Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
Random bulk rate books aren’t artifacts. The vast majority of them probably have a copy in Anna’s Archive.
If they did have a copy in Anna’s Archive, why the fuck would AI companies find physical copies, buy them, rip them apart, scan them, and then digitize them before destroying them?
Remember, you don’t get the digital copy. It’s only used to train their models.
Absolutely. Every AI company has Anna’s Archive in their training data already. They want to differentiate their models by having more training data than their competitors. There are way more books out there that have never been scanned than those that have.
OpenAI just settled out of court for $1.5 Billion perhaps some see this as a way to avoid that legal exposure. But IDK.
Then they aren’t rare books necessarily.
The use of the word “rare” implies that they are not bought in bulk…
Rare doesn’t necessarily mean culturally valuable. How many of these rare books are actually just old instruction manuals, travel guides, training materials, phone books, and dictionaries?
The issue with that is that we don’t yet know what is culturally valuable or not.
Just because we don’t see a need for the specific book now, doesn’t mean it won’t change tomorrow.
Which appears to be backed up by nothing.
Why are you so intent on riding big corpo cock? Do you think daddy Altman is going to praise you, call you his good girl?
You don’t actually need to play devil’s advocate, you know.