Comment by squidbeak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by squidbeak | Hacker News Reader

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> A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies.

If you've read the articles covering this issue, you'll be aware the concern is over the fate of rare and out of print books, rather than your straw man (ie those available in 'thousands to millions' of copies).

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o

> "A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market - but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed," says Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's.

> "But we have, and have sold, books which are for example the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century.

> "It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."

Is there any indication that Anthropic is destroying books from the 18th century? Even the BBC quote is a conditional. Emphasis added:

> "It would be a much more significant problem IF one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."

I agree with the sentiment of course but it is really a huge IF they are doing that.

IF they wanted to train on, say, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, why buy an expensive edition from the 1600s when they would get the same text from a Penguin edition for a fraction of the price? It gets much cheaper secondhand too of course.

I'll go further, why would they want to train on expensive rare and out of print books? Are they, perhaps, competing on an AI benchmark based on extensive medieval knowledge of the cosmos? There's been a lot of pearl-clutching about lost obscure knowledge but y'all really reckon that kind of knowledge is valuable to LLMs?

Rare and out of print does not mean important or valuable.

Usually it means the opposite. Books that are old and valuable tend to be out of copyright, so they do see new printing runs.

The British Library has a large quantity of books that have literary, academic, cultural or bibliopolical significance but are too niche to ever see print new print runs.

This idea that there can only be merit in a work if it's commercially viable is incredibly ignorant, and if that becomes the standard for whether a work is preserved or not, we stand to lose a great deal of our cultural heritage.

It doesn't automatically mean pointless or worthless, either. And it's too late to judge either way once it's been destroyed.

Presumably, being from the 18th Century, copyright law wouldn't apply?

Detestable if they're doing it anyway to prevent competitors getting hold of it.

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