AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

again "destroy" is not accurate. to scan massive amounts of books you have to cut the binding part as feed scanning has been around for ages

there are non destructive scanning options but they are nowhere as fast and prone to errors

Do you mean rare as in old? I doubt they are destroying old books because most of them are out of copyright and probably available already as text. I imagine this applies to in copyright works and I do NOT condone it but the way this is told it sounds like they are raiding old libraries to destroy first editions of Cervantes.

People keep repeating the "rare books" without providing any evidence that they are rare. Anyone who has collected books knows there are massive volumes of old books that can be bought by the pound.

Aren't the AI companies just buying one copy of each book?

And this is supposed to be concerning?

It all sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory, but over the past five years, a lot of conspiracy theories have turned out to be true. That’s pretty creepy.

It's not a bad idea but we need a multi-pronged approach, with at least one other prong being "destroy the companies that are doing this".

But scanning the books also helps those AI companies because ultimately they want more data. Yes, they also destroy rare books to sabotage competitors, and thus also damage global society - a reason why these evil companies should be disbanded - but the article seems to not put any thoughts into things here, other than the superficial "they destroy books".

Savonarola Altman

I’ll leave

I can imagine 100y from now, most if not all books and knowledge are in electronic format or even just as part of an AI, then a wild solar flare wipes out all electronics in a minute..

Getting 10 million people to do anything is really, really hard. Getting 10 million people to spend hours scanning a book (which takes a really long time with a home scanner) sounds impossible :(

Why are these books "rare"? Because no one wants them. Why then are we up in arms over their destruction? These sensational headlines make it seem as though a copy of the Codex Sassoon 1053 is being destroyed, when in fact these are just obscure books that no one cares about.

The rhetoric on this topic is reminiscent of the rhetoric regarding data centers: some noxious combination of misinformation, misunderstanding, and sensationalism, wielded against technological progress.

The hysteria around AI and data centers has hit a precipice. It's actually a bit embarrassing now. I am pretty sure there are foreign adversaries that are trying to stop the US, but I also really blame the AI companies for doing the most horrendous job imaginable in pitching AI to the public. Not a shock that people are against something that tech bros have claimed will destroy everyone's lives in the next 5 years. These books were probably going into a landfill without AI companies getting them, regardless. Tons and tons of books go into the garbage every day.

BOYCOTT.

It's that simple, these corps have once again broken the social contract, you must not reward them. OpenAI and Anthropic especially, both owned by schizo sociopathic elites. Just use Chinese open models on 3rd party providers or more ethical companies.

This is literally the only power you have outside of Luigi, you're not going to fix anything with a letter writing campaign. We are entering a fight for survival so you really need to step up your game and stop letting elites run over you.

Today it's just books and manipulating society, tomorrow they will track and punish your behaviour and the control will only get worse. These people are pure fucking evil and we need to start acting like it while we literally still have the freedom and privacy to organise.

It is quite disappointing to see them not using the type of machines that don't actually destroy the books, like, afaik, Internet Archive is using.

Using a few gas generators for a transitional period isn't great either, but effect of those is very temporary. I fear permanence in this individual deal with the devil made for speed and cost.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

The problem is the choice made here: this is the world's 2 major governments choosing to give very large legal advantages to AI models, over actual people, in copyright. US and EU governments obviously want AI models to make everything from books to movies in the future, and this is a conscious choice both governments are making without consulting people.

Here's another question: The exact reasoning for copyright is made clear in the constitution: "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

What courts changed is failing to promote the progress of science and useful arts by destroying knowledge/art/books and access to those books, supposedly with the goal of maintaining market demand for those books. I mean this reasoning is so bad, so warped it could be used as James Bond villain humor.

Courts have failed to provide authors and inventors with exclusive rights, in fact they have destroyed a right authors effectively had. This decision goes against both the spirit and letter of the law, all because billionaires don't want to respect copyright anymore.

If you're going to do this, why have copyright at all? Can someone explain to me HOW you can explain that the constitution still supports this system?

But, of course, it gets worse. EU courts have decided the opposite, namely that without the author's permission you are not allowed to train an ML model on their texts. Ie. this becomes an additional right authors have, an additional thing authors can license (or not). Now that SOUNDS good, and you can bet the EU commission will be publishing about that. But it isn't good.

Of course the EU has demonstrated their usual do-nothing attitude. They have stated they are not going to do anything about people outside of the EU blatantly violating EU law, and let them profit inside the EU of violations of EU law, thereby destroying authors' income. As to the question why there is any need for EU law if you're not going to act on law violations ... no answer on that front.

To put it differently: why is chatgpt.com, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, ... not banned across the EU? Why are payments involving violating models allowed to go through, given that EU courts have sided with authors? What is the point of having EU laws at all?

But it's far worse: the EU commission is attempting to make their employees use a US model (chatGPT [2]), in violation of EU law, internally in their own organizations. Now from what I hear, they're failing at making people use it, WHILE paying US companies for illegal models.

I mean I hate what the US government has done, but the EU is far worse. They are officials, they are the institutions ... and their public claim to defend authors, their court judgements, their public stance ... is just an outright lie. I mean how else can you call this? 90% of the people involved here are lawyers, from the very top to the bottom rungs, all overwhelmingly lawyers. They know they are going against their own law, and doing it anyway. That is, at best, lying. The EU commission, even the courts and the EU's own bureaucracy will not follow the law internally, NOR are they making anyone else follow EU law!

The real effect of EU decisions: only Mistral, and other EU model providers are forbidden from, and punished for training on copyrighted data without permission. Everyone outside of the EU can just do it without permission and will not face any kind of consequences for that in the EU. EU companies (ie. hugging face) are hosting, for free, models in blatant violation of EU law.

Which is even worse than the US government stance in my opinion. EU has directly chosen for the worst possible of all combinations:

a) EU companies making ML models have to self-sabotage against their competition.

b) EU authors receive ZERO protection from the law. Not because the law doesn't support their case, but because the institutions whose only reason for existence is to enforce the law won't do their job. In fact THEY THEMSELVES violate EU authors rights.

Obviously, under these circumstances, AI model companies are going to outcompete musicians, authors, even movie studios. It's only a matter of time. And that is not a given, it is an explicit choice both the US and EU governments are making.

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/f0b8d4c3-51aa...

[2] in their source you can see what models they were likely using internally 2 years ago: https://github.com/openeuropa/gpt-at-ec-php-client

Destroying history is a crime against humanity.

I mean guys i get it, you have a bad day just once and you want to rewrite history, we all do, but geez... I guess just I feel destroying books should be classed as unethical. if i was ruler I think id ban it.

Destroy human knowledge, skyrocket RAM prices, push up residential electricity prices, potentially infantilize a generation of young people. It's all worth it, of course. Every time you _can_ invent a technology, you _must_ invent it. No externality is worth considering.

Ok . How trustworthy is the claim . It maid by a resource that on its own has problems with copyright.

Overall , smells like propaganda. How many books on earth you can openly buy that has practical “knowledge” value , not just historical one , and exist only in one physical implementation ( book ) . There were numbers of initiatives for a decade to digitalize all valuable knowledge.

It seems the initiative was secretive for a different reason . Buying a single book not allows you to distribute the content of the book , hence 1.5 billions fines.

Usually I personally not on copyright people side , but in this case you clearly see the system functioning. Know knows how the book business will look like in 10 years , but now book publishers doing their job by brining ai companies to court

We should be destroying AI companies, not books.