- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
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“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?” Stupid AI!
I was worried there would be some part of AI that I didn’t like at all . . .
I really hope the AI bubble pops soon and takes at least some of these stupid companies with it. They’ve been operating at a GIANT loss for years at this point, how much longer will this go on?
The way I see the situation is that every single AI company can clearly see the massive wall they are speeding ever faster towards, they see it and can also see that it is a massive wall, thick and sturdy.
There is however one thing that keeps them pushing the accelerator down hard against the floor, the delusion that they alone is smart enough to find the prefect weakpoint where they can smash through to the promised land of massive promises, while everyone else is just flattened against the wall.
It is extreme narcissism combined with yes men powering this shit.
i think they are just making sure they arnt holding the bag. thats why i keep seing new AI startups popping up.
Nevermind that when this bubble pops, the US govt will give them all the money they need from our taxes.
Nah, just Musk. The US Government will bail out Grok and let the others fail.
“the delusion that they alone is smart enough”
are*
It very weird when an otherwise logical comment has such a dumb error.
I dunno, the GameStop Bros are still waiting for MOASS. So I’d say the wealthy have more ways to keep the plates spinning than we wish they did.
At least GameStop is profitable though.
I like the plate spinning analogy. I think these guys have SO much money that they do have a few tricks up their sleeve to keep investors going.
I think once they land a few enterprise level fish hard, it will keep the plates spinning a good bit longer.
Depends on how much power the financiers have to fabricate capital from debt. In modern economics that’s not necessarily a limitation. I do hope it will be tho.
Be careful, because we will all pay the price when the bubble pops. It won’t be just the CEOs paying the bill, it will be governments and people.
Investors are starting to notice that it’s all smoke and mirrors in terms of the profits. I am reasonably sure it will pop this year. I will be utterly shocked if it doesn’t pop by the end of next year. It’s just so comically and obviously unsustainable.
This is gonna go down as the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, I swear.
Biggest Ponzi Scheme so far
if this was about Number Go Up, they’d probably make more money selling the despined books or something instead of destroying them and selling (or do whatever they’re doing with) the raw pulp. this sounds like an expensive process and there’s no guarantee that expanding these datasets is going to improve their models in a quantifiable way, let alone a profitable one. they must just get some kind of perverse pleasure out of making the world a worse place
Good way to prepare for rewriting history to their liking. Shredding/destroying the books should be illegal in this regard.
Yeah, part of me thinks this is part of why they are desperate for these LLMs to take off.
Get everyone to trust it, then just manipulate it to saw whatever fascist lies they want as truth. Look at how Elon gets all pissy everytime Grok starts going to the left on its ideas.
To be fair, we don’t know what books those are, anyone can publish anything as a book these days. It doesn’t have to be good or even true. For example, Jordan Peterson shits out some books, and I personally would not mind if all copies were shredded and forgotten.
The reason they are doing it this way is because it is illegal to not destroy the books if they ingest them. Skirting copyright laws.
The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.
“It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said.
I hate the AI slop as much as the next guy, but these are books nobody wanted. They were going to rot on the shelf until being thrown out. Just being rare doesn’t mean it’s particularly valuable.
Hopefully they are retaining the digitized versions for release at some point in the future. I’d imagine they are, since they’d still need the raw data to train future models.
You can’t determine what knowledge will be useful or valuable to someone in the future. Archaeologists have poured over receipts and shopping lists from ancient Egypt that were thrown away. It’s why the Internet Archive backs up all the random webpages they do. There’s no justification for mass destruction of books, especially since it’s being done to train broadly useless LLMs.
Of course they won’t be releasing these books later on. These companies want to hoard this text data so their competitors can’t access it. It would also be illegally distributing copyrighted work. Aside from destructive scanning being faster, the fact that a book is destroyed makes the digital copy “transformative” and therefore legal if it isn’t further copied or distributed. A judge ruled on this recently. I don’t mean to advocate for copyright enforcement, but that’s the reality here.
I think China has a national repository of AI training data that companies can access if they contribute to it as well. Doing the same thing in the West would at least blunt some of the harm the AI craze is causing, but that would have made too much sense.
Bernie’s plan for government control of AI companies made a lot of sense in this regard. And would mean those vast scanned libraries were public domain, or at least publicly stewarded.
But, ya know, 😱 socialism
This makes me tear up a bit. All those lost books…
Destroying the an endangered book feels like it should be criminal no?
As much as I think this behaviour is fucked up, once they buy the books it’s legally property of the company. And it can be destroyed without consequence since it’s legally property of the company.
I agree there is no current law for it. It just feels like there should be some kind of obligation to ensure records are preserved. With heavy enforcement for mass operations of record destruction.
That’s fucking evil.
That’s absolutely disgusting. At this rate, governments should really be stepping in and stopping all this.
Issue is, the AI accelerationist cult has planned out every scenario, and they have a very good plan to amaze politicians. That’s why the bubble haven’t burst yet.
The whole point of post-enlightenment government is to serve the public good. But then it gets captured by capitalist interests (as Karl Marx explains in Das Kapital) at which point the government serves capital.
According to the article, they are doing this to comply with copyright.
they are doing this to maliciously comply with copyright
Exactly, they don’t comply with any other law that might inconvenience them.
Does anyone remember circa 2014 that radical jihadists in the middle east were destroying ancient and medieval artifacts, including stone heads? And I remember here in the liberal west we thought that was awful.
This is not the only thing that makes me think of that. Also Trump’s recent calls to reduce the size of US national parks and open them up to oil and uranium mining exploitation.
Random bulk rate books aren’t artifacts. The vast majority of them probably have a copy in Anna’s Archive.
If they did have a copy in Anna’s Archive, why the fuck would AI companies find physical copies, buy them, rip them apart, scan them, and then digitize them before destroying them?
Remember, you don’t get the digital copy. It’s only used to train their models.
Absolutely. Every AI company has Anna’s Archive in their training data already. They want to differentiate their models by having more training data than their competitors. There are way more books out there that have never been scanned than those that have.
OpenAI just settled out of court for $1.5 Billion perhaps some see this as a way to avoid that legal exposure. But IDK.
Then they aren’t rare books necessarily.
The use of the word “rare” implies that they are not bought in bulk…
Which appears to be backed up by nothing.
Why are you so intent on riding big corpo cock? Do you think daddy Altman is going to praise you, call you his good girl?
You don’t actually need to play devil’s advocate, you know.
Rare doesn’t necessarily mean culturally valuable. How many of these rare books are actually just old instruction manuals, travel guides, training materials, phone books, and dictionaries?
The issue with that is that we don’t yet know what is culturally valuable or not.
Just because we don’t see a need for the specific book now, doesn’t mean it won’t change tomorrow.
Yeah we remember. Because that’s a literal fucking warcrime. You’re not allowed to destroy historical sites.
While I agree that destroying books is bad - even common ones - it’s also not technically illegal. If I want to burn a first edition of whatever book worth thousands of dollars… I’m legally allowed to do that.
I can also see the benefit of having a digital version of a rare book that can be enjoyed by thousands as opposed to sitting on a shelf. But yeah, definitely hold companies accountable for destroying them. There has to be a better way to do that work and still have a useable book afterwards.
Theyre actually destroying the book to be legal according to the article.
That is the justification and not the reason. Its faster and cheaper to cut the bindings, and they would have to store the books while they are using the digital copies to comply with copyright.
I don’t trust AI companies to not alter the texts of those books if there’s something in them that does not align with their worldview.
So any book added to the online archive(s) by these companies is suspect.If they were archiving digital versions so they could be read by thousands in the future, this would be a totally different conversation.
They don’t even need to be as selfless as the internet archive - just follow Googles lead and allow people to search and view selections the archive, with automatic opening of the archive when you are confident copyright is expired. Even a closed archive owned by a third party with a dead mans switch to open it in the future when the business model is done would be something.
The point of bookburning is that it would only be accessible to AI, bringing forth it’s monopoly on said first edition. No one would upload it to IA in the process. It is deleting one source of knowledge out of existence.
Removed by mod
But then they upload them to Anna’s archive, right?
This could actually be a great initiative if they made them public or at least gave the scans to some Library.
doubt many ‘of the most valuable’ books haven’t been digitized or aren’t available on amazon or ebay for a pittance. when i need to find something on anna’s archive, it’s usually because it’s some bullshit, tween pulp romance novel from the late 70’s.
There’s a lot of incredibly old books that can’t even be opened to be read without damaging them; but those are already locked up in museums and shit for study and preservation.
They’re making it really hard to like them.
