The comments there are absolutely unhinged. There are some good reasons for being anti-AI, but why dilute it with this kind of bullshit:

> It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control

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nhinck3 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're right, it is arguably worse than book burning, not only are they seeking to deprive others of the books, they also want to profit off it.

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swed420 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> why dilute it with this kind of bullshit:

> > It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control

That's only bullshit if you trust AI companies to serve the book contents without alteration.

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dpark 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don’t trust or expect AI companies to serve books at all. That’s not what they are scanning them for.

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swed420 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not in a traditional sense, but obviously on the surface, they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back.

The point is that even under the best intentions, hallucinations occur. Then there's the fact that most models have an ideological bias programmed into them.

The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order?

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dpark 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back.

Sure, in the same sense that they regurgitate any other text they consume. LLMs by definition do not have the full training dataset available, though. It’s far larger than the resulting model. So they can’t reliably reproduce full text without an external source (or if it’s in the training data repeatedly). ChatGPT actually refused to give me a bible quote the other day, presumably because I ran into some general “book regurgitation” safety net.

> The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order?

Honestly, yeah. The idea that people or corporations should hold onto books forever because of a cultural “ick” about throwing out books is a bit ridiculous. Most books end up in landfills.

They aren’t feeding Da Vinci manuscripts into this pipeline. They are feeding still-in-copyright books.

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swed420 an hour ago | parent [-]

> LLMs by definition do not have the full training dataset available, though.

That makes it even worse, then. This proves the original point.

> The idea that people or corporations should hold onto books forever because of a cultural “ick” about throwing out books is a bit ridiculous.

If we're building black and white straw man arguments, then sure, let's not archive anything.

	▲	dpark 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> That makes it even worse, then. This proves the original point. I don’t know what the “original point” is here, but these AI companies are not providing “book excerpt services” and do not claim to. ChatGPT at least will refuse to provide detailed book excerpts (I hit a week or two ago myself). > If we're building black and white straw man arguments, then sure, let's not archive anything. It seems like you are the one creating the straw man. Do you have evidence that these companies are shredding actually rare books? The only cited concrete examples (in this thread anyway) are all rather boring. I seriously doubt they are shredding 200 year old books because why would they?