Comment by TFNA
9 hours ago
I’m a researcher who for years has been scanning my library’s holdings on my particular discipline for my own use, but also uploading the books to the shadow libraries for everyone else’s benefit. The revelation that LLMs are training on the shadow libraries has made me put a lot more effort into ensuring my scans are well-OCRed. The idea that I could eventually ask ChatGPT or whatever about obscure things in my field, and get useful output (of the "trust but verify" sort), is exciting.
> The idea that I could eventually ask ChatGPT or whatever about obscure things in my field, and get useful output (of the "trust but verify" sort), is exciting.
That's your idea, not the one they are going with.
Their idea is that you pay a fee to access any information that was freely available.
Your idea is tearing down of fences, their idea is gatekeeping. The two ideas are incompatible.
Their idea is being able to get answers to questions which were difficult to answer before[0]. Of course they want to get paid for it. The information wasn’t available easily and not always[1] freely.
[0] among other things…
[1] more like ‘often not at all’
> Of course they want to get paid for it.
So should the original authors, no? That is, getting a share of that payment.
Something akin to the German GEMA could work, an entity that levies a usage fee on behalf of all copyright holders and re-distributes to its members, but on a global scale.
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Hasn't that been scanned by Google already? Their model should be trained on most of those texts already.
How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
Library funding is a political stance that has only imaginary connection to whether people pay to ask things of ChatGPT. People can pay to talk to an AI and also government can fund libraries.
The government can then soon "optimize" and fund exactly one library.
Do you believe it makes sense for the government to fund libraries that almost nobody uses because they'd rather ask ChatGPT?
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1. Being offered a service you would pay a lot of money for is a step forward. When people pay a large amount of money for something that means they wanted the thing more than the money. The link between ChatGPT and libraries being under threat seems a bit weak too.
2. The Chinese have been investing a lot into free models, they're perfectly good and keep improving; despite the best efforts of the US. They're even ramping into making their own hardware. Gemma 4 is pretty snappy too. It doesn't seem like there is much of a moat to this, my guess is there will be perfectly good local models if you want to avoid AI companies.
When people pay a large amount of money for something that means they wanted the thing more another thing. Money just provides the method to defer value transfer.
When the person paying the money is rich, the other thing they are foregoing is typically not a life necessity. When the person is poor, however, it typically is.
Free, downloadable AI models have consistently caught up to ChatGPT within 3 months, for almost a year now.
I highly encourage you to go and update your priors.
And how much does the hardware cost to run said models?
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A digital library needs almost no funding. With today's decentralized networking infrastructure such as BitTorrent and IPFS I bet it just exists forever.
> A digital library needs almost no funding.
Clarification:
To maintain the library still requires resources & effort to do so. It only appears to need no funding because the donators of said (disk space / bandwidth / dev effort) are subsidizing it in aid of a goal they believe in (i.e. the church model).
The way public libraries currently "lend" digital books is that they can only lend titles a certain amount of time before the library has to repurchase the title (or remove it from circulation).
How much of Anna's Archive are you seeding?
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Some people might have to pay a large amount of money to ask a commercial LLM, but advances in this space mean that if I have the data myself on my own computer, or can download it from a shadow library, I might eventually be able to ask everything locally for free.
> while the library itself has lost funding
Libraries are inherent parts of universities. While their precise role evolves, do you think that they will just be done away with? Already a substantial amount of scholarship in disciplines other than my own has moved online (legally), and the library is still there.
How about the idea that one day you might be paying a subscription to use a service while non sequitur.
> How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
There are plenty of free models with RAG support. Why do you believe everything starts and ends with a major corporation charging a subscription?
How is any of that legal? Can you just take books from the library and then scan and upload digital copies? How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better? Does calling yourself a "researcher" make you feel like its actually something worthwhile you're doing?
> How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better?
If the obscure book/text is permanently lost forever under your stringent advice of "no stealing under any circumstances", would the "stealing" have saved it? If so, is it ethical to prevent others from accessing the book/text, under your guise of "preventing stealing"?
> How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better?
By quoting your comment in my reply, have I "stolen" your comment?
By reading this comment you have entered into a legal contract, by which you owe me $5. Failure to pay will be reported to the Internet police.
First, it's called infringement, not stealing. It's a custom defined term in a custom defined law.
Second, it is totally legal to read the book in a public library, for free, right now.
Third, laws can change. Current copyright law was pushed by one company (Disney) to +90years, to their benefit, and can be redesigned/pushed back by AI companies, for their benefit.
A 2 year copyright duration sounds like a good compromise.
As a researcher, the main worthwhile thing that I am doing is publishing research, but having all this prior scholarship at hand 24/7 definitely makes it easier to produce said publications. And if I have created a scan, why not help out my colleagues, too?
"Deal with the ethics", seriously? You might want to learn about how heavily shadow libraries are used across academia now. It’s no longer just disadvantaged scholars in the developing world relying on pirated scans because they don’t have good libraries. It’s increasingly everyone everywhere, because today’s shadow libraries can be faster and more convenient than even one’s own institution’s holdings. At conferences, if the presenter mentions a particularly interesting publication, you can sometimes watch several people in the room immediately open LibGen or Anna’s Archive on their laptop to download it right there and then.
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It's not stealing, it's uploading without the licence. Laws in many countries allow for the lawful download of such books, regardless of how they were uploaded.
Separately, aren't always sensible or right - slavery was legal, child marriage was legal, not paying taxes on billions of profits is legal while not paying taxes of £1000 is illegal, reporting Jews to Nazis was mandatory, etc, etc.
> How is any of that legal?
He didn't mention legality. The world is rigged, as you can see by head of state participating in both in running and cover up of history's largest CSE. Watch what people are doing in addition to what they are saying.
I for one am tremendously thankful for TFNA's efforts, since I get access to knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to before.
AI training is legal because the supreme court said so.
Copyright is a property right, and property right is what we call a bourgeois legal right. It will cease to exist as productive force like AI develops.
Imagine thinking Sam Altman and Elon Musk are your comrades.
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You can't steal information don't be silly. You can just not have permission to copy it. Oh no.
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That's a slave mentality. You are aware that OpenAI charges money for other people's work and intelligence, right? Your own and that of other volunteer pirates and of the original authors as well. I don't get people like you at all.
I’ve already posted in this thread about how even if OpenAI charges money for its LLM trained on the literature, that doesn’t change the fact that the literature remains available to everyone through the shadow libraries, and advances in AI mean that one can increasingly work with it locally on one’s own computer.
Open weight models exist and are critical to us avoiding a future where you have to pay sama a slice of every engineers salary.
>I don't get people like you at all.
Because you don't try, which says more about you than OP. It's a major problem with society.
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Of course not, and many authors are already long dead. But if you knew anything about academic publishing, the authors almost invariably are happy to see their work out there freely available. It’s not as if they make any money from it, and the more eyes on their work, the better their chances of getting cited and thereby furthering their careers.
It is some publishers who would object on copyright grounds. But I get the sense that some publishers are already becoming resigned to the fact that most of their new ebook releases are ending up on the shadow libraries within only a few weeks, and Anna’s Archive has become the first place to look (even before one looks at whether one’s own institutional library has the book) for researchers around the world.
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The ridiculously long "70 years after the author's death" makes it highly problematic in many cases.
Why assume people lock knowledge in a box and charge for access?
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