The full headline tries to equate this to The Internet Archive’s recent legal troubles.
For a refresher: The Internet Archive scanned books then shared them online, trying to claim that converting them into digital copies qualified as a derivative work. You don’t have to be a lawyer to see how that claim doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.
The LLM companies are not redistributing the works. They are using them for training. This blog post calls it IP theft, but it has actually been litigated in court already. Using books for training does not qualify as theft or redistribution, even though some people have different opinions about the moral angles.
One of those same lawsuits also extracted a huge settlement from Anthropic for using digital downloads from pirate sites. The conclusion was that the only acceptable way for them to use the books is to buy them and scan them. The courts forced it to be this way.
The current hand-wringing about the destruction of books is based on claims that they’re doing it to rare books that are also valuable. So far nobody has been able to actually provide an example of one of these books that is supposedly ultra-rare, but also valuable, but also only available at one of these book sellers that sells these things in bulk. We’re supposed to assume that one of these books might actually be super valuable but also super rare and also only available at these places they’re buying from.
Before my lifetime, copyright law all but choked and killed the public domain. And now everything is stale and the same.
This particular battle was lost with Google Books and the attempt to make the world's largest library. The modern library of Alexandria.
But then copyright lawyers got involved to get their pound of flesh. And here we are.
I am upset about the destruction of knowledge. Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago. I think it's a mistake to not work with a non-profit, use cheap COTS non-destructive scanning, and write off the costs of rebinding them and rehousing them.
This has been less true every year since Usenet and Geocities. Much of the stuff on their was pirated, but that was the "stale and same" stuff you're complaining about anyway. The rest of the stuff was all kinds of original, good and bad. There's never been more total "content" and more total variety. You just have to look around for it (but that's also never been easier).
Letting AI companies try to profit off of all that creativity forever while choking the ability of the creators to make future revenue off of it is exactly what would actually lead to a "everything is stale and the same" situation. Preserving variety and novelty of new creation would look like putting in new restrictions to reduce this not-envisioned-when-the-laws-were-made sort of read-once-slop-forever usage.
Wasn't copyright law supposed to support creation and propagation of works of art ? Instead, apparently it is A-OK or even encouraged by the same law to destroy books.
That does not make any sense! Really might be high time to scrap it all.
No, it doesn't. Copyright doesn't care about copies, it cares about copying. If it did care about copies - i.e. the total number of copies in circulation - then ReDigi and the Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program would have both been legal. Destroying a copy does not give you permission to create a replacement copy.
The only relevant case law for AI training in the US is the rulings in the Anthropic lawsuit presided over by Judge Alsup. That lawsuit ruled that it's infringement to build a shadow library from pirated books; but NOT to train AI on those pirated books. The only point where destructive book scanning even comes into play is that Anthropic also had a book scanning program alongside their piracy, Judge Alsup said that program was not infringing, and Anthropic happened to be destroying books. At no point did Alsup say that leaving the books whole would have infringed copyright - it was never even considered as it was outside the scope of the lawsuit.
Now, if Anthropic were to non-destructively scan books, store them in a library, and sell the books on, that could be infringing. All the case law about format shifting presumes the owner retains the original. So Anthropic would likely have to hold onto books, at least the ones they wanted to train on, until they were done training on that book[0]. But they do not have to destroy them permanently. They are destroying these books specifically because it is cheaper to do so than to use, say, the Internet Archive's own custom-built nondestructive scanners.
[0] I am absolutely furious about how much this sounds like "fair use is just an extra license you get when you buy a book", and I would much rather have had Judge Alsup just say AI training is not fair use instead.
Courts found that having a central library of 7 million pirated books is against the law, and assessed a large penalty (small for these robber barons) so Anthropic is destroying them now to conform to the law. The law is bs and Anthropic is run by villains.
this is a complicated way of counting how many of each word is in the book.
clearly fair use.
does the author think cutting up a book is a copyright concern? theyre buying the books, its up to them what to do with their copy. if you want the books preserved, maybe fund your libraries to get a copy or two?
It's possible for someone to do something socially reprehensible and entirely distasteful and to be perfectly within the letter of the law while doing so. The article doesn't emphasize copyright issues or fair use, because that isn't the point. The post is trying to argue that the act is not sustainable and needlessly destructive, in pursuit of something that many people believe has limited value or unproven value, which is true.
Not the case here, but it's also important to keep in mind that laws too, can be unjust and immoral. Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws.
These are books that no one else wants and would get pulped otherwise. No one has space to save the 1754 edition of "whale blubber cookery on the open seas".
Original full title (too long): It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.
It's a win-win-win for Amazon if they destroy the source in the process of scanning it. They get the AI training data, and it's cheaper for them to destroy the book in the process. Destroying the book ensures that it will be more difficult for competitors to scan the same content, thereby increasing the value of the data they've scanned.
Lastly, there's a misguided belief among some that it's somehow less of a copyright violation if the source is destroyed, but it's a violation either way unless the entity doing the scanning has permission from the copyright holder to make the copy.
Is it? They keep the scans (somewhere). These books would have rotted in bookstores and then been trashed once those bookstores went out of business.
There’s no giant “used” section at Barnes and Noble. Libraries only have so much space and they have to cycle through books as the years go by. This is easily the best fate these books could have received.
Bullshit...they aren't sharing them with the internet archive, and at least the inventory of the defunct bookstore might have ended up with a collector or something. These slop factories have a less sound business model than any given bookstore, and you think they'll preserve those scans and share them with the world? Corporations regularly delete media for utterly capricious reasons.
> As mentioned elsewhere, this is also IP theft on a massive scale.
Scanning a legitimately purchased book is IP theft? How can he hold such a copyright-maximalist view, and at the same time defend the Internet Archive?
Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes.
Corporation A buys all existing copies of the book, scans them, destroys the originals, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered.
Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge.
Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would defend person B and try to stop Corporation A?
In this hypothetical, my grandpa didn't patent this way to cure diabetes (otherwise the company would owe him royalties, assuming the patent hadn't expired).
So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it.
I'm sure people would prefer if Amazon also offered library-like access to the book, but how is it theft? I'm not asking about "any possible logic" - he called it theft.
Words are subjective. The person is saying that it is theft and if the law doesn't define it as such then the law should change. The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available.
> The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available.
That is also my understanding of the claim, and I would intuitively agree with it.
> So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it.
Ok, but it's a bit different because they are not selling "the book" they are selling a fundamentally different thing for which the book is consumable input. Let's consider a batch of 5000 books. For kicks let's assume the known copies are N=1 for those books. Today, though only a few people can do this at a time, a person can purchase one of those books once read exactly the text in that book, and keep doing so to their heart's content. Or maybe a library buys it and now a rotating legion of people can do that for free. Now let's say amazon buys and scans them, destroying them in the process and refusing to release scans to avoid giving competitors a training edge. Now:
- You can never get the information as written again. At best you'll get an LLM output approximation/mutation of it. If this was the expression of a real human beings lived experience, that's kind of sad and goes against one of the spirited aspects of human existence, to leave a legacy, doesn't it?
- Amazon is going to charge you per token every time you want to access that information.
- Price demand for the information is now tied up with general demand for LLMs rather than the actual book, either reducing or greatly inflating the cost to you in addition to the now recurring charges.
So, now you (a) can't actually ever access that book as it was written (b) need to pay continually to access an approximation of its contents (c) and possibly more than the book is worth since now it's "value" in a price sense has been absorbed into general llm inference costs.
Not to mention you may have eradicated the last extant copy of a person's memoirs, but I guess it's pretty clear people in this industry don't care at this point. I hope one day your entire life story is ground up and consumed in some data farming operation and you are all summarily forgotten.
They didn't say that the Internet Archive wasn't "IP theft" - nor did they say that IP theft was inherently wrong.
"AI training is infringement" is not exactly a copyright-maximalist view. The explicit training task used for pre-training is reproducing the content of the trained-on books; and models trained on such books are able to reproduce significant infringing chunks of them[0] unless specifically post-trained to refuse to do so.
Additionally, they might have thought that Controlled Digital Lending was OK (it wasn't, but that's a different issue to AI training). As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there's a common misconception that copyright is concerned with the number of copies in circulation as opposed to individual acts of copying.
Or they don't care about any of that and just wanted to highlight the hypocrisy.
[0] Which, under the "compression is intelligence" point of view, is entirely expected and not surprising in the slightest.
> 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.
It does though. A lot of people seem to think "it's a book!!!" means it takes on some mystical intrinsic value. That's bullshit. There's an absolute mountain of worthless and near-worthless books. I bet the vast vast majority of these books are those books - after all that's what Amazon wants. A ton of human written text as easily as possible. They obviously aren't buying first editions of Oliver Twist, or even second editions of Harry Potter.
> We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked
Yeah... because then it would reveal how unimportant they are. This sort of outrage inflation is counter-productive. People see through it, lose trust, and then when something bad actually happens they won't believe you.
Then why does Amazon want them? Why train an AI on worthless books?
Individually you might be right. Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.
I've been looking for a recipe book that my mother used to own called "Taste of the Tropics". Every few years I search online, and while I find a listing from time to time, it's always been "Currently unavailable".
I just searched again now and found 3 used copies on AbeBooks for about US$11 incl. shipping. Absolutely made my day.
I don't know if adult me will enjoy it beyond the nostalgia, but there's a coconut cake recipe in there that I will never forget.
Like you said, just about nobody on planet earth would care if the billionaires ingested and then destroyed those final copies, but I'd have been gutted if they'd beat me to it.
>Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.
ask your aunt for the recipe, look it up online with a search engine, ask an LLM by describing how it tastes and the ingredients you remember, this is really not that complicated
>This is cultural violence on a massive scale.
could you be any more dramatic? you're acting like we are actually losing anything when in reality we're gaining from this, you'll just be able to ask the AI for the recipe instead of wasting hours and hours hunting down some old book and ordering it online for an exorbitant amount
Just like with most things, LLM's are terrible at recipes if you are actually a good cook.
Your example is very flawed because if the LLM gave you the exact recipe then it would be infringement, but many recipes need to be exact. LLMs aggregate information so wanting a very specific recipe (to the point of hunting down an old cookbook) is a non-starter because it the LLM is really only guessing.
What are we gaining other than your silly little hypothetical?
The whole problem here is:
- Not everyone agrees on the utility / value of AI.
- A small handful of companies control frontier models and get to shape how these inputs are ultimately put to use.
- As Sam Altman put it, they want to charge you, in perpetuity, for "intelligence" as a service. Contrarily, anyone can access a book usually for a one time purchase fee and read it forever. You'll be paying per token to look up auntie's recipe every time instead of just, you know, reading the book.
Not to mention you are erasing the voices of human beings who had lives and may have related their experiences and emotions in those texts. That anyone would be comfortable with a corporation they know nothing about destroying potentially unique information of the lives and stories of real human beings, locking it away forever as one granular component of a stochastic content generator, the human expression in its actual form never to be accessed again, is absolutely appalling to me.
I think you should reflect more on who will really benefit, who has the control, and why humanity as a collective is potentially losing as collateral, without having much say about it.
What we have is not capitalism. There is way too much gate-keeping regulation for it to be called capitalism.
Just like China does not have communism. They have too much free-market activity and private ownership for it to classify as such.
If you look at China and think "That's not communism", just be aware that they may also look at the west and think "That's not capitalism." Both are right. In fact both systems have converged.
China took the better aspects of communism and capitalism. We took some of the worst aspects of both... Except maybe free speech; but people are working hard on removing that one!
It makes sense; China came out of an era of extreme government control which has been reduced over time (compared to what it was before). In the west, government control has been on the way up and we can't even imagine how bad it can get.
Most people agree it isn't normal. The problem is the people at the levers of power think otherwise. Capitalism as it exists in the US today, with effectively no regulation and deeply intertwined with governance, but in the wrong direction (corporations steering government) is basically the perfect exemplar of what they call a vicious circle in systems thinking. Couple that with the isolationist and individualist principles at the heart of American thinking and you have a perfect storm of runaway variable maximization (aka instability) as increasingly smaller groups of people amass increasing amounts of resources and power.
Wage labor is then the perfect structure to ensure that most resistance from the bottom is suppressed before it can even really start. When you depend on the corporation to succeed for your subsistence (since there is no adequate social safety net to fall back on) taking a principled stance and refusing to destroy great works of literature becomes a highly costly endeavor for most people.
The full headline tries to equate this to The Internet Archive’s recent legal troubles.
For a refresher: The Internet Archive scanned books then shared them online, trying to claim that converting them into digital copies qualified as a derivative work. You don’t have to be a lawyer to see how that claim doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.
The LLM companies are not redistributing the works. They are using them for training. This blog post calls it IP theft, but it has actually been litigated in court already. Using books for training does not qualify as theft or redistribution, even though some people have different opinions about the moral angles.
One of those same lawsuits also extracted a huge settlement from Anthropic for using digital downloads from pirate sites. The conclusion was that the only acceptable way for them to use the books is to buy them and scan them. The courts forced it to be this way.
The current hand-wringing about the destruction of books is based on claims that they’re doing it to rare books that are also valuable. So far nobody has been able to actually provide an example of one of these books that is supposedly ultra-rare, but also valuable, but also only available at one of these book sellers that sells these things in bulk. We’re supposed to assume that one of these books might actually be super valuable but also super rare and also only available at these places they’re buying from.
I think this is impressive backwards reasoning.
Before my lifetime, copyright law all but choked and killed the public domain. And now everything is stale and the same.
This particular battle was lost with Google Books and the attempt to make the world's largest library. The modern library of Alexandria.
But then copyright lawyers got involved to get their pound of flesh. And here we are.
I am upset about the destruction of knowledge. Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago. I think it's a mistake to not work with a non-profit, use cheap COTS non-destructive scanning, and write off the costs of rebinding them and rehousing them.
Everyone is impressively short sighted.
>And now everything is stale and the same.
This has been less true every year since Usenet and Geocities. Much of the stuff on their was pirated, but that was the "stale and same" stuff you're complaining about anyway. The rest of the stuff was all kinds of original, good and bad. There's never been more total "content" and more total variety. You just have to look around for it (but that's also never been easier).
Letting AI companies try to profit off of all that creativity forever while choking the ability of the creators to make future revenue off of it is exactly what would actually lead to a "everything is stale and the same" situation. Preserving variety and novelty of new creation would look like putting in new restrictions to reduce this not-envisioned-when-the-laws-were-made sort of read-once-slop-forever usage.
The 404 Media report referenced in the article was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742
“We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility” (404media.co)
164 points | 3 days ago | 321 comments
Copyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.
Wasn't copyright law supposed to support creation and propagation of works of art ? Instead, apparently it is A-OK or even encouraged by the same law to destroy books.
That does not make any sense! Really might be high time to scrap it all.
No, it doesn't. Copyright doesn't care about copies, it cares about copying. If it did care about copies - i.e. the total number of copies in circulation - then ReDigi and the Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program would have both been legal. Destroying a copy does not give you permission to create a replacement copy.
The only relevant case law for AI training in the US is the rulings in the Anthropic lawsuit presided over by Judge Alsup. That lawsuit ruled that it's infringement to build a shadow library from pirated books; but NOT to train AI on those pirated books. The only point where destructive book scanning even comes into play is that Anthropic also had a book scanning program alongside their piracy, Judge Alsup said that program was not infringing, and Anthropic happened to be destroying books. At no point did Alsup say that leaving the books whole would have infringed copyright - it was never even considered as it was outside the scope of the lawsuit.
Now, if Anthropic were to non-destructively scan books, store them in a library, and sell the books on, that could be infringing. All the case law about format shifting presumes the owner retains the original. So Anthropic would likely have to hold onto books, at least the ones they wanted to train on, until they were done training on that book[0]. But they do not have to destroy them permanently. They are destroying these books specifically because it is cheaper to do so than to use, say, the Internet Archive's own custom-built nondestructive scanners.
[0] I am absolutely furious about how much this sounds like "fair use is just an extra license you get when you buy a book", and I would much rather have had Judge Alsup just say AI training is not fair use instead.
Courts found that having a central library of 7 million pirated books is against the law, and assessed a large penalty (small for these robber barons) so Anthropic is destroying them now to conform to the law. The law is bs and Anthropic is run by villains.
In times of substantial technological change, laws tend to lag substantially behind what is actually needed.
And in times of substantial inequality, they lag yet further.
i dont get it.
this is a complicated way of counting how many of each word is in the book.
clearly fair use.
does the author think cutting up a book is a copyright concern? theyre buying the books, its up to them what to do with their copy. if you want the books preserved, maybe fund your libraries to get a copy or two?
It's possible for someone to do something socially reprehensible and entirely distasteful and to be perfectly within the letter of the law while doing so. The article doesn't emphasize copyright issues or fair use, because that isn't the point. The post is trying to argue that the act is not sustainable and needlessly destructive, in pursuit of something that many people believe has limited value or unproven value, which is true.
Not the case here, but it's also important to keep in mind that laws too, can be unjust and immoral. Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws.
These are books that no one else wants and would get pulped otherwise. No one has space to save the 1754 edition of "whale blubber cookery on the open seas".
> Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws.
So you are saying to abolish copyright?
Original full title (too long): It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.
It's a win-win-win for Amazon if they destroy the source in the process of scanning it. They get the AI training data, and it's cheaper for them to destroy the book in the process. Destroying the book ensures that it will be more difficult for competitors to scan the same content, thereby increasing the value of the data they've scanned.
Lastly, there's a misguided belief among some that it's somehow less of a copyright violation if the source is destroyed, but it's a violation either way unless the entity doing the scanning has permission from the copyright holder to make the copy.
This has been reported of other major ai shops. It is a little chilling that they're going after rare books.
For the record, i don't much have issue with llms and such.
But... the wholesale destruction of printed books is a bridge too far.
Is it? They keep the scans (somewhere). These books would have rotted in bookstores and then been trashed once those bookstores went out of business.
There’s no giant “used” section at Barnes and Noble. Libraries only have so much space and they have to cycle through books as the years go by. This is easily the best fate these books could have received.
If they were sharing the scans it would be great but they’re not.
They are literally not legally allowed to do this.
Google Books tried. They lost. If you want this fixed, talk to your congressman, not Amazon.
Bullshit...they aren't sharing them with the internet archive, and at least the inventory of the defunct bookstore might have ended up with a collector or something. These slop factories have a less sound business model than any given bookstore, and you think they'll preserve those scans and share them with the world? Corporations regularly delete media for utterly capricious reasons.
Indeed. In fact I suspect that the destruction is the point. A book that Anthropic destroys the last copy of is a book that OpenAI will never have.
It is pure evel and anyone involved in this is a criminal that should be harshly punished. Books are sacred.
Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
> As mentioned elsewhere, this is also IP theft on a massive scale.
Scanning a legitimately purchased book is IP theft? How can he hold such a copyright-maximalist view, and at the same time defend the Internet Archive?
I imagine the argument could go like this.
Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes.
Corporation A buys all existing copies of the book, scans them, destroys the originals, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered.
Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge.
Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would defend person B and try to stop Corporation A?
In this hypothetical, my grandpa didn't patent this way to cure diabetes (otherwise the company would owe him royalties, assuming the patent hadn't expired).
So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it.
I'm sure people would prefer if Amazon also offered library-like access to the book, but how is it theft? I'm not asking about "any possible logic" - he called it theft.
Words are subjective. The person is saying that it is theft and if the law doesn't define it as such then the law should change. The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available.
> The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available.
That is also my understanding of the claim, and I would intuitively agree with it.
> So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it.
Ok, but it's a bit different because they are not selling "the book" they are selling a fundamentally different thing for which the book is consumable input. Let's consider a batch of 5000 books. For kicks let's assume the known copies are N=1 for those books. Today, though only a few people can do this at a time, a person can purchase one of those books once read exactly the text in that book, and keep doing so to their heart's content. Or maybe a library buys it and now a rotating legion of people can do that for free. Now let's say amazon buys and scans them, destroying them in the process and refusing to release scans to avoid giving competitors a training edge. Now:
- You can never get the information as written again. At best you'll get an LLM output approximation/mutation of it. If this was the expression of a real human beings lived experience, that's kind of sad and goes against one of the spirited aspects of human existence, to leave a legacy, doesn't it? - Amazon is going to charge you per token every time you want to access that information. - Price demand for the information is now tied up with general demand for LLMs rather than the actual book, either reducing or greatly inflating the cost to you in addition to the now recurring charges.
So, now you (a) can't actually ever access that book as it was written (b) need to pay continually to access an approximation of its contents (c) and possibly more than the book is worth since now it's "value" in a price sense has been absorbed into general llm inference costs.
Not to mention you may have eradicated the last extant copy of a person's memoirs, but I guess it's pretty clear people in this industry don't care at this point. I hope one day your entire life story is ground up and consumed in some data farming operation and you are all summarily forgotten.
Scanning is not the ip theft, it never was.
They didn't say that the Internet Archive wasn't "IP theft" - nor did they say that IP theft was inherently wrong.
"AI training is infringement" is not exactly a copyright-maximalist view. The explicit training task used for pre-training is reproducing the content of the trained-on books; and models trained on such books are able to reproduce significant infringing chunks of them[0] unless specifically post-trained to refuse to do so.
Additionally, they might have thought that Controlled Digital Lending was OK (it wasn't, but that's a different issue to AI training). As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there's a common misconception that copyright is concerned with the number of copies in circulation as opposed to individual acts of copying.
Or they don't care about any of that and just wanted to highlight the hypocrisy.
[0] Which, under the "compression is intelligence" point of view, is entirely expected and not surprising in the slightest.
AI psychosis cuts both ways.
> 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.
It does though. A lot of people seem to think "it's a book!!!" means it takes on some mystical intrinsic value. That's bullshit. There's an absolute mountain of worthless and near-worthless books. I bet the vast vast majority of these books are those books - after all that's what Amazon wants. A ton of human written text as easily as possible. They obviously aren't buying first editions of Oliver Twist, or even second editions of Harry Potter.
> We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked
Yeah... because then it would reveal how unimportant they are. This sort of outrage inflation is counter-productive. People see through it, lose trust, and then when something bad actually happens they won't believe you.
They've been very clear that these aren't "special" books. Your gotcha isn't a gotcha.
And come on. They're not revealing the titles because that would reveal which bookseller they worked with.
Then why does Amazon want them? Why train an AI on worthless books?
Individually you might be right. Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.
This is cultural violence on a massive scale.
I've been looking for a recipe book that my mother used to own called "Taste of the Tropics". Every few years I search online, and while I find a listing from time to time, it's always been "Currently unavailable".
I just searched again now and found 3 used copies on AbeBooks for about US$11 incl. shipping. Absolutely made my day.
I don't know if adult me will enjoy it beyond the nostalgia, but there's a coconut cake recipe in there that I will never forget.
Like you said, just about nobody on planet earth would care if the billionaires ingested and then destroyed those final copies, but I'd have been gutted if they'd beat me to it.
>Then why does Amazon want them?
quantity has a quality of its own
>Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.
ask your aunt for the recipe, look it up online with a search engine, ask an LLM by describing how it tastes and the ingredients you remember, this is really not that complicated
>This is cultural violence on a massive scale.
could you be any more dramatic? you're acting like we are actually losing anything when in reality we're gaining from this, you'll just be able to ask the AI for the recipe instead of wasting hours and hours hunting down some old book and ordering it online for an exorbitant amount
Just like with most things, LLM's are terrible at recipes if you are actually a good cook.
Your example is very flawed because if the LLM gave you the exact recipe then it would be infringement, but many recipes need to be exact. LLMs aggregate information so wanting a very specific recipe (to the point of hunting down an old cookbook) is a non-starter because it the LLM is really only guessing.
What are we gaining other than your silly little hypothetical?
The whole problem here is:
- Not everyone agrees on the utility / value of AI. - A small handful of companies control frontier models and get to shape how these inputs are ultimately put to use. - As Sam Altman put it, they want to charge you, in perpetuity, for "intelligence" as a service. Contrarily, anyone can access a book usually for a one time purchase fee and read it forever. You'll be paying per token to look up auntie's recipe every time instead of just, you know, reading the book.
Not to mention you are erasing the voices of human beings who had lives and may have related their experiences and emotions in those texts. That anyone would be comfortable with a corporation they know nothing about destroying potentially unique information of the lives and stories of real human beings, locking it away forever as one granular component of a stochastic content generator, the human expression in its actual form never to be accessed again, is absolutely appalling to me.
I think you should reflect more on who will really benefit, who has the control, and why humanity as a collective is potentially losing as collateral, without having much say about it.
Oh no, some hypothetical person can't find a mediocre cookbook from 20 years ago. Amazon stop!!
Do you even hear yourself?
Getting real sick of capitalism systematically consuming and destroying everything it touches.
These behaviours would be described as obsessive and pathological in any clinical setting, but when they're done for profit it's somehow normal.
What we have is not capitalism. There is way too much gate-keeping regulation for it to be called capitalism.
Just like China does not have communism. They have too much free-market activity and private ownership for it to classify as such.
If you look at China and think "That's not communism", just be aware that they may also look at the west and think "That's not capitalism." Both are right. In fact both systems have converged.
China took the better aspects of communism and capitalism. We took some of the worst aspects of both... Except maybe free speech; but people are working hard on removing that one!
It makes sense; China came out of an era of extreme government control which has been reduced over time (compared to what it was before). In the west, government control has been on the way up and we can't even imagine how bad it can get.
Most people agree it isn't normal. The problem is the people at the levers of power think otherwise. Capitalism as it exists in the US today, with effectively no regulation and deeply intertwined with governance, but in the wrong direction (corporations steering government) is basically the perfect exemplar of what they call a vicious circle in systems thinking. Couple that with the isolationist and individualist principles at the heart of American thinking and you have a perfect storm of runaway variable maximization (aka instability) as increasingly smaller groups of people amass increasing amounts of resources and power.
Wage labor is then the perfect structure to ensure that most resistance from the bottom is suppressed before it can even really start. When you depend on the corporation to succeed for your subsistence (since there is no adequate social safety net to fall back on) taking a principled stance and refusing to destroy great works of literature becomes a highly costly endeavor for most people.