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| ▲ | tptacek 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That would make sense as an argument if the natural endpoint of these copies was preservation, and AI was disrupting that. But the natural next step for virtually all these books is to be recycled, not preserved. Books are generally not preserved. It is extremely normal for them to be pulped. Millions and millions of books are pulped every year. | | |
| ▲ | mslt 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Might as well grind up the tablet of complaint to Ea-nāṣir and make cement out it, right? What use could there be in preserving the mundane facets of everyday existence? | | |
| ▲ | svachalek 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Preservation would be cool but what does that have to do with anything? The system is that the remaining copies have private owners and the private owners can do anything they want with them, including sell them or shred them. Most of these owners aren't doing anything particular to preserve them, they're stacked up with 10,000 other TV Guides in a hoarder's moldy basement. Anyone interested in keeping October 1994's TV Guide pristine has had over 30 years to procure and protect their copy. These particular buyers are converting their copy to a digital one that's getting some kind of use, which is better than the fate of 99.9% of the other copies. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't even think ownership rights are the principal component of this situation. It's true that in a different copyright regime, Anthropic could simply publish an archive of every book they scanned (and I think they likely would do that, if they could). But the primary reason these books get destroyed is that nobody cares about them. Old, rare books are a garbage disposal problem, not a cultural one. To me the most important thing to know about this story is that the AI companies are a tiny, tiny blip in the big picture of what happens to old physical books. Everybody imagines libraries hoping against hope to get their hands on all these rare books so they can shelve them and preserve them for generations to come. But if you donate a box of old books to a public library, there's a good chance the clerical staff handling that donation is going to roll its eyes and cart the books out to a dumpster. Large public library systems have stopped taking book donations, for this reason. "Bring them to a thrift store" is what they'll tell you. |
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| ▲ | dukeyukey 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's more that, we don't need to preserve a million copies of the same mundane book. Losing a few copies to AI training is fine. | | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | When applied to ordinary mundane objects, this is the mindset that leads to pathological hording behavior. Ultimately I think it's rooted in a fear of, an attempt to deny, mortality and the passage of time. |
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| ▲ | pfdietz 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Around a million books are destroyed each day in the US. | |
| ▲ | 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | mslt 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To play devils advocate, completely on the terms of your argument, would it be better for that particular human artifact to be shredded and its contents melted into an anonymized data pool, or for it to exist in a museum archive, in its original form, such that future generations can better understand what it was like to be alive in 1994? I’d personally choose the latter, especially given that the 1994 tv guide is not going to meaningfully improve the utility of the language models. Direct access to pre-digital history is drying up rapidly, why accelerate that for incremental benchmark gains in a domain that isn’t even relevant to the most useful forms of a nascent technology? | | |
| ▲ | tgsovlerkhgsel 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A reasonable opinion, but I'd personally strongly choose the former. A physical book in a museum archive is useless for 99% of the worlds population even if they really wanted that specific book and were able to find it, as they'd have to arrange for access, then travel (at incredible expense) to access it. Maybe they could ask the museum to digitize it, but that's still going to be days of delay and tens of dollars of cost to access parts of that book, if the museum even offers that service. If we go slightly beyond your "melted into" statement, the chances of the book becoming useful to the public are much higher in the AI company's digital archive, which might turn into something like what Google Books could have been, given the right incentives and copyright law changes. And of course that presumes that the TV guide is going to stay in the museum rather than been thrown out as part of curation (or realistically, long before it makes it into a museum). Neither museums nor archives hoard everything, throwing stuff out is - as far as I know - one of the key jobs of an archivist. And a 1994 TV guide, while useful to understand what it was like to be alive in 1994, likely doesn't contain much unique information. You don't need that specific guide. If there are 52 weekly editions, of 10 different guides, you would likely get most of what you want from any one of them. And for the parts that you wouldn't - there's a good chance that you'll have a much easier time getting the essence of this knowledge from the anonymized data pool that all the content was melted into, rather than chasing 10 different museums to find the original magazines. | |
| ▲ | skeledrew 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A museum - or any other building - can only hold so much physical stuff. How much of it do you really want preserved? How do you choose what is preserved (it's an eventually inevitable choice)? Do you save the 1980s stuff but not the 90s? Or save every even/odd year? Some other method? How much direct access do you think people need to pre-digital history? | | |
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| ▲ | throwaway219450 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The BBC has both in some cases, but we know for sure what was broadcast when: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/about Historic TV guides are also the sort of strange ephemera that people collect. They ought to be digitized like newspapers and other magazines, but this was always the purview of libraries anyway. |
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| ▲ | azan_ 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well for example yours - if you don’t pay for these rare books and don’t store them in good condition, then you have decided that they are not worth saving. Many of these rare books would run you like I don’t know, 1 buck? | | |
| ▲ | unleaded 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't think I have enough money or room to buy all the books I think are worth saving, and my list no doubt has some overlap with someone else's. If I did buy them, what if someone else wants to read them? If I lose it or it gets destroyed in some way, the chance it will be gone forever increases (assuming there are multiple copies). Entrusting the availability of knowledge to individuals like that sounds like a bad idea. There could be some kind of publicly funded organisation that can take care of a big collection of books, afford to keep them safe, and make them accessible to anyone. |
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