Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast
Legal reasons: When you “purchase” an ebook you’re actually just licensing it and nearly all ebook licenses exclude the ability to do anything with the ebook other than read it yourself.
They could get a commercial license to get big ebook libraries like Anthropic did, but they can’t, really, because Anthropic paid for an exclusive license. Which means that if other AI companies want to compete, they sort of have to buy books in bulk and tear them apart to scan them.
If you think any more than 0.1% of these physical books would ever have ended up in antique bookstores, you’re dreaming.
Think about how many books out there are things like Donald Trump’s biography, or pointless drivel from non-experts, self-help books that tell people to down “essential oils”, old editions of programming books, or just plain shitty fiction that never sold much in the first place.
It’s ok to throw trash away! Really!
That’s like saying, “they had some failure modes from the synthetic data, so they should just obviously stop trying forever.”
They’ll just fix the edge cases and move on. Like any programming task.
Yes. That does make sense.
If you bought a book, scanned it—destroying it in the process—then read it on your computer, that would be completely acceptable.
Why is it wrong when a corporation does the same thing?
They’re not claiming ownership of the copyrights, just ownership of a copy. Which is how copyright works.
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 🤷
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.
If you want unautomatable, ludicrously expensive, insecure mountains of instability… Go for it👍
Proving once again that windows isn’t ready for the desktop.
The chances this fixes it are… Remote.
While I sort of agree with you that that is his angle, service jobs that aren’t easily automatable will continue to climb in the “job stability and pay rate” category until the world figures out how to deal with Baumol’s Cost Disease:
Just in time for the Steam Machine and Steam Frame!
Right, Valve? Right?
…any day now…
The AI paradox: It’s both original (hallucinating) and plagiarizing (copying things, word-for-word).
Even if I find a clue, how will I know? I’ve yet to hear a notification sound nor do I have a cute little fairy whispering things in my ear 🤷
For all I know, I could’ve walked past thousands of clues throughout my life. I haven’t given up solving the mystery, though!
Careful: Random cats make love when they find cozy, secret places. This could be an ominous sign of things to come.
7.7 square mile nation that’s 80% uninhabitable due to mining phosphates with approximately 10,000 people in the middle of nowhere finally makes the news again after decades of nothing happening.
This is why open source AI is necessary!
If your language requires an IDE to show you WTF is going on in the code, it’s a bad language.
Given, there’s ways to write poor code in any language, but some are much, much worse than others. Java and JavaScript being the kings of that kind of thing.
Some day, AI assisted coding will become so intelligent that it will look at your average “enterprise” Java code and ask the user, “WTF were they even trying to do here?” Which is the only correct response a lot of the time.
Thank you for posting this comment. I came here to write the exact same thing and now I don’t have to!
👍
There is a story people tell about AI regulation, and it goes like this: the technology is moving too fast, governments can’t keep up, regulators are overwhelmed, and by the time anyone writes a law the thing they’re trying to regulate has already evolved into something else entirely.
No. That’s not the story people are telling about AI regulation. It goes like this:
If we regulate AI, that will give an advantage to AI companies in other countries. They will surpass our AI capabilities and leave us in the technological dust.
There’s a related story:
If we regulate AI, we’re likely to create more problems because Boomers don’t understand technology.
If you own a book, you can legally make as many copies of it as you want. As long as you’re not distributing them, the courts treat that as a single effective copy.