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- Hacker News
- I support physical media and doing whatever you want with said physical media. If you want to overpay for a copy of Sharepoint 2007 For Dummies and destroy it, knock yourself out. Just because media has been printed and is "rare" doesn't mean it has any practical value.
You could easily write an article about how Goodwill and the Salvation Army dump millions of "rare" books that no one would ever buy for $0.50. And thrift stores will dump multiple copies of said books. AI companies would only ever need one!
The only thing I disagree with is AI companies feeling entitled to freely use every piece of copywritten work without restriction, but that applies just as much to web scraping, pirated books, etc.
- Discussions:
2 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725
21 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
- This is what the copyright laws dictate no ?by whatever1
- No. A copy is still a copy even if you destroy the original.by bena
- i would assume that would come into play if they were uploading scans of the books? there must be some gray area where training like this doesnt apply to that. or ya know, just do it and face the consequences later because you already have the data and know that ai obsessed government will just shrug their shoulders.by exhumet
- Those laws are lobbied for by large corporations, these are not just laws that exist outside of that context. They can also be changed, or Amazon could just incur the fines.
Large corporations will move fast and break things when it’s convenient; they don’t care much about the law - just about profit.
by waffleiron - Not to my understanding. To begin with, it's far from given that "rare" books are all covered by copyright. But if they are, it's at best murky: whether you destroy the original doesn't really have anything to do with what you're doing with scanned contents. The scanned contents themselves may be inherently a copyright issue, regardless of destroying the original. The actual trained model has separate arguments more in its favor, so if no scanned contents exist - IE the data is read once for training and not stored or saved, they have a better argument. But in that case the destruction is totally disconnected from copyright, as they'd be totally okay to rescan the material.by Glyptodon
- Bias disclaimer: Amazon is my current employer, but I don't work on AI or anything else mentioned in the article.
Yes, this is a result of copyright laws. The other commenters are wrong/uninformed.
If it was up to the companies training LLMs, they wouldn't destroy the books: It's a waste of company resources, it's needlessly destructive/evil, it generates bad PR, etc etc. There are essentially zero advantages, other than it is what is required under US copyright law (or at least, it is what their highly paid lawyers believe is required under US copyright law).
by thenewnewguy - So, if a corporation can suck up entire books to teach their machines how to think using the information from those books, can we (all humans) join a single corporation that provides all books to its employees? Just need one copy of each and we'll make that copy digitally available for our employees so they can learn from and utilize the knowledge from the books. It's not copyright infringement, they're employees.by RobotCaleb
- Almost like… a library?by tensor
- The scariest thing for me about companies not caring even minimally about conservation is that when AI gets more powerful than humanity (which is clearly a when not an if, even if there's a lot of uncertainty and differences in opinion about the time horizon here), I want to hope that AI will care more about conservation of human people.
So far from how I see how powerful organizations work, I'm not as certain as I would like to be.
by xiphias2 - > AI gets more powerful than humanity (which is clearly a when not an if, even if there's a lot of uncertainty and differences in opinion about the time horizon here)
People say this all the time, but so far nothing has convinced me it's true.
LLM development has more or less plateaued, and the current boundaries are very real - energy, resources, capital.
At this point we're talking about marginal improvements against the same asymptotes of all technological innovations.
by legitster - "rare" is used in these headlines/articles to incite and generate clicksby spogbiper
- Rare as in your grandfather's John Deere manual from 1982, not rare as in a test print run of The Great Gatsby. The number of books ingested by these AI companies is a drop in the bucket compared to old books destroyed every year through normal means.by ursuscamp
- > The number of books ingested by these AI companies is a drop in the bucket compared to old books destroyed every year through normal means.
Citations? Also what exactly are these 'normal means'? As a bibliophile who loves scouring used book stores for out-of-print titles this is a topic I'm very interested in.
by stuxnet79 - > We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked, but they are rare, meaning there are not many copies of them in circulation. Sometimes that’s because not many copies of them were ever printed, and sometimes because they are in a foreign language not many people speak.
Not even the title of one of those rare books?
by andsoitis - As I understand it, "rare" in this context could mean anything—even a washing machine manual from the 1980s...by plpbs
- It doesn't really matter. The article suggests that they are selecting and tracking books by ISBN, which means: books that have been published or at least reprinted in the last 50 years or so. And they are trying to get as much of that set as they can, regardless of quantity, quality, or any other consideration. Which means that older books printed before ISBNs became common may be relatively safe, at least from Amazon. And some books just don't come up on the used market very often.
(small historical irony: when Amazon first started selling books, they used the Books in Print database, which included a lot of books not actually in print.)
by Finnucane - > The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.
It would seem the redaction of the rare titles is a way to avoid de-anonymization and subsequent harm to the business of the seller who agreed to place a tracker in one of the books. That being said, maybe they could have chosen a better methodology which would have allowed the disclosure of the title, although ultimately I’m not sure the title matters too much outside of their claim they were “rare”.
by ropbear - 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.by olalonde
- > 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.
by hansmayer - It's better value to me that someone is digitizing and training with books then they just languish somewhere in perpetuity.
- If there’s only 3 copies in existence, and everyone on the frontier wants it in their corpus, what do you think will happen?by pohl
- 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...
by amiga386 - > 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.
by Ataraxic - The length of this article and the unnecessary visualizations felt like a waste after getting to the end and discovering they won’t reveal anything about the books that were scanned.
The closest they got was admitting that the rare books weren’t anything that someone might care about in the sense that people assume when we hear “rare books”
> 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.
Okay? But then why exactly where they considered valuable enough to warrant an entire article about them going to a book scanning facility? Without revealing anything about these books I have no idea if they were classic literary works that were underappreciated, or if this was some old guide about How to Use Microsoft Office 97.
There was a more balanced take on Twitter (which I’m unable to find again, because Twitter) from a book seller who said it was more of the latter type: Books that were rare because they were no longer in demand and most everyone had thrown their copies away. Some parts of the media are doing backflips to try to imply that these are cherished literary classics being fed into the shredder to deprive humanity of something valuable, but the book seller seemed happy to be making sales for useless old books that no human was interested in buying.
by Aurornis - Anyone who is into books eventually finds out that we're permanently losing them all the time. Like they're thrown out, and lost forever. University libraries throwing out huge collections of out-of-print material to make room for new books, study spaces, even cafés. Municipal libraries turning over their collections. Books that never made it to libraries going out of print, tossed in the trash after yard sales.
The AI companies digesting this stuff is a net win for humanity. And I'm not a fanboy! Ideally they'd upload them to Anna's archive too, but even if they keep it private forever, at least these books live on in some way in the model weights. Thats better than a landfill.
by awakeasleep - This is why we read the comments first :)
Thank you.
by tejohnso - > or if this was some old guide about How to Use Microsoft Office 97.
Materials like that may be very valuable to software / tech / HCI archeologists soon.
I can't get the tools or local know-how to straighten my scythe blade in a country where every cottage had a scythe less than 100 years ago, with the last scythe-native generation rapidly dying out.
Fast forward a civilizational collapse and that M$ Office 97 for Dummies might be as groundbreaking as a Guide to Using Roman Concrete
by dantyti - As if the AI industry is only shredding "crappy" books.
I recently bought a rare book. It was a boat design book written by a famous yacht designer in the 1940s, but it's been out of print for decades and I had to pay $150 for a "fair" copy with missing dust jacket.
I have an interest in older technology and the old ways of doing things (for instance, how do you lubricate the mast of a gaff rigged boat so the gaff jaws don't jam?) I've often found myself reading very old books that have been out of print for a century.
Sometimes I read those books at libraries and I've been the only person to check them out in years (I started doing this back when they still stamped the return date on a card so you could see when it was checked out). Now most of those books have been disposed of by libraries due to yield management software and I've ended up with some of them in my personal collection, but people like me can only save a tiny sliver when most of them are being bought in mass by Sam Altman. When they're gone the knowledge in them is also gone.
We are burning the library of Alexandria and the HN consensus is "those books probably weren't saving anyway."
by jordanb