alt Hacker NewsI was surprised to read that Anthropic (and probably other data / model companies) are doing this and it's extremely disappointing, as working towards the benefit of humanity is not an exclusive right / domain of theirs but rather, is a shared responsibility and mission carried by all of humanity itself as a collective responsibility. Thus, the preservation of this knowledge, its availability, and accessibility are the most important things that we must ensure continue.
From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge.
Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this, they should maintain archives that are publicly available. As stated in my first paragraph, they are not the exclusive stewards of humanity despite them anointing themselves as such. Granted, a lot of these books might not be that useful, but still a relic of times pre-machine generated text, which makes them valuable if only for their archival value.
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> From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria,
These comparisons are starting to get ridiculous. Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, that it’s sitting in the warehouse of a bulk book reseller, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy?
Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.
No, that’s the hyperbolic reaction clickbait wants from you.
Not all rare books are valuable. Someone’s self-published junk sitting in the garage is NOT analogous to the library of Alexandria.
Many, most, maybe all of these “rare” books are being scanned instead of just being recycled.
Not a big Reddit fan but there was a great post there from someone in the book industry talking about how non-industry people often give this great moral weight to ever book in a way that is totally disconnected from reality.
> From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge.
How can anyone say this with a straight face. The knowledge is not destroyed, it is transformed. You can make use of it today in the form of LLMs and the scans still exist. Nothing was lost. It's literally no different from them buying books and stocking them in a private library not open to the public. It's not called the Scanning of Alexandria because if it was, it wouldn't have made a blip in the history, Alexandria's libraries were burned, those books, that knowledge was destroyed. Then only thing being destroyed here is physical copy (again for the people in the back: a copy).
> Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this, they should maintain archives that are publicly available.
Those same copyright restrictions are exactly what would prevent them from sharing the archives. Your beef is with copyright, not the AI companies who are (in this one, rare, instance) following copyright laws/rules.
> From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria
Hyperbole much?
Does the fact that they're being converted to an immutable digital permanent record for all time mean anything to you? Because as far as I know, the works lost to the Library of Alexandria were wiped out of existence, not simply transformed into a more durable form!
If you tell people who need digital text from books that they need to destroy books after scanning them, they're going to use destructive scanning and destroy the books.
A small change in the copyright law would fix this problem. Something like:
If a company is scanning material protected by copyright, it has to send a digital copy of the scanned material to Library of Congress within 5 working days.
Surely they have the high quality scans, but there would probably be the same legal restrictions to just share the archive.
From their perspective, it's training data that their competitors don't have. If they make it available, they fill in their moat.
The idea that these corporations or any of the literal sociopaths that work for them give the slightest bit of a shit about "benefitting humanity" is hilariously naive. The one and only thing these entities care about is money, and making as much of it as they can. If they could get away with it, they'd commit every crime that exists if it meant they get a quarter of a percentage increase in their quarterly earning reports.
> working towards the benefit of humanity is not an exclusive right / domain of theirs
That's not their goal or else they wouldn't be burning books. Their goal is making money no matter the cost to the society.
>Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this, they should maintain archives that are publicly available.
Aren't the copyright laws forcing them to do this the very ones that would make such archives illegal? The books that could be in such an archive are the books that don't need to be destroyed.
> From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria
Are you referring to the burning of the Serapeum in AD 391 or the warehouse fires in 48 BC?
> I was surprised to read that Anthropic (and probably other data / model companies) are doing this and it's extremely disappointing, as working towards the benefit of humanity
Look, others talked about how this fetishising of paper books is quite silly (though I don't like it when the destructive scanning is just so one could feed it into a chatbot) but I have to say, all I can do after reading the above sentence is laughing bitterly. Anthropic is an American for-profit company, any talk about "working towards the benefit of humanity" is just marketing lies, and it's always incredible to see people treat those seriously.
_Of course_ Anthropic does that.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you really do have to assume the worst about any of these "AI" companies, especially the large ones like ChatGPT and Anthropic.
They literally lie, cheat and steal at any opportunity they have and in any way that they think of. Do not trust a single thing that they say; it is a fool's folly to do so.
A lot of this can already be said about a lot of companies, especially almost any large company, but it goes doubly if not triply so for this new breed of company now.
Yes but let's continue using Claude to write code because we suck at programming. Really the only way out of this is to STOP NOW using AI and use our brain instead. These company will just shut down if we stop using, and thus paying, for their services.
Come on, we did without AI for all our history, we could live without it with no issue (as to me we could live without smartphones, internet, etc if we want).
They have already gotten to Archive.org. Books that were available to borrow are no longer 'available'. SMH
They're not destroying rare manuscripts or incunables.
They're destroying one (1) copy of a mass-produced item for each AI company.
Public libraries destroy millions more yearly as a matter of routine.
This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic, along with the water use nonsense, and similar with the soviet-aligned moral panic that destroyed the civil nuclear industry 40 years ago.
> Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this
There are none.
> From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria
Let's view it realistically here: AI companies are parasites. Them destroying books to dumb down mankind, absolutely fits into the destruction of the library of Alexandria.
Having said that, I think the day of physical hardcopy of books, is not necessarily over, but will be heavily complemented via digital storage. For instance I only keep books that I may re-read later or read many more times, e. g. thick science books. Many other books I can keep as .pdf file without a problem.
>From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge.
How tho?
Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take them home, so the seller doesn't have to pack them for the trip back. Just the other day, there was a whole bin of books in front of a shop, offering them for 50 cents a piece. They will be destroyed anyways.
Unless they are buying and destroying really old, rare books or important small-print books, it is not much damage. It is not like they will buy "all copies of all of the books", just one. And its just that the data in physical print most likely hasn't been used for training, so this can help you find more unmined quality data. Nobody is stealing your books, preventing you from buying more or destroying all copies of a single book.
And some of these books would rot out of circulation or be destroyed anyways. Some people throw away 80-100 year old books on the regular, as they might just be unimportant to them or the world in general. And once the last copy is thrown or rots, that book will die forever. This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.