Comment by olalonde
7 days ago
This feels like a manufactured controversy. What difference does it make to me what someone does with a book after they buy it? It's effectively unavailable to me regardless of what they do. If people are really concerned about these "rare" books, they should lobby the copyright owners to release them online or print more copies.
> What difference does it make to me what someone does with a book after they buy it?
I think this is a bit of a myopic take. It's like saying it's my property I can do what I want, yet there exists designated historic homes or neighborhoods that are deemed to have cultural value where modifications do in fact need to be approved.
I'm with you on the "rare" part. If people are thinking about 70+ year old documents or ancient manuscripts, I doubt that's what AI is being trained on and is being destroyed, but it's reasonable that people find _that_ idea distasteful.
You can say it's manufactured but if these companies ignore this criticism, it's just another way AI companies are committed to losing the public.
> It's like saying it's my property I can do what I want, yet there exists designated historic homes or neighborhoods that are deemed to have cultural value where modifications do in fact need to be approved.
Yes, and when you buy them with that designation, you know what you're getting into. The problem occurs when you already own it, and some group is trying to get it labeled as historic, which will add to your burden and limit what you can do with it.
When I was in a small town, this was actually weaponized. A hotel owner was trying to get another hotel categorized as "historic" and had rallied a lot of people behind his cause. He had a case - the hotel did have some claim to being the "first" in some category or other. But really, he was doing it because it was a competitor. The "historic" hotel owner had to spend a lot of money to fight the cause, because being labeled historic would prevent him from performing various upgrades, making the hotel less attractive to customers (he was already not getting many customers).
What difference does it make to me if someone shoots the last bison? I wasn't getting to eat it either way.
If people are really concerned about bison, they should lobby gamekeepers to release photos of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison#/media/File:Bis...
Replace bison with some random animal no one's ever heard about, and photos with literal clones of the animal, and you've got a much better metaphor. Not to forget that in this world, brand new animals are created every day.
If you destroy a 17th century book, you can't make another one. Eventually you destroy them all.
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A digital copy of a book is identical in value to a printed copy.
This is entirely untrue.
Simple example:
Actual book from 1732 (rare, original, older than your country): https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Compleat-City-... -- yours for £1,258.00
A scan of the same edition of that book: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-compl... -- free. Nobody's paying any money for the digital copy.
I don't think you understand the book itself is a collectible object with rarity and value, regardless of the information it contains.
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If there’s only 3 copies in existence, and everyone on the frontier wants it in their corpus, what do you think will happen?
This is a problem whether it's AI companies buying them or three random dudes. The real solution is to get the copyright owners to keep distributing copies, or to change copyright law.
The three random dudes will probably not destroy them, quite a significant difference.
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If there are only 3 copies, then each copy is going to cost thousands of dollars.
Sample:
> Thou shalt commit adultery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible
I think the term "rare" might be a bit loaded. DOES it mean "only a handful in existence" or more like "1000 copies?" And at any rate, at least by scanning the book they're theoretically making its contents available to the public. What are the other people who own these books doing besides having them sit on a shelf?
"Only a handful" is a precious or extremely rare book. 1000 copies of a book total would certainly qualify it as rare. That's not a lot of copies.
> What are the other people who own these books doing besides having them sit on a shelf?
Not destroying them. By continuing to exist, it keeps the possibility that the books will eventually go to someone else. Maybe even a library that specializes in rare books.
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I care a lot about the high-illustration picture books of the 80s. Since they have ISBNs, they're presumably on the list. Does the LLM ingest the artwork? Even when it comes to text-only novels, it isn't making the experience of reading the book available.
> what do you think will happen?
They raise the price and print more copies?
> They raise the price and print more copies?
How? Like, do you think a book published 100 years ago has a digital file sitting around a publishing house that might even exist anymore? Re-publishig of old books are often based on scans (the originals were literally pressed into paper by metal, not printed off hard drives), and if the books don't exist, they can't re-scan.
I own some antique Japanese books that have very few copies in existence. You couldn't get them re-printed if you want to if the physical book didn't exist anymore. For a few books, I've actually purchased incredibly high-quality scans that cost me hundreds of dollars because to produce the re-issues, people had to go to museums with high-powered cameras to photograph the pages under supervision of a curator. There's no digital file to print from the publisher. If those books were gone, there's no bringing them back.
You are not understanding how the market works. Rarity and value do not always correlate with demand. Otherwise I have some beanie babies to sell.
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What if the book has been out of print for 50 years? This isn't a contrived scenario, most of the rare books are like this.
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It's better value to me that someone is digitizing and training with books then they just languish somewhere in perpetuity.
> What difference does it make to me
It's the scale that matters as first, and secondly, most people don't shred their books after reading them once or twice. This is just beyond words.