Comment by nemomarx
7 days ago
It'll live on if they publish those scans or contribute them to a national archives or something. Proprietary data has a habit of being lost over time though.
7 days ago
It'll live on if they publish those scans or contribute them to a national archives or something. Proprietary data has a habit of being lost over time though.
They are literally not allowed to publish those scans.
Half the reason the books get trashed in this process is because the first sale doctrine keeps copyright from strangling all the freedom in this narrow area.
If they are in the public domain, they could publish them. How many books are in the public domain but have never been digitized and shared in a public archive?
And if the books are not in the public domain, then they should not be allowed to train their AI models with the material without some kind of license or agreement with the owner of the copyright.
> If they are in the public domain, they could publish them.
That'd be an easy fix with new law -- if you are an AI company with book data, you have a burden to make openly available (or require your suppliers to) all public domain book scans.
Depends on the book. I'd wager the majority of the rare books are in the public domain.
But they won't share them because they don't want their competitors to have the data.
The books get trashed because loose pages are much easier to scan.
> They are literally not allowed to publish those scans.
Emphasis mine. Just provide a digital copy, no questions asked. They will distributed to various archives globally. I'll pay for the drives and shipping. I understand and can appreciate the potential liability, and am willing to launder it to preserve the subject collection(s) and dataset(s).
The problem is that we're ignorant of the true value of objects and we don't know what will be valuable in the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
It seems a little short-sighted to destroy an artifact to get the text.
Perhaps the genetic material that remains in books from the people who handled them, or the pollen from plants in the environment that the book existed in will have value in the future, but we won't know what we lost because some people foolishly destroyed it in a bizarre quest to make AGI that the creators argue could potentially destroy humanity.
The more and more I read about these kinds of people the more I'm starting to realize that they're in the "here for a good time not a long time" group of people and those are the last people you want making long-term decisions.
On its own that seems like a pretty weak justification, at that point we would need to preserve every copy of every book forever because you never know what what useful physical material it has on it even beyond its text. That extends to non-book items as well, and while I understand the idea it's just not realistic in any sense.
I think the more important part is to define what "rare" actually means and save/digitize set copies of those books that are actually at risk of being lost completely (rather than letting them rot away somewhere or get bought up to be privately destroyed). I suspect many of them are just not at all interesting enough to justify the expensive though.
My comments on this subject aren't some sort of justification for any particular course of action; they're more a disapproval of the course of action being made by people people who have more dollars than sense.
As a general rule preserving historical artifacts for continued future analysis and appreciation by people who have yet to be born is a noble cause that's considered worthy in and of itself without the need to justify it. We're talking about the richest group of people who have ever existed with the means to preserve them but decline to do so and instead act like the Taliban blowing up statues of Buddha.
I think this is intuitive to most people. If a prerequisite for the birth of AGI was that a humanoid robot had to sit down in the Louvre and eat every single painting there with a knife and fork while occasionally stopping to wipe away historical detritus with the Mona Lisa that it's wearing as a bib people would by and large express a visceral and justifiable outrage.
The people who are doing this know how this looks so they're trying to do it all behind closed doors, through cut-outs and intermediaries.
Millions of books go in the trash every day. Should all private property come with such an asterisk that it ought to be preserved for whatever unlikely contingency you can imagine? I don't know, AI actually seems like a much more worthwhile pursuit.
In one of the first articles that I saw about this topic they were describing a scenario where a botany manuscript from the 19th century that only had three remaining copies was being digitized and then pulped.
They don't care about the R.L. Stein Goosebumps series or Louis L'Amour pulp fiction. They want the stuff that isn't digitized and they're willing to destroy original artifact to do so with no guarantee that even the digitized text will ever be made publicly available.
It's foolish and selfish.
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