Comment by GuB-42

> As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.

So books that would probably have ended up as trash. These AI training facilities are actually doing these book a service. Not only they are probably going to keep the scans safe (for future training), but having the book end up in an AI model may be the only way it is going to have any use at all.

Let's say for instance that the book in question is about woodworking, and it is not great, lots of mistakes and inaccuracies, unoriginal content, etc... except for a single thing, maybe a trick for making a certain measurement or something like that. Who would read such a crappy book for this single good trick he doesn't know is there, well, an computer will, computers process terabytes of crap without tiring and complaining, that's what they are for, and with a well designed LLM, that one trick may resurface, waiting for someone to ask about that specific measurement.

The problem here is not that rare books end up in AI training facilities, it is that these AI facilities are owned by for-profit companies keeping the data to themselves. These books should go to public libraries instead, for everyone to access, it would be better if these books weren't destroyed in to process too. But the question becomes: why didn't public libraries didn't do that in the fist place? And maybe in a more respectful way. The AI companies would just have had to license the database to libraries, probably simpler and cheaper than having their own scanning facilities.

To me, this mess is a failure of the copyright system. One one hand, large scale book digitization projects intended to preserve and make the original text accessible get lawsuits by publishers, while AI training is "fair use". It means we have built a system that encourages destroying rather than preserving these books!