5 ms·

>From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limi

>From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge. How tho? Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take them home, so the seller doesn't have to pack them for the trip back. Just the other day, there was a whole bin of books in front of a shop, offering them for 50 cents a piece. They will be destroyed anyways. Unless they are buying and destroying really old, rare books or important small-print books, it is not much damage. It is not like they will buy "all copies of all of the books", just one. And its just that the data in physical print most likely hasn't been used for training, so this can help you find more unmined quality data. Nobody is stealing your books, preventing you from buying more or destroying all copies of a single book. And some of these books would rot out of circulation or be destroyed anyways. Some people throw away 80-100 year old books on the regular, as they might just be unimportant to them or the world in general. And once the last copy is thrown or rots, that book will die forever. This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.

starkd 1mo ago
Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.
- sergimansilla 1mo ago
  No, they are destroying them because that’s the way that they can keep a digital copy legally.
  - beering 1mo ago
    This is not true. Google Books does not destroy books. No court has ruled that you must destroy books to legally keep a digital copy.
    - tingletech 1mo ago
      I think under first sale doctrine you have a much stronger case with destructive scanning. Google Books, HathiTrust, and Internet Archive's book scanning project have had a lot of legal expenses.
- fortran77 1mo ago
  They are destroying them because it’s easier to scan them if you slice the binding.
  - cdkmoose 1mo ago
    And very hard to re-assemble after you have done that. They are not in the book binding business.
  - eloisant 1mo ago
    I didn't fully understand why but apparently there is also a legal reason to destroy the books, it makes it them less likely to be considered copyright infringement.
    - beering 1mo ago
      Not really. Selling the book onward does seem legally dubious but legally nothing (yet) prevents you from storing the book in a warehouse. obviously it’s cheaper to dispose of them.
- voidhorse 1mo ago
  You don't know that. A major part of the problem here is the lack of transparency. Keep in mind we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.
  - andsoitis 1mo ago
    > we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism. Pretty feeble investigative journalism if they cannot give us the names of even 5 such books we are supposed to be outraged about.
    - shagie 1mo ago
      While not an authoritative source... https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_trade_commission_is_being_urged_to/p513eyx/ https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_... (and not actual book titles) > Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc. So... something like Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 - https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Conference-U-S/dp/9027715289/ref=sr_1_2 https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe... I make no claims that that's a such a book that's been ordered, but that's the type of book that the reddit post references.
      - alightsoul 1mo ago
        That data is useful as a source of scientific knowledge even if it's not current. Although it's probably already online, they probably don't want to download it and risk getting another copyright lawsuit
Mudbugs 1mo ago
Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today) Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead. The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
- WarmWash 1mo ago
  I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing. The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.
  - p-e-w 1mo ago
    This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is. The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.
    - andsoitis 1mo ago
      > This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is. The internet has amplified voices who say things to signal rather than do things to change. That's orthogonal to knowing what "the right thing" is.
      - Lerc 1mo ago
        The increase in people who believe that perception is reality has the logical consequences of people shouting their opinions loudly enough so that it becomes 'the right thing'
ro_sharp 1mo ago
You’re equating something being ubiquitous and affordable with it not being valuable. Yes, there are plenty of books, many were printed, many have lasted a very long time (plenty over 100 years!). That says more about the success and utility of the technology than it does about whether individual books should be shredded.
chrisjj 1mo ago
> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned But unreadable by humans, right?
- mjdv 1mo ago
  They're scans. Those are human-readable. They probably won't make them available to the public, which is the exact same state they would be in if they bought the books and just put them on a bookshelf in a warehouse.
  - alightsoul 1mo ago
    That was due to negligence. Now it is profitable to keep the books private, and actively deny others access to them.
    - ceasesurthinko 1mo ago
      Ah, yes, because we all know OpenAI and Anthropic are famously just front operations for the high-end antiquarian book trade.
      - alightsoul 1mo ago
        That's an in house operation that benefits them, not a front.
      - merely-unlikely 1mo ago
        High-end antiquarian book traders is a genuinely hilarious way to describe them and I shall refer to them as such henceforth.
RIMR 1mo ago
Those books at the flea market aren't "rotting", they are available for sale. You seem perfectly fine living in a world where your flea market is devoid of books.
- otherme123 1mo ago
  A lot of them are rotting. We are not talking "one of the three living copies of the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses". Rather "1956 statistics of the cultive of yuca in 'some small village from Mexico': a boring analysis". Those books have value to train LLMs as they are 100% free of AI text, but has been collecting dust (or rotting) in someone's room for decades, and no human is buying them even for 10 cents. Also, Anna's text implies that the books are scanned and then mischievously destroyed so nobody has access again to the content. That's not the case: the books are "destroyed" before scanning, by dissasembling them in pages so they can be feed to the scanner. Scanning while keeping the book intact is difficult, as you need to software-unwarp the page before OCR'ing it, and expensive as you either need specialized scanners or humans doing it.
- hypendev 1mo ago
  No, they are not. A lot of them are rotting and get thrown or given at the end of the day.
voidhorse 1mo ago
> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine. But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, training is a lossy, noninvertible transformation. The LLM cannot legally produce the book verbatim, it will only spit out a regurgitation of the information, chopped and mingled into a broad information space. Furthermore, these "magic machines" are not the property of the public. They are owned by a handful of corporations who want to charge you continuously for every token output by the machine. So, not only is the original text locked away forever behind company walls, you now need to pay for access to an approximation of the original contents which you can no longer even verify as being correct because the source is no longer accessible. If you are cool with this, from a cost perspective you are cool with a deal whereby I trade you access to a definite resource for a one time fee of $N for, instead, a perpetual cost of $M to you every month/day/hour for access to an amalgam in which you cannot even determine what proportion of the resource you are actually getting. You're basically saying you're cool with me selling you some unknown portion of wine for a monthly subscription price instead of selling you a definitive amount of wine for a one time fee. lol.
- joshstrange 1mo ago
  Are you under the impression they scan the book, train on it, then destroy the digital copy? Because that's not what's happening. They scan it, and hold it forever to train future models on. The scan still exists, not available to the general public but that's no different than if they had bought the books and kept them in a private library closed to the public.
  - anjel 1mo ago
    Destroying the physical copy inflates the value of the retained digital copy
dumb_notsmart 1mo ago
Oho you think they're buying common books? Books they can find online already?
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
vin047 1mo ago
>it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge This sentence reminded me of “The Things” by Peter Watts. The Thing in that short story believes it’s actually the good guy and decides to commit “violent integration” for the sake of humanity. I’m not sure I buy the links premise that Anthropic is doing this with malice, but if it were, would be an eerie parallel.

starkd 1mo ago

Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.

sergimansilla 1mo ago
No, they are destroying them because that’s the way that they can keep a digital copy legally.
- beering 1mo ago
  This is not true. Google Books does not destroy books. No court has ruled that you must destroy books to legally keep a digital copy.
  - tingletech 1mo ago
    I think under first sale doctrine you have a much stronger case with destructive scanning. Google Books, HathiTrust, and Internet Archive's book scanning project have had a lot of legal expenses.
fortran77 1mo ago
They are destroying them because it’s easier to scan them if you slice the binding.
- cdkmoose 1mo ago
  And very hard to re-assemble after you have done that. They are not in the book binding business.
- eloisant 1mo ago
  I didn't fully understand why but apparently there is also a legal reason to destroy the books, it makes it them less likely to be considered copyright infringement.
  - beering 1mo ago
    Not really. Selling the book onward does seem legally dubious but legally nothing (yet) prevents you from storing the book in a warehouse. obviously it’s cheaper to dispose of them.
voidhorse 1mo ago
You don't know that. A major part of the problem here is the lack of transparency. Keep in mind we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.
- andsoitis 1mo ago
  > we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism. Pretty feeble investigative journalism if they cannot give us the names of even 5 such books we are supposed to be outraged about.
  - shagie 1mo ago
    While not an authoritative source... https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_trade_commission_is_being_urged_to/p513eyx/ https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_... (and not actual book titles) > Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc. So... something like Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 - https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Conference-U-S/dp/9027715289/ref=sr_1_2 https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe... I make no claims that that's a such a book that's been ordered, but that's the type of book that the reddit post references.
    - alightsoul 1mo ago
      That data is useful as a source of scientific knowledge even if it's not current. Although it's probably already online, they probably don't want to download it and risk getting another copyright lawsuit

Mudbugs 1mo ago

Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today) Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead. The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.

WarmWash 1mo ago
I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing. The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.
- p-e-w 1mo ago
  This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is. The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.
  - andsoitis 1mo ago
    > This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is. The internet has amplified voices who say things to signal rather than do things to change. That's orthogonal to knowing what "the right thing" is.
    - Lerc 1mo ago
      The increase in people who believe that perception is reality has the logical consequences of people shouting their opinions loudly enough so that it becomes 'the right thing'

ro_sharp 1mo ago

You’re equating something being ubiquitous and affordable with it not being valuable. Yes, there are plenty of books, many were printed, many have lasted a very long time (plenty over 100 years!). That says more about the success and utility of the technology than it does about whether individual books should be shredded.

chrisjj 1mo ago

> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned But unreadable by humans, right?

mjdv 1mo ago
They're scans. Those are human-readable. They probably won't make them available to the public, which is the exact same state they would be in if they bought the books and just put them on a bookshelf in a warehouse.
- alightsoul 1mo ago
  That was due to negligence. Now it is profitable to keep the books private, and actively deny others access to them.
  - ceasesurthinko 1mo ago
    Ah, yes, because we all know OpenAI and Anthropic are famously just front operations for the high-end antiquarian book trade.
    - alightsoul 1mo ago
      That's an in house operation that benefits them, not a front.
    - merely-unlikely 1mo ago
      High-end antiquarian book traders is a genuinely hilarious way to describe them and I shall refer to them as such henceforth.

RIMR 1mo ago

Those books at the flea market aren't "rotting", they are available for sale. You seem perfectly fine living in a world where your flea market is devoid of books.

otherme123 1mo ago
A lot of them are rotting. We are not talking "one of the three living copies of the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses". Rather "1956 statistics of the cultive of yuca in 'some small village from Mexico': a boring analysis". Those books have value to train LLMs as they are 100% free of AI text, but has been collecting dust (or rotting) in someone's room for decades, and no human is buying them even for 10 cents. Also, Anna's text implies that the books are scanned and then mischievously destroyed so nobody has access again to the content. That's not the case: the books are "destroyed" before scanning, by dissasembling them in pages so they can be feed to the scanner. Scanning while keeping the book intact is difficult, as you need to software-unwarp the page before OCR'ing it, and expensive as you either need specialized scanners or humans doing it.
hypendev 1mo ago
No, they are not. A lot of them are rotting and get thrown or given at the end of the day.

voidhorse 1mo ago

> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine. But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, training is a lossy, noninvertible transformation. The LLM cannot legally produce the book verbatim, it will only spit out a regurgitation of the information, chopped and mingled into a broad information space. Furthermore, these "magic machines" are not the property of the public. They are owned by a handful of corporations who want to charge you continuously for every token output by the machine. So, not only is the original text locked away forever behind company walls, you now need to pay for access to an approximation of the original contents which you can no longer even verify as being correct because the source is no longer accessible. If you are cool with this, from a cost perspective you are cool with a deal whereby I trade you access to a definite resource for a one time fee of $N for, instead, a perpetual cost of $M to you every month/day/hour for access to an amalgam in which you cannot even determine what proportion of the resource you are actually getting. You're basically saying you're cool with me selling you some unknown portion of wine for a monthly subscription price instead of selling you a definitive amount of wine for a one time fee. lol.

joshstrange 1mo ago
Are you under the impression they scan the book, train on it, then destroy the digital copy? Because that's not what's happening. They scan it, and hold it forever to train future models on. The scan still exists, not available to the general public but that's no different than if they had bought the books and kept them in a private library closed to the public.
- anjel 1mo ago
  Destroying the physical copy inflates the value of the retained digital copy

dumb_notsmart 1mo ago

Oho you think they're buying common books? Books they can find online already?

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

vin047 1mo ago

>it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge This sentence reminded me of “The Things” by Peter Watts. The Thing in that short story believes it’s actually the good guy and decides to commit “violent integration” for the sake of humanity. I’m not sure I buy the links premise that Anthropic is doing this with malice, but if it were, would be an eerie parallel.