AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

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 are 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Random bulk rate books aren't artifacts. The vast majority of them probably have a copy in Anna's Archive.

Looking at the temperature outside today, it's a pleasure to burn

Yup, and we all have our tv feeds at home. I should reread that. I just remember that Montague was named after the pencil he used.

So it can’t be traced that they’ve used said books for training data.

I agree! I’m sick of Ai!

Fucking 90% of the books I read are “rare”

That's sort of the joke. These aren't treasured first editions. They're not shredding the Guttenburg Bible. These are single prints sitting in warehouses and abandoned libraries or dumps that nobody has read or carried about in decades. They're rare because they never got a second edition.

And the process of digitizing the book means disassembling it. So the copy (that nobody wanted) is destroyed as a result.

The article is pure clickbait. These books aren't valuable, save that they were produced pre-AI. That's why you can get them in bulk on the cheap.

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.

How would a book seller know? Orders increase and you find out afterwards why. Bit hard to know ahead of time

Cause to easily scan them they remove the binding and rebinding is more work %han destroyibg so the point is capitalism

Have you ever tried scanning a book? It's a huge PITA.

They just cut the binding off so they can be run through a document feeder.

To keep their competitors from buying them and scanning them.

Easier to scan if you cut the binding off, and it costs money to re-bind a book you purchased for 10 cents as part of a lot.

Do make sure that knowledge is only available through their model and otherwise lost to humanity.

Same with bombarding small websites until they give up and pull the plug.

Everything is fucked

Copyright. They mustn't make a copy. There is legal precedent that confirms it's okay to transform the copy you bought into digital format. The Internet Archive relies a lot on that. I think they actually litigated it in the first place. So that's why the copyright heads are going so absolutely apeshit. If no one's charging you rent for using some data, then it's "unethical".

Fair use loophole, they claim they convert one physical book into one digital with no illicit copies, while also supporting the delusion of AI being an equivalent to a human reader. It is weird on so many levels but no one of noticeable weight asked them wtf.

I mean have you tried donating books? They just dump them into a storage room with thousands of other books donated that nobody wants.

They're pissing in the well so their competitors can't access the same information.

you snip off the book and scan the binding

To avoid competitors also scanning the book to get some kind of edge.

As his faculties return, Robert (who has always been technophobic) must adapt to a different world, where almost every object is networked and mediated-reality technology is commonplace.

…

However, jitter and latency are considerable problems with this basic network when long distances are involved. In the novel, Robert Gu develops an algorithm that partially compensates for these technical deficiencies, and might ultimately allow the inclusion of haptics.

This feels like it would be a little Mary-Sue to me, but I haven’t read the book. Is that transition handled well?

Crazy how we had all this information available and all we did was lock it up and make it for sale. The internet was an awesome place we shared ideas easily and without massive corporate "sponsors" now the owners of the internet are the corporations and they are just riding t till the wheels fall off.

They're working on it :/

If we burn the planet down, koalas will go extinct too. They're innocent.

It's a second dark age approaching. It's slow, maybe not in our lifetime but with the enormous pressure of climate and demographic crisis add the regression of human cognition and destruction of researchable truth and you will get a collapse of the global economy and a shift in priorities (survival first) that will bring a dark age.

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.

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.

That would imply preserving the original. No, they are having their AIs revise history and its literature to whatever they deem 'acceptable' in their new world order, hence the rampant book banning spree they've been on as of late.

Also, if every AI company does this, then it's more books gone. If they cooperated they'd only need to do it once. Good scans of all books in the public domain would be so useful for us all as society.

They want to be the sole arbiter of all knowledge. Kind of hard to do that when the books they stole from still exist.

I hate that I started to wish for the deaths of people I don't even know outside of news coverage, but that's what it takes unfortunately

thiel is already running away to argentina, he knows his Palantir ai is kinda cooked.

I assume most of them will get nice severance packages instead.

The only real question is how long until 1929 comes again.

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.

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 are likely sending them to the landfill instead, i think might scrape the books that are usually published online as well.

Popular doesnt always mean good. Unpopular doesnt always mean bad. There are countless little poetry books that only circulated through clubs. Texts circulated through writing groups that contain works of authors before they were famous.there are rare books you've never heard of that a collector would pay thousands for because they are one of the few people who know its value. Old folios that crossed oceans as the libraries behind them burned in petty wars that sat in attics for generations before the family found it only to send it up wholesale in an estate auction.

The point is that these assholes buy it all up by the truck load and process it indiscriminately. All to avoid copyright, and to feed their environment destroying hallucination machine.

"Book burning is good actually because no one reads them"

Summarized by biological human intelligence

Typical fucking anti-human attitude. If it doesn't make money then it's useless.

You do know that books (the majority in existence probably) aren't meant to be sold or read by the general public but? Like historical ledgers, accident inquiries, patents, scientific findings, family trees, weather data?

Yeah, they sit on shelves because the average person - at least in the U.S. - is steps away from brain death.

If more people were better educated and or literate this would not be happening.

Maybe theyre from publishers that have since folded, and the original plates or print-copies are lost in some storage yard, or a tip face.

It depends on why the books is rare, some books are rare because they are not popular while other because they were banned. For example I know a novel were the English translation is easily available, but the original language is rare because it was banned in the original language in multiple countries. Don't forget collecter artbooks that were never digitised.

Im assuming for pre digital era books, they don't have the equipment (printing plate) anymore. But yes, presumably anybody could just print the scans with a modern printer?

Keep in mind that books often become culturally important decades after their print run, sometimes when the copyright is ambiguous.

And also keep in mind there are technically, an insane number of "rare" books out there, but important rare books might only be important to people without the money to pay for another printing.

I could almost forgive this prrocess if they were /also/ archiving these books (leven if limited ike Google books does), but they won't, because they are so focussed on staying ahead of compeditors based on the "knowledge" in their training data.

I have this great book about all the glassware in use in 1940s chemistry.

Lots of them are uninteresting and useless to 99.99% of people IIRC (examples I saw in a French article a few months ago was very precise history of some random villages in Spain or something similarly ultra specific)

If we have access to the digital copies then Yes, but we don't have access to them, they are turned into training data for AI.

Three decades?

You mean to tell me that you think that three decades is enough to digitize centuries of printed media in almost all languages in the world?

The book needs to be not copyrightable at the moment, then you need to have a copy, then you need to put work into scanning and OCRing it, then to place it in somewhere accessible. It's a pretty narrow window. Some books that get published now get no digital release or it's put behind a heavy price tag.