As if the AI industry is only shredding "crappy" books.
I recently bought a rare book. It was a boat design book written by a famous yacht designer in the 1940s, but it's been out of print for decades and I had to pay $150 for a "fair" copy with missing dust jacket.
I have an interest in older technology and the old ways of doing things (for instance, how do you lubricate the mast of a gaff rigged boat so the gaff jaws don't jam?) I've often found myself reading very old books that have been out of print for a century.
Sometimes I read those books at libraries and I've been the only person to check them out in years (I started doing this back when they still stamped the return date on a card so you could see when it was checked out). Now most of those books have been disposed of by libraries due to yield management software and I've ended up with some of them in my personal collection, but people like me can only save a tiny sliver when most of them are being bought in mass by Sam Altman. When they're gone the knowledge in them is also gone.
We are burning the library of Alexandria and the HN consensus is "those books probably weren't saving anyway."
> As if the AI industry is only shredding "crappy" books.
Do you, or anyone else, have any source suggesting that they’re buying highly valuable rare books and shredding them?
The kind of $150 rare book that you had to buy from a specialty collector who graded it is in a completely different category. You’re thinking of “rare books” in the historically rare, valuable, and collectible category.
The book sellers shipping off orders of 1000s of books at a time to these facilities are calling the books “rare” because they may only have 1 copy, not because it’s a collectible with a high price tag.
There are a ton of niche books like the one the parent is speaking of which might not be considered hugely valuable by the general public or less specialised second-hand stores, but are both rare and valuable in their niche.
For instance there were only limited production runs for a set of books on South Africa's participation in the Second World War, and getting hold of them is increasingly difficult. But they have ISBN numbers, so they fall within the group of books being collected and destroyed by AI companies, and as a result might disappear altogether, along with the knowledge inside them.
> There are a ton of niche books like the one the parent is speaking of which might not be considered hugely valuable by the general public or less specialised second-hand stores, but are both rare and valuable in their niche.
I'll ask again: Does anyone have a single example of this?
Every conversation about this topic has been full of this same assertion, but nobody can ever name even a single example. We're supposed to believe it's factual.
You’re supposed to believe it’s factual because you have investigative reporting by multiple newspapers with good track records, on the record statements by bookstore owners, and evidence presented in court cases like the one regarding Anthropic’s Project Panama.
Notably, one of those piece of evidence from that Anthropic case was an internal presentation clearly stating the intention of Project Panama was to “destructively scan all the books in the world.”
Beyond that, some book sellers have named specific titles, such as “an Estonian translation of John le Carré's The Mission Song, a specific edition of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, and the October 1983 issue of Warship monthly magazine” and “everything from 18th-century African agricultural implements to biographies of 1950s racing drivers.”[0]
But getting a full list of all those sold globally is difficult. I imagine we’ll start to see some efforts to try to encourage booksellers to contribute to public lists though.
Have you seen AI companies making any effort, with their newfound immense power to get the attention of lawmakers, to lobby for amendments to copyright law to make this exercise a less destructive exercise?
Why would they? They're not the ones upset that they're cutting up books. They fought a court case to allow them to do it a different way that didn't require cutting up any books. They were shut down and had to pay billions, and so they're doing it the only legal way that is left to them.
This is literally what the publishers asked for. If they wanted a different way, they're the copyright lobby. They are making all the rules. They can change it.
Those poor AI companies, they’re the real victims here! /s
There are several things to criticise here, including the US’s terrible copyright laws and the publishers involved in that case who care more about in-print than out-of-print books.
But it’s the AI companies that are actively buying up and destroying books at an unprecedented scale, which is an action they’re choosing do to and certainly don’t have to do. Therefore that’s also where the immediate focus and attention needs to be
It would be nice if your local library hadn't sold their copy but I think your beef is with the libraries, or perhaps with the politicians who failed to fund them in that case.
Actually I expect that a copy of most books probably is still available in a copyright library but it might not be easy to access.
Weeding (the library term of art for selecting works for deacquisition) is a very import part of collection management. It's actually regionally and nationally coordinated so the interlibary loan network does not throw away the last copies.
Once you start to realize just many books got thrown out annually before “AI” you have less sympathy. Libraries are one of the biggest contributors to this because there is simply too many books that nobody cares about.
I suspect folks are over weighting how much knowledge is being destroyed in these books. If someone actually quantified it that would be amazing but as someone who started going to used book sales at a very young age I just have no sympathy. Most books are worthless. I don’t mean that from a text perspective either.
They're not reproducing the information verbatim and with the ability to definitively reference its source. Moreover, not all AI companies are going to get the same books and therefore the same training set, and as companies go bankrupt, training sets are changed, and models abandoned, that information might disappear entirely.
It's not at all the same thing as still having the books themselves available somewhere.
On the other hand, the book can only be in one place and read by one person at a time.
People may not even know the book exists or that it contains the information they want. Obtaining access to a copy may be very difficult, even if it is not particularly rare. The AI is much more accessible.
Then find a way to make them digitally available, verbatim, like Google Books attempted to do. I'm sure with the power that AI companies have they can have legislation amended to make it happen.
That copyright law is a mess doesn't mean that companies that buy up rare books, destroy them, and keep the contents locked up are beyond criticism for their actions.
They don't have to scan and destroy these books, it's an entirely voluntary choice.
I recently bought a rare book. It was a boat design book written by a famous yacht designer in the 1940s, but it's been out of print for decades and I had to pay $150 for a "fair" copy with missing dust jacket.
I have an interest in older technology and the old ways of doing things (for instance, how do you lubricate the mast of a gaff rigged boat so the gaff jaws don't jam?) I've often found myself reading very old books that have been out of print for a century.
Sometimes I read those books at libraries and I've been the only person to check them out in years (I started doing this back when they still stamped the return date on a card so you could see when it was checked out). Now most of those books have been disposed of by libraries due to yield management software and I've ended up with some of them in my personal collection, but people like me can only save a tiny sliver when most of them are being bought in mass by Sam Altman. When they're gone the knowledge in them is also gone.
We are burning the library of Alexandria and the HN consensus is "those books probably weren't saving anyway."