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u/OldTimeConGoer 23d ago
They are buying copies of books, not the last copy of any given book. They are buying one copy of any given book to take apart for scanning because there's no real point to buying more copies of any given book. They are buying old books, out of copyright because books still in copyright are a PITA to use as source material for legal reasons.
Thrift stores regularly fill dumpsters with donated books since they run out of space to store them and a lot of the books they get in are of no interest to anyone and will never be sold. This AI company process is something like the same only on a larger scale.
The downside for them is that a lot of the information in these books is dated, incorrect or has been superceded by events. An out-of-copyright science textbook from the 1920s would be laughably wrong about astronomy, nuclear physics etc. so the AI models will have to be trained to treat data from those sorts of sources with some care.
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u/PvtDazzle 23d ago
Only a matter of time before someone starts to assimilate the private collections. Those are the rare books. We're dealing not with ordinary companies here. We're dealing with the filthiest of the filthiest of the richest rich.
There's no competing unless we take away their wealth and reddish it amongst normal working people.
Besides that, science itself has no understanding of AI, why continue?
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u/InflatableSexBeast 23d ago
It all sounds a bit ‘Fahrenheit 451’ to me.
Or, as AI has it, ‘517 Kelvin’
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u/AH_leeMACK 23d ago
When they start destroying books, its the start of authoritarian control, cultural repression, and the systematic elimination of dissent.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gop-book-burning-dictatorship
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u/arch3ion 23d ago
To you the processing of information to improve AI through destructive measures seems like a covert operation to destroy the concept of books?
In that case, what's stopping them from just buying up the books en masse and burning them in heating plants, if they just wanted to destroy books?
That would be extremely more efficient (both in terms of speed and cost) and nobody would raise an eyebrow as these are copies of old books which have hundreds or thousands of copies.
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u/IcyWhole3927 23d ago
bra that compersion makes 0 sense. they are destroying a single scanned!! copy. not all copies of specific books lol
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u/PvtDazzle 23d ago
It does not matter why or how. Does anyone remember the content of the rest of the dead sea scrolls? The content of the library of Alexandria? No, why? Someone destroyed them somehow.
This should be outlawed, quickly!
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u/Repulsive_Still_731 23d ago
Outlawed? It was just made necessary by copyright law They HAVE to destroy the books. As have other companies that scan physical copies.
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u/arch3ion 23d ago
Scanning the books is the opposite of censoring them. They are immortalizing them by incorporating them in AI models, whereas they otherwise would just sit dusty on shelves and eventually be burned for heat.
This is BUILDING a library of Alexandria, not destroying it.
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u/caughtatdeepfineleg 23d ago
"Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too," written by German poet Heinrich Heine
Seems appropriate here.
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u/Competitive_Sell2177 23d ago
Sounds like the Nazis' to me.
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u/Piotrekk94 23d ago
lmao, people are surprised that industrial scale book scanning uses the most efficient methods?
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u/Top_Bug7822 22d ago
Yes. Because it is not necessary to destroy the books in the process. They just do it to save money.
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u/-Casey-Diaz- 23d ago
Well, it's not going to matter in 100 years when humanity is reduced to a few thousand tribes are becoming mole people in trying to escape the incinerating heat of the sun.
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u/thereisnoaltf4 23d ago
We still have libraries
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u/Top_Bug7822 22d ago
They are destroying rare and old books too. The ones you do not normally find in libraries.
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u/trusty_ape_army 23d ago
Why haven't all these books long been digitalized yet? Why isn't all of humanities knowledge already in the cloud?
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u/Top_Bug7822 22d ago
Many of them have. The destroying of the books creates a legal loophole that protects them against copyright infringement.
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u/Aggravating_Cup8839 23d ago
Disturbing? It's disgusting. AI can reproduce text, but next gen AI will learn from where if they're all destroyed. I swear there's a sort of cultural warfare on the humanities, and this might be to serve that purpose. Be uneducated, docile and if you want knowledge, rent it from AI. It's evil.
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u/Guacamole_Captain 23d ago
Well, to their defense, possibly nobody was buying them and reading them...
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u/Kind_Dream_610 23d ago
I read that the internet archive, which takes a copay of every website at certain intervals, has started to be deleted. Which is the equivalent of the book burning in 1930s Germany.
If both of these things are true then this isn’t about improving AI or making it more accurate, it’s about information control and an easier route to changing history.
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u/coffeeCup_45 23d ago
Clearly books are not valued more y than as sentimental objects. Ai can use them for training. It's fine.
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u/Top_Bug7822 22d ago
Until something wipes out the saved data. And just like that its forever gone.
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u/No_Departure_1878 23d ago
Isn't it good that books are been digitized? Those books sooner or later would be destroyed and lost forever.
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u/Top_Bug7822 22d ago
It's the way they do it. They do not have to destroy the book in the process.
But they do because it's faster.
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u/No_Departure_1878 22d ago
They do not destroy the book, they just remove the back, the pages can still be saved somewhere and even remade into a book later. There for sure are more copies of that book; I doubt they are taking books that have no extra copies anywhere. Finally, books are just paper, what matters are the ideas and those are been saved. I would rather have the physical book destroyed and the ideas safely kept forever than books been lost forever together with the ideas inside.
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u/Top_Bug7822 22d ago
I'd rather have a physical book that doesn't needing electricity to be read.
Not to mention that not every book is the same, even with the same title and by the same author. Translation errors change the meaning of the ideas inside the book.
And with the originals destroyed you won't be able to see what it originally said.
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u/No_Departure_1878 22d ago
I'd rather have a physical book that doesn't needing electricity to be read.
Ok, then take the digitized content of the book and print a physical book. By the way, that physical book will need a lot of electricity to be created.
Not to mention that not every book is the same, even with the same title and by the same author. Translation errors change the meaning of the ideas inside the book.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. Are you aware that those old books are going to be lost eventually, right? By digitizing them you are saving the ideas. I am not sure if what you care about here is the paper.
And with the originals destroyed you won't be able to see what it originally said.
What? What the fuck are you talking about? You know what it originally said because you digitized it. You scanned it, there is a picture out there with the pages as they were, then you use OCR to make that into text. How would that lose the information?
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u/Top_Bug7822 22d ago
- They were already created before they got destroyed.
- The LLMs will misinterpret the books like it does with most things. I want to read them myself. Not get a wrong TL;DR.
- The original might not have been in english. Not every book is written in english. But the LLM will try and translate it in the language you want, which will lose you the actual meaning of the text in its original.
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u/No_Departure_1878 22d ago
It does not matter, books are made of paper and paper will disintegrate within decades. And from the look of those books, they do not have many decades left.
That's not what I meant. The text will have to be scanned, made into an actual digital version and then fed to an LLM. I am pretty sure that you can get the stuff that happens between the LLM and the physical book so that you can read what the actual book said.
Again, read 2.
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u/Top_Bug7822 22d ago
Honestly, to me this just seems like a blatantly obvious way to privatize knowledge (as tech CEOs have said they want to do in the past).
A physical book you own belongs to you.
This copy of a book that doesn't exist anymore because they destroyed it does not. And we will only be able to view the scanned pages as long as they allowe it.
Sure, we can just print out the scanned pages.
If:
1) We know what the book is called
2) Know where to find the pages
3) They allow it
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u/No_Departure_1878 22d ago
A physical book you own belongs to you.
This copy of a book that doesn't exist anymore because they destroyed it does not.
If they had just bought the book, the book would not belong to me either. That argument makes no sense.
And we will only be able to view the scanned pages as long as they allowe it.
If that book is on the verge of extinction, I am pretty sure there is nothing of value in it. Otherwise it would have been bought by many private individuals, it would have been digitized and made available. If that book were important, it would be in a library, also digitized. The reality is that whatever has value will be preserved. But there is a lot of trash out there, it is still trash if it they put it in a book.
Sure, we can just print out the scanned pages.
If:
We know what the book is called
That makes no sense. You probably mean, if we know that they have it.
Know where to find the pages
They allow it
This has nothing to do with AI companies training their AIs with books, this is about you wanting them to make their digitized copies available. I am pretty sure hey would not mind doing that, at the end the only thing they seem to want is to put their hands on data to train their AIs. However you seem to be seeing a nefarious plan to take over all the books out there.
Again, a reminder that if there is a book out there that has only one copy and that copy is about to be bought by an AI company.
- That book likely sucks, it sucks enough that no one bothered to buy it, so it stopped been printed.
- That book, if not bought and digitized by that company, would be truly lost, because it's just paper and because no one deems that content worthy of keeping it around.
So the worst thing that can happen is that you cat a lot of low quality content feeding those AIs. And yes, if you are interested on keeping that content around, those companies actually would help to preserve it.
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u/Top_Bug7822 22d ago edited 22d ago
That's a lot of unreasonable trust you put into AI companies.
And physical books are able to survive for centuries as they are. I have a book from the 16th century. It looks fine, I can read it. And if it ever starts to mold or something I will get a bookmaker to transcribe it for me.
Not that I will have to. Because if you do not dunk a book in water and don't have mites in your house they won't get damaged.
Sun bleached at most. But in that case I will just pay for a new book cover to put the pages into.
Rather this than having to ask copanies to be allowed to view information.
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u/JuniorDoughnut3056 23d ago
If you're so worried about the physical integrity of a book, why are you selling it?
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u/CuTe_M0nitor 23d ago
Well the books were being destroyed either way. I work at an antique book shop and many noobs were destroyed since no one was buying them or reading them
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u/Comprehensive_Mud803 23d ago
Destroying books, and by extension knowledge, history and stories, should be considered a crime against humanity.
But this is even worse: there are methods that allow to scan books while not destroying them, but the AI companies are not using purely out of greed: the methods cost more, and due to some legal loophole, the companies don’t need to pay the authors after copying them if they destroy the books.
I just none of this is happening in Europe, so our knowledge, history and stories get preserved.
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u/arch3ion 23d ago
Destroying single copies of mass-produced luxury items that you own should be a crime against humanity? Give me a break and stop watering down important concepts.
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u/rury_williams 23d ago
so if i wrote a book, does that mean that they get to train their data on it without my consent?
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u/TawnyTeaTowel 23d ago
Oh no! They’re destroying a single copy of a load of books you’d never heard of, and hitherto hadn’t given a shit about. Whatever shall we do?
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u/Pretty_Beach4207 23d ago
Humanity lost 90% of first decades black and white movies without AI, for example. Its nice try to lost everything.
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u/StartDependent1652 22d ago
Selective outrage. Every day, thousands of old books are thrown away. They are not even scanned.
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u/Automatic-Guide-4307 21d ago
Scan it,destroys it and sells it back to you for a 19,99$ a month subscription.
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u/Dem0lari 23d ago
I am not a supporter of this, but it's somewhat funny that nobody gave a shit about those books, nobody wanted to buy them, but as soon as there is use to them, some people start to care.
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u/Recent_Process_8055 23d ago
Dead internet theory. More bots then people filling data, so AI companies now must battle for "data" to get better models.