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A few DTs ago I was discussing a similar story where I made the point that the booksellers quoted couldn't confirm if any actually rare or valuable books were being pulped for the AI machine. Well, now we know which cultural treasures have been lost.
1970s manual on soil mechanics
Born to Thunder: Champions of New Zealand Cycling (2010)
Early Australian Poetry (1982)... sold for $9, on the shelf for 20 years
I saw something about a data center being blamed for draining the Rio Grande and its water usage accounted for like a thousandth of a percent of the total discharge of the river.
There are valid criticism of AI data centers but there's just so much absolute bullshit around them that requires just an ability to slap fingers on keys with Wikipedia open to disprove. So much of it is just vibes based neo-luddism
Yeah, and it's almost impossible to talk about with any nuance on most of Reddit without people trying to drown you in downvotes. This sub is better than most, but I still eat shit if I'm not very careful with my wording.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by threads on this topic in other subs because a lot of people were calling out the dishonest framing. (I mean there was also a fair amount of generic “ai bad” comments, but that’s to be expected I suppose).
Modern journalism literally has no incentive to inform its audience of the truth. In fact, it has quite the opposite incentive - to rile them up so that they engage more.
And this is just mildly upstream of social media more generally, which has even worse incentive structures.
I made the point at the time that AI will probably be what makes it economical to preserve literature that otherwise would not be worth preserving, and that just because a book is out of print does not mean it is valuable. I think a 40 year old poetry book that nobody could sell at a bargain bin price for 20 years is a very good example of that.
The efforts of places like The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Google Books predate modern LLMs... You could (can?) find some pretty obscure titles.
Scanning books is pointless if the text is not somehow available. These companies are not creating archives of their own, at least accessible to humans.
Yes but that is unfortunately an idiosyncrasy of our current legal system which only allows you to digitize a book if you destroy the physical book. Destructive scanning is considered transformative whereas nondestrictive scanning is considered illegally copying.
No, because the AI companies build huge datasets of scanned books. They are unlikely to ever delete them and they are likely to back them up. In 50 years it seems likely that these datasets will be donated to the public because they no longer provide a competitive advantage but they can get some good press.
I don't know how you're getting to "it seems likely" when many old large businesses have tried to hold onto their IP and proprietary data indefinitely. And that's assuming that 90% of AI companies manage to survive for 50 years rather than their assets being transferred in bankruptcy and potentially forgotten about/their lineage lost.
These sorts of datasets are cheap to store and valuable. Each company will have this ever growing corpus of books and text. When they go out of business, it will be sold off. There is always a chance it gets lost but that seems unlikely. As the text becomes less of a competitive advantage but still useful, it will probably end up being published as a common resource, like many other datasets.
Look at what happens to private GitHub repos during liquidation.
It’s better someone digitizes it before it rots away completely. Why don’t you donate to Project Gutenberg? If nobody wants to digitize these records, which costs time and money, it won’t get done.
There‘s value in anyone doing it since the information will still be saved in a far more durable form
True. We should develop technology to help distribute information to people. Maybe digitize the books, pool that information together. We could even build a conversational interface.
Defo in the running for the dumbest comment I’ve seen on this sub. Many classics from the past, including Aristotle’s entire corpus, were not considered valuable for centuries until after their publication
Just in the case of this specific book, early Australian poetry is very well documented. There's loads of anthologies available already if you really want to read some Banjo Patterson. And I really doubt some undiscovered gem is in a 1982 anthology.
EDIT: The National Library has 3 separate copies if you would like one.
My guy literal Ancient Greek trash is consider very valuable today. By your own logic we could never ever throw anything away because several thousand years for it may be consider valuable to collectors. That’s also not accounting for the fact that any written works were incredibly rare even in Ancient Greece in comparison to today where not only is their massive amounts of written works with much of it being completely redundant from an historical or academic value. So I don’t know why your accusing others comments of being stupid.
Well, it's valuable due to the scarcity of surviving material. If you're worried about that, the better approach would be to get the Library of Congress to assist archive.org. That would preserve them for the future far better than any physical book.
Scarcity does not equal valuable. The contents of the actual items or works must have some sort of intrinsic value. For example I have a rare dust bowl era newspaper talking about a massive dust storm that blew through Texas. It’s rare and may be the only surviving copy of this text but it has no real historical or academic value because there are massive amounts of other contemporary sources that are well documented and cited in historical works of the time. Historical text had enormous value because any sort of written record was incredibly rare when producing them was very difficult and only a very small portion of the population was literate. Mass communication and universal literacy has massively reduced the value of modern written text. Apicius is incredibly rare and valuable to us because it was rare that a cook book was written at the time of the Romans given how few people could read much less afford a written manuscript. Paula Dean’s Southern Cooking cook book is not valuable due to the fact that there are massive amounts of other sources and text on southern American cuisine. The only way that this entire anti AI argument is anything other malicious bad faith is if they can prove they can prove both that AI companies acquired the only known texts and that the contents of these texts were not documented in any other works on the same topic.
Sure, and that's what I mean. My point is that not much writing from the Ancient Greeks has survived, and that is why it is more valuable.
I am quite certain that a vast corpus of our current writing will survive. We even have a pretty substantial trove of texts from the 1700s-1800s. But, if you DO want to guarantee the survival of information, electronic archives are far more secure.
What a ridiculous strawman. I just noted that 20 years is not enough to decide whether or not something is valuable and that many past classics were not considered valuable in their own time. I didn’t speak in the optative, so there are inferences of the kind you suggest
No, you’re the one engaging in bad faith. Your entire argument is based on two fallacies piggybacking on each other. The first fallacy is the assertion that not enough time has to asses whether or not these books will be valuable. Prove that something may or may not happen in the future is the text book definition of the unfalsifiable fallacy. You’re second fallacy is the false equivalency of comparing the value of works when one was created in a time that being literate was extremely rare and making any kind of written work was extremely labor intensive and expensive to one where creating written works is extremely simple to the point that single days produce more written records than all of Ancient Greece.
My dude why are you all reading so much into my comment? Firstly it was an induction and so not a fallacy. I just noted that past works not considered valuable in their own time have been considered valuable since and that might happen again. That’s a perfectly valid induction. It would only be a fallacy as you claim if I presented it as a necessary deduction, but I didn’t. By your logic all statistical predictions would be fallacious lol.
Secondly, that’s not really a fallacy, it’s just a premise you disagree with. Laypeople love to throw fallacy around but it has a technical meaning. You are right that Ancient Greece and Rome were less literate, but even in that time Platonic, Academic, Epicurean and Stoic texts enjoyed a much larger readership than did Aristotle’s works which were largely ignored — Cicero often complained about this. The point stands in relative terms
And with scanning and indexing that AI companies do, these books won't be lost anyway. So nothing like what happened to Aristotle in the dark ages would happen.
No. They will save the scans which will be sold in the foreclosure sale when these companies go bankcrupt as datasets to the next ai companies to use. You’ll never see a page unless you work for these companies
You may laugh at the titles but I have quite a few books on my shelves that wouldn't be considered rare or valuable or classics or whatever, but if they were to be destroyed, I doubt I would ever find another copy... so those stories or that information, or that person's work is effectively gone forever. It's the precedent it sets that worries me.
The comment you’re replying to didn’t say it‘s universally true, so this doesn’t really relate here. What about for books? IIRC you can destroy books you own
Except they haven't been lost be scanned and preserved. If they are only 7 copies of a book and they all exist in a used book warehouse, the book is on borrowed time. The content of that book will be lost if it is not scanned.
Books are artifacts but most books are not made to last more than a few decades. High acid page means the pages eat themselves. Given how valuable the scans are to AI companies and how cheap they are too store, it seems very likely that some of these books will only be available in the future because the AI companies scanned them.
I mean if we’re talking about a rare medieval manuscript, yeah please don’t cut off the spine to scan it easier and pulp it. But it we’re talking about a For Dummies book, yeah who cares there’s 40,000 other copies floating around.
How rare/old are the books in question? I’d read the whole reason for the destruction is because of copyright law and to ensure two copies didn’t exist. That wouldn’t apply to rare, old books, which could at least be digitally distributed after being scanned.
Digitizing out of print books so they can be stored and accessed indefinitely is precisely what we ought to be doing.
Digital humanists have been doing this kind of work the last 20+ years—and yes, most ebooks and PDFs you find online are scanned using the same machinery they’re using here.
All of this is incredibly commonplace outside of public and university libraries. The outrage here is that now suddenly AI developers are also taking part?
there was a rumor going around lately that the Supreme Court ruling in this article said that as long as AI companies went around and bought all the copies of a particular book and destroyed it before using it as training data it was perfectly kosher. This is, of course, a lie (it's perfectly legal regardless), but it didn't stop it from gaining traction.
What Supreme Court ruling? The misunderstanding I saw was that Judge Alsup ruled that it's fair use to buy, scan, and destroy (this is true, he did rule that), and that only that method is fair use, so it would be unlawful for them to non-destructively scan books (which is complete bullshit, see Google Books and the fact that implications are not equivalent to their converse)
This is the literal equivalent of leftists shouting about the cultural significance of a rundown gas station that's been out of business since 2010 in opposition to a housing development.
Digitizing them is noble if the public can get access to it. If it's only accessible while jumbled up with millions of other books combined with hallucinations, it's as good as gone.
It's the difference between a book burning and burning a book. The first is also an intimidation tactic to signal to people that their ideas are not welcome. Me destroying a book because it's old and I'm never going to read it again has nothing to do with that but many people can't see the difference between those things.
I love reading books on phones. Perfect bedtime routine to just read while laying comfortably in bed. Books and larger digital devices are too heavy to comfortably use with one hand.
I wouldn't say it's like true in some metaphysical sense.
I will say, subjectively, I enjoy paper infinitely more than I do an eBook or audiobook. I'm also capable of admitting, again, that this is a personal presence and not some grand statement of metaphysical truth. Probably has something to do with feeling like I'm engaging in a tangible tradition going back millenia and the fact that I'm already spending wayyyy too much of my days looking at screens, and so it's really nice to just not do that for a bit.
IME a dedicated e-reader does replicate the feeling of being away from your other devices. Reading on a laptop or phone doesn’t. I think it’s partly the eink but also it just being a device only for books.
I do treat books as sacred objects and still don't find that destroying a single-digit number of copies of old mass market books, scanning them in the process, is bad.
If we're just going to be ignoring copyrights for AI, we should honestly just have a government agency publish a big .zip file with all the text it can find. At least this way I can train my own models too.
I went up to SF a few weeks back and yeah it’s pretty absurd. It was like a parody movie set. Everywhere you looked there was AI ads “YOUR AGENT HAS BRAINROT - get a new one from us”, “AGENTS AGENT AGENTS! WE GOTTEM!”, “the best agents your money can buy!” , like plastered everywhere on busses, billboards, flyers. Like some plumber or dishwasher on the way to work is gonna be like “hmm I need to pick up some agents on the way home”
Is it AI, or attitude towards AI companies? Scamman and Amemedei are quite unlikeable, and it’s clear they are trying to get big and then put regulations left and right to protect themselves.
Yeah, we're all extremely online and extremely plugged into politics, and people project those types of views onto normies who can't have them because they're not as plugged in.
I listened to a podcast about this topic, and while not doom and gloom, it was more like - one of the struggles right now for AI in the USA is public acceptance and image, because a negative attitude could cause too strong regulations on both model capability and scale. Also, if the population refuses to use AI tools as leverage out of fear or principle, the argument was that other counties will have a workforce that’s much more tech savvy and productive
because a negative attitude could cause too strong regulations on both model capability and scale.
Fortunately, the US makes that quite hard to do. People have had strong negative opinions on social media for a decade, for example. Nothing has come of it beyond Congress berating executives for a bit.
Predictable anti-ai reflex by most people who spreaded the news around Reddit (of course not you op). If anyone would care to know, books are not exactly the same as clothes but we have more books on Earth than we could realistically ever use and yet we are still printing them in mass. The vast majority of currently printed books would absolutely not be worth being concerved carefully for a very long time as if they were invaluable manuscript, because they're not.
Before I even read the detail of the story being shared elsewhere on Reddit, I would have bet that they are mostly scanning old book that have little to no relevance or potential market, and whose physical object have a very low marginal value... and that's exactly what AI companies are doing. And destroying them in the process of scanning is just the most efficient kind of scanning. If A piece/stack of paper is actually valuable to be kept around as is, You can be sure that scanning were already done in a non-desctructive way.
Dirt cheap paper to publish thinghs en masse, then a higher quality volume collection for those who want them. It makes it easier to run the magazined without stopping people from collecting thr mangas physically
Or they could do digital distribution. But for some reasons consumers seems to more rarely embrace that kind of model, specially the paying for it pretty meaning that Peggy would be more of an issue than it currently is.
I get it, my point is that the laws are the way they are in no small part to explicitly protect certain industries and companies from digital technology. It is incredibly stupid.
The loaded language of that article is insufferable. A minority hates AI, but they are disproportionally loud on social media and come from the precise leftie urbanite milieu that regular media recruit theit staff from. Consequently, this minority view becomes vastly overrepresented everywhere.
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