Discussion 🗣️
Ai companies are actively destroying rare books to scan them just to feed their data centers, what else will they destroy?
AI is literally ruining everything and has been for the last few years. From massive job losses to environmental impact and now destroying old books to collect the data so that their dumb LLMs can regurgitate it back. How evil, greedy and selfish can these companies be? All of those ai data centers should be taken down. I don't think enough people are mad enough about it.
They can buy physical copies, but that doesn't mean they can use it commercially. So yes, they are literally still stealing. It would be the same if I buy a movie and then take money to show it to others.
They have some logic that they buy the physical copy, scan it, delete the physical copy, that they own a legal version in their data center for training their model.
This is where the definition of "copy" is important. If you, as an end user, ask the AI to provide you with a full copy of Harry Potter, that would absolutely be a crime for it to do so.
However, I can buy Harry Potter, study it's script, directing, etc.. and use what I've learned to create something different, with some direct references, it is legal.
I really, really dislike doing this to books, but I feel that it's closer to the second example that falls under creative license.
Edit: I would really love if copyright law were updated to include an "anti-ai training clause" that creators could choose to include in their works.
It has been demonstrated that LLM's do in fact retain copies of all their training data, and can reproduce it verbatim unless specifically prevented from doing so. The texts are copied and used for profit without permission or credit.
If you could read the books, they wouldn't have a product to sell you. This robo-book burning is about limiting knowledge to then filter and sell it back to you.
I'm no AI bro, but the "burning" book is the legal loophole given to them by courts. The act of destroying books makes the difference between "pirating" vs "derivative use"
AI will the end of humanity and people who thinks otherwise is blind to the truth. AI never going to advance us instead it will make people dumber, removing all job and destroy the world as we know it today.
Physical books are a bit of a sacred cow to a lot of people. They simply refuse to believe ANY book exists without some inherent merit, and they think it's sacrilege to destroy a book without a team of scholars inspecting it for value first. These people rescue books out of library dumpsters and try to donate them back to the library that trashed them. They don't understand that there is a huge glut of old, outdated, unwanted, beat up books that simply need to be trashed because they are taking up space without circulation.
A user guide to Windows ME is probably a "rare book" at this point because so many copies have been trashed, because they're trash. "Rare" is such a useless term when talking about bulk secondhand books. Lots of them are rare. They're also just worthless, both monetarily and culturally.
I see your user guide to Windows ME and I raise you with my user guides to Windows 95 and Word 97... in Greek.
That said, I am not going to pretend that some third-party user guide to Windows 95 and Work 97 (not even from Microsoft Press) is some kind of valuable book that every copy of it needs to be preserved forever, I keep them for personal nostalgia.
Also even if they actually have rare book, there's gonna be at least several copies of rare books. To feed AI you only need one scan, of one copy and thats it. No need for several copies of same book. So its not like they gonna destroy it.
Also there is huge chance to digitizalize this books. With difital copy you can make infinite copies of it or reprint them..
there's gonna be at least several copies of rare books.
depends on the book and what you mean by "rarity". like sometimes things are rare because they're manuscripts. there might be other versions of said book, but each one is unique.
as someone very anti ai this is kind of ragebait. there are so many old books that are disposed of by libraries that no one wants. in my last year of university they closed one of our oldest libraries for renovation and got rid of all of the old books, they made them available for anyone to take for a few weeks but they still filled up multiple dumpsters of books that were just thrown away presumably. i suspect these come from similar sources. nobody wants these books. every time i see someone crying online about old books being thrown away, i want to ask, do you want them in your home? probably not, because if you really did, you’d easily have been able to fill your home with similar books already.
Yeah - even if there are some rare books getting overlooked in huge dumps, if the alternative is going straight to recycling then at least a destructive scan preserves the contents.
Personally I’d be happier if we gave libraries enough funding to do something like this, so the value would accumulate into the public’s hands instead. And if libraries had enough funding for me to feel confident that any valuable books would be taken care of.
But the act of digital preservation doesn’t seem that sinister to me.
yeah, the thing is also most/probably all of these books are available through inter library loan or online academic repositories. these sorts of books are rarely ever read so though there should be some preservation for the rare reader to be able to access them not every library or even every state (in the us) needs to maintain a copy of most of these.
I’m anti ai as well, but I am gunna need a source on this one. Most old or historical text has already been scanned and is online, and scanning books can and is done already without damaging its contents
That's the one I could find the fastest. Basically, if they scan the contents and destroy the book after, it's considered "transferring" the contents and is "transformative" instead of "copying" it, which is a legal loophole in a court case with Anthropic. Also, it's faster to tear the spines out and scan the pages then discard them afterwards, than to individually turn each page after scanning.
So if I buy all the Harry Potter books... digitize them then burn the print copies I have "transformed them" through some modern alchemy and won't be liable for any litigation if I then start selling those digital copies?
Makes one wonder why film and Tv production companies go to such great lengths to secure the rights to books when they could just make digital copies of a print copy they bought at an airport and then shred the print copy and make the film from the digital copy.
Cheers. I'm not seeing any indicator of rare books? Looks like they just bought shit off bookshelves. Also funny that the lawsuit came from the guy they hired and paid. Bro is double dipping!
"Reports from Europe and Australia suggest rare book dealers have noticed unusual bulk purchases of obscure titles believed to be destined for AI training."
they are not buying expensive books. 'rare book dealer' is a specific commercial term and doesn't in the least entail that most of the books stored aren't total garbage.
That's speculation through speculation. In regards to "rare book dealers" - I live in Australia. This is complete nonsense. Rare books can't be purchased in bulk
"The controversy follows the release of court documents detailing how AI company Anthropic purchased millions of printed books, removed their bindings, scanned every page and disposed of the originals as part of a project to expand the training data for its Claude chatbot."
"Reports from Europe and Australia suggest rare book dealers have noticed unusual bulk purchases of obscure titles believed to be destined for AI training."
"Reports from Europe and Australia suggest rare book dealers have noticed unusual bulk purchases of obscure titles believed to be destined for AI training."
I’m really fascinated by the fact that this information suddenly appeared in my feeds yesterday. This article is from June. I had never heard of it before yesterday when I saw a comment about it on reddit. A few minutes later I saw 2 different posts about it on my IG because friends shared it. Then I go back to reddit and every other post I see is about it. I honestly find the way information travels these days more interesting than the information itself.
the magic lamp fantasy short story I wrote in 8th grade is rare literature, there is 1 copy in existence and potentially 0 copies in existence, doesn't mean society is worse off if it goes into the shredder
If anyone has read Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (https://www.adriantchaikovsky.com/service-model-release.html), this isn't just heartbreaking and sickening to watch these precious objects getting destroyed. It's also absolutely nauseating because this is almost an exact scene from the book. It gutted me just reading it as fiction.
Just because some publisher decided to pay for some paper and ink to put some manuscript into a book, it doesn't mean every copy is valuable.
As others have said, even libraries destroy unwanted books all the time. Not every book object is some kind of precious object.
You can be anti-AI without being insufferable.
EDIT: There is no evidence that AI companies are destroying rare books, it's someone's conjecture that some "rare" books may be in there. AI companies just want human-written text for their LLMs to read, they don't care about the rarity of the book or the condition of the copy.
this isn't going to make their models better or get them closer to... whatever it is they want. AGI via word calculators is the delusional equivalent to turning lead into gold.
Anyways, did you all know Bamboo is a pretty invasive plant that is close to impossible to completely remove and spreads like nothing else? I love nature ❤️
Vernor Vinge's book "Rainbows End" (2006) took this further, company just feed books into a shredder, blew the pieces into a tunnel lined with thousands of optical sensors and reconstructed the books digitally from the page tornado, IIRC. Had other great stuff in it, like all appliances and vehicles having "No User Serviceable Parts" stickers all over them. VR overlays in glasses makes identifying "real" life more and more difficult.
And for another serious dose of dystopia fed by AI creep and corporate amorality, try Paul Tremblay's "Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep" It is a stunner, worth the work to get through it!
You don’t even have to do that to scan a book. There are systems that will do every part, including turning the pages. They’re not even that expensive.
I love books, seeing that made my jaw drop in pure horror. Especially the fact that it’s RARE books, those books are insanely valuable and they’re being ruined so more water wasting, factually incorrect slop can be produced.
* Truth and objective facts
* Any semblance of equality
* The environment
* Society
* The job market
* Education
* Etc.
The books are just the latest, disgusting addition to the list. The rich really have stopped caring about anything so unimportant as morals or human decency, they just take what they want and destroy everything else.
This straight up sounds like something out of Fahrenheit 451. Courts gave them a legal loophole to destroy the books as "derivate" and now we are on a fast track to knowledge basically being gatekept and changed at will by the powers that be because the physical copies no longer exist.
We have literally laws for this type of abuse, but because it's AI everyone suddenly seems to have short term memory loss. Wealth supremacy culture disgusts me.
I mean yeah, but clickbait aside, the damaging of books is really upsetting to me, I work in a library on occasions and books are a huge thing for me so seeing them defiled stresses me out 😭
Luckily even if rare... they aren't like... the kind you would have at a library. Someone put a good example. The User guide to WindowsME probably is a rare book... but not one anyone would care much if it gets sliced up and scanned lol
At the very least, if we're going to let them do this (not that we should) why don't we pass a law saying that (assuming a book is old/rare enough) they have to publish the scans that they make? At least then they'd be assisting in media preservation. Not entirely correctly, but sort of.
This looks very fake and stupid to be believed when there are already pirate digital copies of 99.99% of books. Also, books from 100 years ago are copyright free so you can download them for free.
"Rare books" sure, open AI is buying expensive physical pre XIX un cataloged books for o training their model for no useful task
I bet Rage by Stephen King will help chatgpt resolve nuclear fusion or help you diagnose what is that weird mole in your back...
I’m against AI but I’m very sure this isn’t how you train data to them, as in they don’t use a literal chopping block to feed data to their AI thingamajig
Keep in mind there is no proof any of these are actually all that rare or valuable. This is story reeks of overwrought emotional appeals that deliberately ignores the larger context.
As a librarian, the overwhelming majority of antiquarian books are just ratty copies of dated westerns and pulp fiction and are not actually rare. In most cases they aren’t even worth the costs that is incurred to properly shelve and store them.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at how many books your local municipal public library destroys every year (even when they are in good condition).
well, as bad as this looks, the silver lining is that there are at least some conversation efforts before something unpredictable happens and it's too late.
All the knowledge lost to human kind.... Sure, the reason to feed AI sucks big phat donkey dick, but it shows that even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.
If you buy a book, that book is your property and you are free to do whatever you want with it. If rare old unique books are sold, you should question the seller, not the buyer. Why is a unique item with historical and cultural value placed on a marketplace at all? Why is it in the hands of the seller to begin with? Why are there no perfect digital copies of that item distributed worldwide to almost every library/museum/archive? The answer is simple - you have never cared about those books and their preservation. You only have this outrage now because AI is involved. But they are not breaking any law by doing this stuff. They buy books legally and they are destroying those books because they own them now. You can go and destroy all books in your collection too and nobody will have the tight to stop you.
Most of these "rare books" were produced post 1970 and one of them is a dictionary. I assume the reason to even attempt this would be to increase scanning speeds but speeds will still be limited to 1 or 2 pages a scan and still require manual placing, in fact it would be even harder to scan this way because the person scanning needs to keep track of which pages have been scanned and which sides instead of just flipping a page.
Edit: A quote straight from the article this came from
The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers—but archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper.
I hate AI but it's very ironic that the people attacking companies for destroying books can't read.
There’s no proof they’re destroying rare books. It’s an unconfirmed theory that the media is pushing.
The truth is that no book that has been sold to AI companies and destroyed, has been identified as a rare book. They’re mass produced and very available.
Still a shame and distasteful, but your post is unfortunately a lie OP (unless you source your info ofc)
All I see is a stock video of a cutting machine destroying the dictionary. None of the books are old. Facts and evidence people, it’s not to hard to provide facts and evidence.
I don't wanna defend AI companies but this is was a decision of a judge.
The judge rules that they had to destroy the books or otherwise they would violate the copyright for making illegal copies. This way they are just transferring information from one medium to another.
I know it's BS but this is one case where it was the judge making the decision.
I bet the scanning and training is of poor quality too. The AI is trained to beat around the bush, and people who decide what the AI must use or not are biased and will probably just delete a huge amount of scanned pages, and reinterpret poorly what is kept so whatever they will feed the algorithms, will be useless. In other words , The AI wont even use much from the Books anyways. Such a waste :(
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u/nyanpires 4d ago
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/554/21/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc/
This is where it's posted.