Comment by infecto
8 days ago
Once you start to realize just many books got thrown out annually before “AI” you have less sympathy. Libraries are one of the biggest contributors to this because there is simply too many books that nobody cares about.
I suspect folks are over weighting how much knowledge is being destroyed in these books. If someone actually quantified it that would be amazing but as someone who started going to used book sales at a very young age I just have no sympathy. Most books are worthless. I don’t mean that from a text perspective either.
Libraries usually offer those books for sale to the general public. I just picked up two from my local library that way.
AI companies are not doing the same.
AI companies are building the knowledge from the books into their models, which they offer for sale to the general public.
Far more people will use the model than would ever have read the book.
They're not reproducing the information verbatim and with the ability to definitively reference its source. Moreover, not all AI companies are going to get the same books and therefore the same training set, and as companies go bankrupt, training sets are changed, and models abandoned, that information might disappear entirely.
It's not at all the same thing as still having the books themselves available somewhere.
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And libraries throw away a lot of books that go to the dump. So what?
You should be pushing for better copyright law not Amazon for buying up worthless books.