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Comment by _m_p | Hacker News Reader

Librarians were already doing this at scale in a process euphemistically called "weeding":

https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...

This is a bizarre comparison.

Weeding is the natural process of disposing of less-demand books. Like the rest of us, libraries operate in finite space, so if they want new books, they have to remove ones their users aren't using. Most libraries will try to sell books before disposing of them in any destructive way.

What similarities do you see here?

People are very desperate to try to claim that something that's somewhat obviously morally wrong is actually highly nuanced, because it makes them feel uncomfortable.

I would disagree on the "obviously morally wrong". What's the alternative for the books if they were "saved" from the fate of being scanned and shredded? How many rare books have you personally brought in the last year? Not everything that's ever created needs to be preserved forever.

No, we're just telling you your moral intuition is absurd.

Yes, clearly it's completely absurd to think that shredding rare books to more cheaply train LLMs is anything but a moral good, which is why there is this entire thread is full of people jumping through hoops to explain how it's technically legal (and therefore fine) and "you wouldn't have bought those books anyway" (I suppose we don't have the choice anymore!) and, most amusingly, "they're actually becoming digitized and searchable this way" (are LLMs stochastic parrots or aren't they?).

Given that in the US we dispose of 640,000 tons of books each year, this attempt to inflate outrage is just ridiculous. Books are not things of intrinsic moral value; they are morally neutral physical objects.

To the extent the information in a book is something to preserve, this scanning is a good thing.

Libraries are not archives, and weeding does not mean destruction.

Libraries in my area dispose of 'weeded' books by covert means, so that public ire isn't aroused by finding dumpsters full of discarded books.

They are most assuredly destroyed.

This is really dishonest framing, unless you really, honestly can't tell a difference between pulping a mass market paperback romance novel that there's 3 million of in circulation, and shredding an 18th century botanical text that there's only 2 copies of in existence.

You call of dishonest framing, but you're begging the question twice.

Once that AI companies are really shredding 200 year old rare books, and once that libraries are only weeding mass market pulp fiction.

That is literally what this article is about.

The "article" in question is a tweet. The "rare botanical text" is just an example the author of the tweet made up in order to generate sympathy.

The tweet is about a 404 Media article about the practice. It's linked elsewhere here.

Does the 404media article mention that rare botanical book? I saw an excerpt here elsewhere of their examples and it wasn't in that list.

Also I had a family member work in libraries. They got rid of books for very small prices based on how many people checked them out. Not how easy they were to replace. One example was a 100 year old gold leafed book they sold for £5 to someone who removed every page to sell separately.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073042

> an 18th century botanical text that there's only 2 copies of in existence.

> books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases

Wow, that's impressive they had ISBNs in the 18th century.

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