's got one for sale, or most often neither. This can piss you off, if as it happened you had a reason to care.
- tptacek 2mo agoThat would make sense as an argument if the natural endpoint of these copies was preservation, and AI was disrupting that. But the natural next step for virtually all these books is to be recycled, not preserved. Books are generally not preserved. It is extremely normal for them to be pulped. Millions and millions of books are pulped every year.
- pfdietz 2mo agoAround a million books are destroyed each day in the US.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mslt 2mo agoMight as well grind up the tablet of complaint to Ea-nāṣir and make cement out it, right? What use could there be in preserving the mundane facets of everyday existence?
- dukeyukey 2mo agoIt's more that, we don't need to preserve a million copies of the same mundane book. Losing a few copies to AI training is fine.
- ErigmolCt 2mo agoI suspect rare here often means out of print or commercially obscure, not unique