Comment by stuartjohnson12
6 hours ago
I think people are, on the whole, too precious about old things. In the case of books produced after major commercial printing began, I don't believe it is the paper that imbues the book with historical value.
Indeed, I think there's a high chance that this process increases preservation of the most relevant part of the media - the actual content!
There are tons of old rolls of film slowly rotting away in warehouses that were never digitised. Even for beloved media, the BBC occasionally tracks down an old lost episode of Dr Who.
For now these books are in corpuses of training data, but eventually I trust they will make their way to the rest of us.
> For now these books are in corpuses of training data, but eventually I trust they will make their way to the rest of us.
What makes you think they will? What would be the incentives for these companies to do so?
Well, you probably weren't going to go and find any rare, non-digitised books to physically go and read (unless you were going to, in which case, rock on), so we can start by benchmarking relative probability there.
1. At some level of critical information-withholding mass, a leak or disclosure similar to SciHub is inevitable because of the commonly held opposition to hiding knowledge.
2. Availability via Google Books or similar.
3. Availability via AI model reference.
4. Failing any of the above, better AI models that are more capable of doing more things, at the expense of books that were likely to go unread (revealed preference, rare books are often rare for a reason). This will obviously be a nonstarter if you don't want this to happen, but I think it would be good for the world if it did.
I think category of old books that were going to be read or otherwise become important parts of human knowledge that have not yet been digitised and now will never become so because they are instead being shredded and will never make their way into the light because of AI company data hoarding is a small category.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH96S4rBZbI
That's only true if you think digital storage has more longevity than paper. It doesn't.
Then why are people so worried about the paper not surviving?
Because its longevity depends on not being deliberately destroyed.
So if the Mona Lisa is part of a model we can burn it?
I pre-empted this - my argument does not apply to texts where the physical object is a major part of the historical value of the thing. No, I'm not saying to destroy one of the four remaining Magna Cartas that were meticulously copied by hand. But even if I was, we're only dealing with texts here that are irrelevant enough to have never been digitised already - we tend to digitise most things of value and so the Mona Lisa and Magna Carta would never have been part of this discussion in the first place.
I am however OK with destroying one of the remaining 50 children's books of which only 300 copies were ever printed in a small town in Ohio in the 1970s as a test run for a failed book which was subsequently never commercialised.
> I am however OK with destroying one of the remaining 50 children's books of which only 300 copies …
What if the perception of those books change over time and are considered masterpieces later on?
Moby Dick was out of print when Melville died 1891 and not a huge success until it got a revival in the 1920s
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If you purchased the Mona Lisa (or some rare book), in this hypothetical, you can burn it.
There is a difference between legal and right.
That’s the whole point because the book shredding is already declared legal.
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> For instance, a painter may insist on proper attribution of their painting, and in some instances may sue the owner of the physical painting for destroying the painting even if the owner of the painting lawfully owned it.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Artists_Rights_Act
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