somewhere were we can't access it. as the article states: “permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers”
the issue isn't that the physical copy is gone, it's that they are preventing people from making digital copies that are actually accessible by destroying the physical copies.
> If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more.
archivists keep everything, because we don't know right now what will be important 100 years from now.
By any metric imaginable, it's making the information more accessible, not less. First, it's taking a single copy of a 10k physical print and it's making it digital. Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.
Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.
I happen to actually actively shop second hand bookstores, so I am potentially affected by this - as opposed to most people complaining because they don't like the idea. And I still absolutely support it.
Help me understand how. Not only are these LLMs expressly prohibited from specifically regurgitating copyright works if the users asks them to, but they habitually hallucinate or paraphrase things wrong.
If they won't regurgitate the copyrighted text verbatim, and are known to be confidently incorrect and hallucinatory, I'm struggling to see how these texts are "immediately available to literally billions".
And I ask this as someone who has had LLMs give me incorrect assertions about the contents of books.
For example, knowledge about how the book smells when you open it, something that reader do talk about enough I don't think this should be a strawman, is lost. But, that is about the experience of reading the book, not the knowledge of the book.
The exact text? Yeah, I think that is largely lost as well. This is a summary. And for rarer books, it will be a particularly bad summary. The basics of the book are being captured in a space that the right question that retrieve it, but worse than a sparksnote and any well read reader will tell you all the sorts of things a sparknotes already loses compared to reading the book directly.
But, that little bit of data is a bit more data than existed before, and future LLMs should get better at giving the information. So, in that sense, the knowledge is better being spread compared to copyright where the book stays in a warehouse until it is disposed of. If it was between this and a sparksnote of the book being made, the sparksnote is far better, but between this and the book simply being disposed of, then the LLM is better but far, far from great.
That's a lot of assumptions that goes into the judgment, which is probably why different people reach different conclusions. One person is imagine the alternate fate of this book being slowly rotting in a landfill, the other resting on a bookshelf where it is read at least once fully and then flipped through time to time, and neither are wrong.
> Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.
Isn't this a contradiction? I mean, maybe you can invoke a fair use policy if an LLM spits out some text from the scanned book, but then you are _not_ "making it available to literally billions".
History tells us that very few "permanent" situations are truly permanent.
Provided a set of information has value (which in this case it clearly does) then the overwhelming likelihood is that, eventually, through some method or other, the information will become public.
If you destroy the only copy of a physical artifact, the situation is as permanent as it can get.
Fetishizing books isn't going to help.
In fact, most of those "rare" books don't sell because nobody wants them. The AI companies are making them even more rare, so the booksellers should be thankful.
But where did you hear that they’re buying “all copies”? And to what end?
To take a crude example in a different medium - new york in the 90s - widely documented right? Yet, if you want to find high definition video of street life in a given burrough on a given day or year, you're faced with an enormously difficult task. There were some HD test videos done in Manhattan in the late 90s (which have been posted to Hackernews before), but there's no equivalent for the other burroughs. Your best best would be finding original negative out takes or location scouting footage from feature films, a very hard task. That's only 30 years ago. Outside of the focal points of the worlds attention - English language, rich countries, places in the news, contemporaneous sources for 'non notable' events (lifestyle, how people spoke dressed etc) is surprisingly poorly preserved.
Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.
I honestly can't and I think you can't either or you would have used an example with books/printed media rather than film, an entirely different ballgame.
Similar textual examples would be any text containing actual language as it's spoken in a given place or time. Or any factual textbook detailing the buildings present in a given location. Or any text book detailing a now defunct construction process. Or any text book (generally small run) detailing a niche interest, now missing ecosystem or the state of a particular political situation at a given time. Essentially all textual primary sources for events which are not currently considered important - but which we have no way of estimating the future importance of. One can continue to create countless counterfactual examples in this vein. My overall point is we cannot know what may be useful or even essential in the future, and knowledge should be preserved under the assumption that it is likely to be.
Historians frequently refer to this paradox - how everyday aspects of life are frequently not explicitly documented, since they're so obvious to the communities or communities of expertise that observe and carry them out. So it's actually incredibly important to preserve what seems like ephemera.
Hell we couldn't have AI training at all if we lacked the corpus of existing written literature - but there was no way any author could have anticipated this future utility more than a couple of decades ago.
1. If someone is acquiring books in bulk for bargain-bin prices and shredding them, they're books whose physical copies have essentially no market value and which, absent this buyer, were overwhelmingly headed for pulping or landfill anyway. Millions of books are destroyed every day.
Could one of these worthless looking books turn out to contain information historians care about in a 100 year? Sure. But that doesn't create an obligation for someone to pay to warehouse every extant copy forever. Physical Preservation has costs: space, cataloguing, handling, transportation etc. Archives and libraries have always had to make choices for this reason.
2. I'm not arguing that preservation has no value. The question is whether destroying a physical copy after digitizing it is a serious loss when talking about mass-produced printed material.
Was this the last surviving copy ? Is the information unavavilable in libraries, archives, other editions, scans, citations, contemporary works etc ? If not, nothing has been lost except one physical instance of a reproducible object.
Your film analogy worked a lot better because old film footage is often unique primary source material. A camera recording of a random brooklyn street in 1993 may literally be the only recording of those people, storefronts and circumstances. The nth printe dcopy of a technical manual is not analogous to that.
But buying all the copies is categorically different and I cannot imagine why they would attempt that, except perhaps to prevent their competition from getting a hold of the same text?
Of course they aren’t buying “all copies”, and that wouldn’t even be possible in most cases since such books are usually flea market/attic material and most copies aren’t for sale (or even catalogued) to begin with.
I’d be interested to learn who comes up with such lies though. Is it really just random people venting their frustration, or some kind of organized astroturfing operation?
Maybe the Bodleian Library at Oxford University should give all their rare books to AI companies to scan and destroy them since it is not a "big deal" anyway.
Except that when they did do a pilot with OpenAI to scan these rare books, [0] they did NOT destroy them. I wonder why?
[0] https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/services/research-partnerships...