Bruh, this is literally like scientists scavenging metal from shipwrecks that predate the era of nuclear bomb testing, cause they need steel that isn’t contaminated by nuclear fallout for certain measuring equipment 😵💫😵💫
Great analogy for the shit we’re currently saturating our digital world with
Low background bullshit training data.
Fking nailed it.
The worst part is that they are destroying the books afterwards.
Reminds me of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, who sketched ancient artifacts in his personal notebook and then destroyed the originals.
…why? Why?
We also have no guarantee these books will be available at a later date in these digitized formats, nor that they won’t be altered to fit certain narratives which is of course trivial to do with digital copies. At a minimum these need public verifiable checksums to be relied upon.
I don’t like this and don’t trust it one bit.
These AI companies already showed their hand in trying to corner the PC component market with an end goal of users no longer being able to own their own PCs. Now they’re potentially trying to do this with all written recorded information.
How long until Altman’s Firemen show up at your door to burn your books?
They even hve an economical incentive to destroy the books, because by doing so, they will get the data and prevent the competition from getting it for them
Anyone who is not in favor of killing them at this point needs to die too. Or is just out of a coma.
Literally Fahrenheit 451
Silicon valley needs to burn
I mean it’s California so it just like does that so.etimes, but I mean the residents. The residents need to burn.
Is it really destroying though? They’re digitizing them, and publishers still have the digital copies ready to print more at any time. So it’s not like they’re destroying the texts, they’re just shifting them.
Nobody complained when Google did this over a decade ago 🤷
When you say they’re “destroying the books” you make it sound like they’re erasing one of the last known copy of some important work when in reality, most of these books were purchased in bulk from bookstores and libraries that were planning on discarding them anyway.
Almost all these books were either headed to the dump or the recycling center. They’re just being digitized on the way.
Almost all these books were either headed to the dump or the recycling center.
My wife works at a law firm that contracts with “Books By The Yard”, which provides books purely for office aesthetics. For a few hundred bucks you can plaster a bookshelf full of material nobody will ever read, because they’re such a commodity.
It’s so crazy to see people ingesting this news from the conspiracy-brain perspective of “The AI companies are stealing all the knowledge!” without recognizing the more pressing reality of decade upon decade of publisher overproduction, resulting in a total devaluing of physical media for its academic importance.
Imagine going into hysterics because a warehouse full of shitty airport books went up in smoke, like it’s the Library of Alexandra that just burned down.
When they destroy the physical copy they remove them from the antique stores market which often rely on circulation.
Edit: Also physical copies don’t require electricity, a device and internet access plus they are something you can own.
physical copies don’t require electricity
Good luck reading by candle light.
I guess you must live in that part of Alaska where it’s night time for half the year and don’t have daylight.
At least digital storage prices have only been going down in recent months, right? /s
Digitized for private consumption.
Nobody cares when Google did this or when archive.org does this, because they’re sharing the results with the world. (Idiotic shortsighted lawsuits from the authors guild notwithstanding)
in this case they often are actually destroying them. they take them apart, beause it’s easier to scan than to use a proper book scanner
Yeah that’s true of Google as well I believe. I think Archive is more careful, but I’m sure some books get damaged in the process there as well.
I imagine they were talking about destruction in a practical sense. Disassembling the book and scanning it like that is faster and cheaper than purpose build book scanning machines.
Additionally, court documents indicate they generally just throw them away afterwards. So the knowledge is retained, but that book is destroyed.
https://tagteam.harvard.edu/hub_feeds/3415/feed_items/14341220
The knowledge is retained and owned by a private corporation who now does not have to share what may have been a still under copyright, but now the corporation owns it? Make it make sense.
Make it make sense
A robber barron class of psychopaths are running the whole damn show!
ship of theseus ah shit
deleted by creator
I’m waiting for the day when desperate LLM companies start paying people to post real human content, only for those people to just ask ChatGPT to do it.
This is already happening.
They are paying people bottom market rates to generate unique written content and people are just having AI write it for them.
Some kind of AI ouroboros situation.
(Non)Human centipede.
Reverse centaur centipede?
“now you only posted 4 times today Jenny, do you just want to do the minimum?”
Supposedly the people paid to rate responses are already using AI
Big AI mostly switched to synthetic training data anyway. The books they’re digitizing are being used to gather knowledge, not writing styles or logic (mostly).
As in, when you ask ChatGPT how long some book is, it can just go check (if it’s in the database). It’s also useful if you ask about that book or about knowledge contained in that book. It’ll even reference books now (if you demand that in your prompt).
It’s not the same as earlier LLM tech which relied on scanned text to figure out how to respond to any given prompt (from a language standpoint). The “language” part of LLMs is a solved problem now (thanks to the synthetic training). At least for English 🤷
The article quotes a post from ISBNdb saying the issue is model collapse from training on synthetic data.
Yes, what’s the issue?
Total collapse is a solution.
It’s also unavoidable.
Nice that they’re actually buying them this time instead of just downloading torrents of book collections again.
I imagine they already burned through literally all of the torrentable books
That would be all the books.
Ah fuck… No wonder old maths texts are a nightmare to get hold of recently…
They first crashed RAM prices, the SSDs, and now books too?! Oh fuck 😭
