A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
irishtimes.com
irishtimes.com
So it's not likely to be rare and precious books. It's things which are already in the Library of Congress or its many equivalents.
If they're forced by laws to destroy the results of the scans after training on them, as some have implied, that's bad, on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep the scans, or even the transcripts, that's probably an improvement on the status quo, to be honest.
I've had family members in the used books business, and trust me the fate of the vast majority of these books was always to be pulped.
> Anthropic said: "None of our data acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books."
This statement was clearly carefully worded, using the words "rare or antiquarian" to mean "pre-1966, pre-ISBN". Their statement is answering a question that wasn't asked, so that (if they need to) they can claim in the future that they never said they weren't destroying books with ISBNs.
(EDIT: I'm assuming "precious" means the same as valuable here to make the question easier to answer. In fact, of course, people usually say "precious" when they mean a personal or emotional attachment or cultural importance rather than economic value.)
Of course there are always post 1960 books which are rare and valuable for being very limited run first editions, signed copies etc.
only if they share the scans/transcripts and don’t hide it away.
Anyone that wants to train a model needs to procure and destroy their own physical copy of each book!
Why? Couldn't they resell or give away the books after scanning them?
This could very easily be turned into a preservation and archiving operation with just a tweak of the laws, or a carve-out.
And make the bank once, and make it legal to train on? How people in the bank get compensated is a different question, but -while almost impossible to settle on an individual basis- could be settled reasonably in bulk by some form of mandatory implied statutory contract?
Well, if the book is still in production the author will get the royalties. Though if it were still an active release they should just sell digital copies.
Where can I see the scans and the transcripts in this "better status quo"?
lol. A belief that a for-profit company will retain some data in its storage forever is somehow "enough of an improvement", but the proof that this actually exists isn't
Also weird that in the space of 5 years, they'd gone from an idea, got national buy in, and then got an international standard sorted.
Or have their covers stripped off and shipped out as "remainders."
Almost all the 60s science fiction I've owned came like this, bought on the pavement in port cities like Bombay and Madras. Container loads sold by weight.
Excuse me, what?
"Individual reproductions of a work by a natural person for private use on any medium are permitted, provided they are not used directly or indirectly for commercial purposes …"
And yes, it's the duplication which is illegal, not the publication of them.
Here's my AI theory: someone is purchasing lots of books en masse to be packaged and sold for LLM training to multiple clients (not just a single company like Anthropic), but only scanning once and then reselling the scans while preserving a "chain of custody" proof that individual copies were purchased. Claude shot that idea down for reasons related to the intricacies of US first sale doctrine and copyright law, but had an ambiguous response when I proposed that it might be Chinese companies doing something similar for training AI models that are intended for possible resale to overseas markets.
(I don't believe them being digitized for consumption by AI will impact book sales much, as ebooks, google books, project gutenberg, etc didn't either)
Buy it? You’re wasting investor money.
Public domain books - no need to bother, they’ve scraped PG and any other source and can do with it what they like.
Used booksellers should raise the price of used books that are of no interest to any real reader.
But of course, unlike humanity, AI is really worth it!
Publishing any out-of-copyright books would be awesome thing to do. But it seems none of the books in this order would fall under that, and it's unclear how many old books they are actually ingesting. Current reports are mostly talking about relatively recent books
AI companies are shredding rare books
> [...] I was near to the point of actually digitizing and getting rid of all my paper books.
> I was that close about five years ago, but then I had an epiphany. I went to private library, and I realized that books were never as cheap as they are today. They never will be as cheap, and that there's some power about having these things in paper always available, no batteries, never obsolete, and that if you made a library now, you would never be able to make some of these libraries in 50 years, so I decided to keep and to cultivate this paper library as something that was going to be powerful in the future.
I remember seeing photos of his library but can't find them anymore. This is the only thing I could find:
What's the use of all this AI if they can't figure out this relatively simple task.
i think that they might actually want to do the ram gambit all over again - buy up these rare books so that competitors can't get them. destroying them after scanning makes doubly sure that the competition won't get their hands on it
The need for all the content, Moar!! Feed me. Is this the Paperclip Maximiser in the form of the Training Material Maximiser?
Will it be that, in the end, the lack of "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" was the cause of driving rule hallucinations in all previous models? Will this finally get OpenAI back in front of Anthropic? Hurrah! We found it!
If a book is rare and you wanted to preserve it don't sell it so easily, increase the price, or put it into a contract system like Ferrari does with cars they sell.
And as is happens in history, any time some entity mass destroys the books, they turn out to be bad guys
"MOAR input!!!"
- Johnny 5, Short Circuit. That was a great film. Seems it was unexpectedly prescient too.
As a teenager I remember I was amazed at the speed at which Johnny 5 would consume that book.
why not just every textbook for every subject in high school and college?