Our family volunteers at a nonprofit that moves a huge number of books. We take donations and run massive charity sales, clearing tens of thousands of books a month. Pricing works like a ladder: you try to sell a book for a couple of bucks, then for a dollar, then by the $5 bag, then for free, and you still end up with thousands of books nobody wants even at no cost. These used to go straight to pulp. Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.
I'm sure the Anthropics of the world have shredded the last known copies of plenty of titles. But nobody talks about the last known copies that get pulped every day simply because there are so many books nobody wants and storing them is expensive.
My wife loves bulk book hauls. Those places that we frequent, work like a literal permanent discount warehouse - books in high shelves, on pallets, everywhere. Often hundreds of issues of the same one.
But there is so many books there that no one want's to read. Hundreds of the same book lying there for months or years.
Same for public book-sharing "libraries" (small shelves that look like bird house, usually in parks etc). People really like them and there are many in my city, but most books there are products of a gone era and a gone mindset. No one want's that even for free.
We were taught respect for books, but not everything is worth preserving.
I didn't go this year but my local town library has a book sale where books go for something like $10/bag. I donate some books to them throughout the year. There are still a lot of books available on the last or second to last day of the sale. I'm sure a huge number get pulped.
Well, they could turn the bad faith story into a good faith story by making them available for everyone to download perhaps. (AI companies "saving" old books!) But that would require giving a s*t which they don't and that is the real problem imho.
That would require effort (to sort, acquire copyright, etc) which they wouldn't put in. Because they don't care.
People obviously feel bad about companies doing this. People reading these stories don't care what's legal, they care what's ethical. Heck, re-publishing long lost material would make AI companies heroes instead of bad guys.
> That would require effort (to sort, acquire copyright, etc) which they wouldn't put in. Because they don't care.
I don't think you have any idea how expensive it is to acquire the copyright for a single book with the intent of making it freely available online. That's equivalent to asking the rights holders to perpetually forgo all possible earnings from the material, and they expect to be compensated accordingly. Even paying lawyers to begin assembling what's needed to make this happen would be five figures per book to get started.
Google attempted to do this 15 years ago, they got sued and stopped. It turns out that tech companies occasionally do have to follow the law, you'd think people would be happier about that...
Distributing copyrighted works (prior to expiration of their copyright) verbatim is illegal.
Training an LLM on copyrighted works is not illegal.
This whole debate has been tried in court already. Calling it IP theft only stands on individual moral grounds, but the law allows for derivative works.
A lot of these books are reference titles that are outdated to the point of uselessness and/or weren't that great/interesting when they were new. Not many people have interest in or use for textbooks from the 50s.
> Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.
Yeah, now instead old books being turned into toilet paper, we'll get turned into toilet paper.
And Sam Altman will become richer than God, and isn't that what really matters?
But don't worry! You'll still have access to ChatGPT until your savings run out.
I have a similar thought too each time I walk past piles of discount books.
I'm in the camp that perhaps it's healthy to not grasp onto every bit of information. that some artifacts dying a natural death is maybe just the way things are
They have to destroy the copy either way for it to be fair use (according to Bartz v Anthropic). Cutting the bindings off is already the faster method to scan, and once you're required to pulp the original anyway, it becomes a no-brainer.
The judge ruled that format shifting was fair use. The fair use argument was enhanced because the original was destroyed. Hypothetically, one could do only the format shifting and keep the original - but the original could not be sold or donated or otherwise given away because then the format shifted copy would not be fair use.
I can burn DVD copies of my old VHS tapes. I cannot then give away the old VHS tapes or sell them at a garage sale. If I keep them, they're cluttering the shelf... so the VHS tape gets thrown away afterwards.
Can someone explain why the old books could really be relevant. I get the pre-nuclear steel analogy, but why is this relevant given how much more modern texts exist. A few years ago, millions of yahoo groups were erased but now a few thousand books are what is needed to run a successful AI company? I mean, it can barely be about the information in those books (that would be very often outdated), but just for a little more text (with ever less marginal gain), what is the benefit?
It sounds like it is about the information in the books. The titles they're looking for are all nonfiction. Not everything is on the internet, and just because it's a few years old doesn't mean it's outdated.
Speaking from experience, the information density of published books is a lot higher than most internet text. It's very high quality training data.
The goal here is to have all human knowledge in a single file, which is pretty neat IMO.
The internet basically never delivered on the promise of replacing textbooks or even education as a whole. Wikipedia sucks on many topics, has insane internal politics, and is a tertiary source by design (redigesting blogs and books), whereas textbooks are generally secondary.
Booksellers noticed a huge uptick in non-fiction purchases, that is not the same thing as them not targeting fiction at all.
Edit: Actually, I have real evidence, the Bartz in "Bartz v Anthropic" is Andrea Bartz, a novelist, and the complaint specifically lists four of her novels as infringed works.
> but now a few thousand books are what is needed to run a successful AI company?
They're scanning millions of books.
It's the diversity of text that helps. One of the lessons we've learned is that more training data leads to better models. Even old books have different mixes of word sequences that will improve the model. The returns are diminishing, but when you have the pipeline set up to ingest it you might as well keep adding to the dataset.
They are the memories of the productive part of society. You can leaf through them and get the feel of what it was like. You don’t need most of your memories, personality, or core ideals to be productive to the State.
The information density is a lot less for millions of yahoo groups. They are far more likely to cover the same topics and not have new information in them.
Books are more likely to be about a specific topic or story or time or setting and be more information dense
> why the old books could really be relevant
> it can barely be about the information in those books (that would be very often outdated),
LOL, not being rude: have you ever read a book outside of what they forced you to read in school? Most old books are not O'reilly's manuals for Visual Studio 2014, they don't go out of date.
They are interesting to human beings for the same reason they are interesting to the labs. If it was just about quantity of text then the labs could generate text with the prev. gen model and use that alone to scale to the next model, there is something of immeasurable value contained in books (hint: it starts with an i and rhymes with bin formation).
Cognition is encoded in language, they weren't brain-damaged yet. There's better (real, not token-exchange) thinking, which LLMs can copy and reproduce in novel arrangements.
Maybe for current in print books, but the concern is about rare books being pulped in this process. If a book is rare then it isn't in print, so nobody is making money out of it.
I've believed for years that it really should have one, or at least a "you aren't selling this to the public at a reasonable market-rate price (or via subscription, I care about access far FAR more than ownership), you lose all rights to it" regime.
A book, song that has been out in public-domain for more than 10 years, should be downloadable. Even if you were to rebuy the same CD again the amount that the artist received would be a pointless pittance. Why not just let it be free to be enjoyed by all?
OCR Scanned for training, then tossed away or burnt. Great for nature.
Good memories of visiting used bookshops near Kyoto University with stacks upon stacks of obscure literary works and research material. Lots of interesting books about the Japanese language that were never digitized and I always left with 2-3 new books. So I'm not super happy about AI companies hoovering this all up and not making the scans available.
Pretty much as it happened with vinyl records twenty years ago. I remember seeing photos of this guy somewhere in Brazil standing atop heaps of vinyl records which he had amassed with HDLR intention. Now books. Some of us hold on forever.
You are a moron: vinyl records came and went in about 25 years, books have been the engine of human progress for at least the last 3 millenia, the books being burned by these misanthropic lunatics are not available in any other medium, this is not about fascination with some particular mediumn of transmission, it's about the contents
Before you buy the apologia that these books are not valuable or interesting: if they weren't valuable or interesting the AI labs would not be spending billions of dollars to purchase and scan them. Yes, everyone has a personal anecdote about pallets of garbage books but I have three insights for you that you may not have because you don't read or sift through pallets of garbage books:
1) The labs don't want garbage books, they want interesting books that are rare and unique. They want high quality training data, random permutations of language style are fine, but what you want is unseen information, unseen patterns of thinking, unseen ideas.
2) Most pallet of books contains lots of valuable and interesting works, maybe 1-3% but sorting through them takes time, money, and energy, that's why the labs are starting to purchase by the pallet, it's because they already have a fully automated process so they can always beat any bookseller small or large on cost to find the books of interest and value in a pile.
3) Many of these pallets may sit for years before being sorted, and many of the books may sit for years before being sold, but these things actually do eventually happen, valuable books are found, and they eventually make their way to interested readers, this is the business model of used bookstores. Most books of value don't get destroyed or thrown away.
Destroying human art, knowledge, and culture is an essential part of the business plan for frontier labs, it is not enough to steal and regurgitate all the art and information in the world, you also want to make it inaccessible through any other means than the regurgitation machine. Don't expect the book burning to be an isolated incident, they are coming for every other form of stored human knowledge or art, and yes, unfortunately while scanning it they will have to destroy the original copy. And attacking the past is only the beginning.
Ah yes, the litteral destruction of culture and physical media for a centralised subscription service. I love the liberal world of techno enclosures of our new overlords, viva el free market economy.
> But what happens when sales numbers don't meet projections? The book is discounted. Then, at the publisher's discretion, the bookstore will receive a directive to rip the covers off the books, recycle the remainder of the book to be "pulped" or turned into other forms of paper, such as notebook paper and toilet paper. The bookstore is expected to mail the book covers to the publisher as evidence that the book has been destroyed.
That's an American take. In Latin America they sit in boxes and you can see it, because the pages will have been discolored after so many years of sitting somewhere waiting to be sold. They're only recycled if they're given away at book exchange events and no one wants them.
Once upon a time, Hansel and Gretel were walking through the woods when they met a Sleeping Beauty called Snow White. As they tried to wake Beauty, a naked Emperor walked in screaming "Off with his head" before a Big Bad Wolf started huffing and puffing.
We could go out in the world, have experiences, cogitate upon them, learn to write well, and then do so? It ain't easy, but that's the way it used to be done.
Our family volunteers at a nonprofit that moves a huge number of books. We take donations and run massive charity sales, clearing tens of thousands of books a month. Pricing works like a ladder: you try to sell a book for a couple of bucks, then for a dollar, then by the $5 bag, then for free, and you still end up with thousands of books nobody wants even at no cost. These used to go straight to pulp. Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.
I'm sure the Anthropics of the world have shredded the last known copies of plenty of titles. But nobody talks about the last known copies that get pulped every day simply because there are so many books nobody wants and storing them is expensive.
My wife loves bulk book hauls. Those places that we frequent, work like a literal permanent discount warehouse - books in high shelves, on pallets, everywhere. Often hundreds of issues of the same one.
But there is so many books there that no one want's to read. Hundreds of the same book lying there for months or years.
Same for public book-sharing "libraries" (small shelves that look like bird house, usually in parks etc). People really like them and there are many in my city, but most books there are products of a gone era and a gone mindset. No one want's that even for free.
We were taught respect for books, but not everything is worth preserving.
I didn't go this year but my local town library has a book sale where books go for something like $10/bag. I donate some books to them throughout the year. There are still a lot of books available on the last or second to last day of the sale. I'm sure a huge number get pulped.
Well, they could turn the bad faith story into a good faith story by making them available for everyone to download perhaps. (AI companies "saving" old books!) But that would require giving a s*t which they don't and that is the real problem imho.
They legally cannot do this.
That would require effort (to sort, acquire copyright, etc) which they wouldn't put in. Because they don't care.
People obviously feel bad about companies doing this. People reading these stories don't care what's legal, they care what's ethical. Heck, re-publishing long lost material would make AI companies heroes instead of bad guys.
> That would require effort (to sort, acquire copyright, etc) which they wouldn't put in. Because they don't care.
I don't think you have any idea how expensive it is to acquire the copyright for a single book with the intent of making it freely available online. That's equivalent to asking the rights holders to perpetually forgo all possible earnings from the material, and they expect to be compensated accordingly. Even paying lawyers to begin assembling what's needed to make this happen would be five figures per book to get started.
That certainly hasn’t stopped them before… IP theft is kind of their whole thing, isn’t it?
Google attempted to do this 15 years ago, they got sued and stopped. It turns out that tech companies occasionally do have to follow the law, you'd think people would be happier about that...
Distributing copyrighted works (prior to expiration of their copyright) verbatim is illegal.
Training an LLM on copyrighted works is not illegal.
This whole debate has been tried in court already. Calling it IP theft only stands on individual moral grounds, but the law allows for derivative works.
They legally cannot scan them in entirety either but they are.
Again, under Bartz v Anthropic they can scan and train on whatever they want, as long as the original is lost in the process.
A lot of these books are reference titles that are outdated to the point of uselessness and/or weren't that great/interesting when they were new. Not many people have interest in or use for textbooks from the 50s.
> Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.
Yeah, now instead old books being turned into toilet paper, we'll get turned into toilet paper.
And Sam Altman will become richer than God, and isn't that what really matters?
But don't worry! You'll still have access to ChatGPT until your savings run out.
Do you have an actual point about scanning the books, or are you just using this as a soapbox to rant about AI and Sam Altman?
I have a similar thought too each time I walk past piles of discount books.
I'm in the camp that perhaps it's healthy to not grasp onto every bit of information. that some artifacts dying a natural death is maybe just the way things are
Why do they shred them at all instead of donating or selling them again?
My understanding is they cut off the binding for scanning. They'd have to resell it donate by the page
They have to destroy the copy either way for it to be fair use (according to Bartz v Anthropic). Cutting the bindings off is already the faster method to scan, and once you're required to pulp the original anyway, it becomes a no-brainer.
A judge ruled it was OK to scan books and save the scanned copy if you shred the physical book afterwards.
The judge ruled that format shifting was fair use. The fair use argument was enhanced because the original was destroyed. Hypothetically, one could do only the format shifting and keep the original - but the original could not be sold or donated or otherwise given away because then the format shifted copy would not be fair use.
I can burn DVD copies of my old VHS tapes. I cannot then give away the old VHS tapes or sell them at a garage sale. If I keep them, they're cluttering the shelf... so the VHS tape gets thrown away afterwards.
Yea, there are a ton of people that seem they'd rather the books get lost forever than be looked at by an AI company.
Can someone explain why the old books could really be relevant. I get the pre-nuclear steel analogy, but why is this relevant given how much more modern texts exist. A few years ago, millions of yahoo groups were erased but now a few thousand books are what is needed to run a successful AI company? I mean, it can barely be about the information in those books (that would be very often outdated), but just for a little more text (with ever less marginal gain), what is the benefit?
It sounds like it is about the information in the books. The titles they're looking for are all nonfiction. Not everything is on the internet, and just because it's a few years old doesn't mean it's outdated.
Speaking from experience, the information density of published books is a lot higher than most internet text. It's very high quality training data.
The goal here is to have all human knowledge in a single file, which is pretty neat IMO.
The internet basically never delivered on the promise of replacing textbooks or even education as a whole. Wikipedia sucks on many topics, has insane internal politics, and is a tertiary source by design (redigesting blogs and books), whereas textbooks are generally secondary.
> the information density of published books is a lot higher than most internet text
I'm not convinced. I think you are under-weighing the massive volumes of stuff like self-help books, romance novels, etc.
They're targeting non-fiction books, so romance novels would be out.
Booksellers noticed a huge uptick in non-fiction purchases, that is not the same thing as them not targeting fiction at all.
Edit: Actually, I have real evidence, the Bartz in "Bartz v Anthropic" is Andrea Bartz, a novelist, and the complaint specifically lists four of her novels as infringed works.
Is that a policy change after o4 got a little out of hand?
Also the ability to set the training input limit in the past could be useful.
> but now a few thousand books are what is needed to run a successful AI company?
They're scanning millions of books.
It's the diversity of text that helps. One of the lessons we've learned is that more training data leads to better models. Even old books have different mixes of word sequences that will improve the model. The returns are diminishing, but when you have the pipeline set up to ingest it you might as well keep adding to the dataset.
They are the memories of the productive part of society. You can leaf through them and get the feel of what it was like. You don’t need most of your memories, personality, or core ideals to be productive to the State.
Diversity. Modern books with modern content and in modern styles are overrepresented, old ones underrepresented.
Because Yahoo in particular was very good at destroying goldmines shortly before they became ultra valuable.
There's a number of places that destroyed vast amounts of data in the wind down of ZIRP that probably regret it now.
I'm guessing the more integration tables they consume, the better they become at integration.
I also guess that they're targeting languages that aren't tier one for them yet. Like, Japanese is probably a relatively small corpus for them.
I also wonder if it’s used for text generation in image models! Awful lot of typefaces, sizes, orientations, and words in those books.
They aren't but these companies have more money than sense.
The information density is a lot less for millions of yahoo groups. They are far more likely to cover the same topics and not have new information in them.
Books are more likely to be about a specific topic or story or time or setting and be more information dense
Writing style maybe?
> why the old books could really be relevant > it can barely be about the information in those books (that would be very often outdated),
LOL, not being rude: have you ever read a book outside of what they forced you to read in school? Most old books are not O'reilly's manuals for Visual Studio 2014, they don't go out of date.
They are interesting to human beings for the same reason they are interesting to the labs. If it was just about quantity of text then the labs could generate text with the prev. gen model and use that alone to scale to the next model, there is something of immeasurable value contained in books (hint: it starts with an i and rhymes with bin formation).
Cognition is encoded in language, they weren't brain-damaged yet. There's better (real, not token-exchange) thinking, which LLMs can copy and reproduce in novel arrangements.
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The sad part is, imagine how positive this could be if the scans were made available to the public.
Might add insult to injury for the publishers/authors though?
Maybe for current in print books, but the concern is about rare books being pulped in this process. If a book is rare then it isn't in print, so nobody is making money out of it.
Unfortunately copyright law does not have a squatters-rights exception
I've believed for years that it really should have one, or at least a "you aren't selling this to the public at a reasonable market-rate price (or via subscription, I care about access far FAR more than ownership), you lose all rights to it" regime.
A book, song that has been out in public-domain for more than 10 years, should be downloadable. Even if you were to rebuy the same CD again the amount that the artist received would be a pointless pittance. Why not just let it be free to be enjoyed by all?
OCR Scanned for training, then tossed away or burnt. Great for nature.
Good memories of visiting used bookshops near Kyoto University with stacks upon stacks of obscure literary works and research material. Lots of interesting books about the Japanese language that were never digitized and I always left with 2-3 new books. So I'm not super happy about AI companies hoovering this all up and not making the scans available.
Pretty much as it happened with vinyl records twenty years ago. I remember seeing photos of this guy somewhere in Brazil standing atop heaps of vinyl records which he had amassed with HDLR intention. Now books. Some of us hold on forever.
You are a moron: vinyl records came and went in about 25 years, books have been the engine of human progress for at least the last 3 millenia, the books being burned by these misanthropic lunatics are not available in any other medium, this is not about fascination with some particular mediumn of transmission, it's about the contents
"the engine of human progress"? I think you mean capitalism.
> the books being burned by these misanthropic lunatics are not available in any other medium
prove it, name one title
> this is not about fascination with some particular mediumn of transmission
it very much is. this fetishism of books should really stop, especially when ebooks are more useful, durable, etc.
Before you buy the apologia that these books are not valuable or interesting: if they weren't valuable or interesting the AI labs would not be spending billions of dollars to purchase and scan them. Yes, everyone has a personal anecdote about pallets of garbage books but I have three insights for you that you may not have because you don't read or sift through pallets of garbage books:
1) The labs don't want garbage books, they want interesting books that are rare and unique. They want high quality training data, random permutations of language style are fine, but what you want is unseen information, unseen patterns of thinking, unseen ideas.
2) Most pallet of books contains lots of valuable and interesting works, maybe 1-3% but sorting through them takes time, money, and energy, that's why the labs are starting to purchase by the pallet, it's because they already have a fully automated process so they can always beat any bookseller small or large on cost to find the books of interest and value in a pile.
3) Many of these pallets may sit for years before being sorted, and many of the books may sit for years before being sold, but these things actually do eventually happen, valuable books are found, and they eventually make their way to interested readers, this is the business model of used bookstores. Most books of value don't get destroyed or thrown away.
Destroying human art, knowledge, and culture is an essential part of the business plan for frontier labs, it is not enough to steal and regurgitate all the art and information in the world, you also want to make it inaccessible through any other means than the regurgitation machine. Don't expect the book burning to be an isolated incident, they are coming for every other form of stored human knowledge or art, and yes, unfortunately while scanning it they will have to destroy the original copy. And attacking the past is only the beginning.
Ah yes, the litteral destruction of culture and physical media for a centralised subscription service. I love the liberal world of techno enclosures of our new overlords, viva el free market economy.
What do you think happened to all these used books before the AI companies showed up?
They sat in boxes
Not quite:
> But what happens when sales numbers don't meet projections? The book is discounted. Then, at the publisher's discretion, the bookstore will receive a directive to rip the covers off the books, recycle the remainder of the book to be "pulped" or turned into other forms of paper, such as notebook paper and toilet paper. The bookstore is expected to mail the book covers to the publisher as evidence that the book has been destroyed.
https://www.offthebeatenshelf.com/blog/pulp-fiction-is-real
That's an American take. In Latin America they sit in boxes and you can see it, because the pages will have been discolored after so many years of sitting somewhere waiting to be sold. They're only recycled if they're given away at book exchange events and no one wants them.
TIL that's where the term "pulp fiction" comes from!
"Once great literature—now great litter."
Feel free to buy books by the ton and preserve them yourself. The simple fact they’re being sold by weight implies they’re not rare or unique.
The simple fact that the AI labs are spending billions of dollars to acquire and scan them implies they are rare and unique.
The value in these AI companies will be more in their proprietary training data than the models.
A dark age will come. AI shredders destroy all the books then hallucinate what they once contained.
Once upon a time, Hansel and Gretel were walking through the woods when they met a Sleeping Beauty called Snow White. As they tried to wake Beauty, a naked Emperor walked in screaming "Off with his head" before a Big Bad Wolf started huffing and puffing.
I'm the opposite of an AI doomer but this is actually scary to me. Once knowledge is hollowed out like this how can we get it back?
We could go out in the world, have experiences, cogitate upon them, learn to write well, and then do so? It ain't easy, but that's the way it used to be done.
This is unironically part of their business plan: don't just regurgitate the world's information but also destroy all other sources of information.
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Could this be for AI training data?
It’s on the headline if you visit the link.
It doesn't matter what language the tokens are in, now Eye of Sauron seeks to consume all knowledge.
How does one "consume knowledge"?
Well, in this case, I imagine they mean by shredding books after scanning them. Since that's what's happening.
That's not consuming knowledge, that's consuming cellulose and ink. If it were, then printing another copy of a book would be "producing knowledge".
BRB, going to do "programming" by copying source files to another directory. Look how productive I can be.