>Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.

Help me understand how. Not only are these LLMs expressly prohibited from specifically regurgitating copyright works if the users asks them to, but they habitually hallucinate or paraphrase things wrong.

If they won't regurgitate the copyrighted text verbatim, and are known to be confidently incorrect and hallucinatory, I'm struggling to see how these texts are "immediately available to literally billions".

And I ask this as someone who has had LLMs give me incorrect assertions about the contents of books.

> Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. Or be useful and scan book for Anna archive and other shadow libraries.

Citizen's lobbying against megacorp is a mirage.

>But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.

By what metric ? The copy is now guarded by a company instead of being on the second hand market.

> Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed.

I don't if that is true: a lot of old books might still have copy or other rights associated to them, likely owned by author and/or publisher, directly or inherited, but often those who have the rights do not have digital or physical copies at hand anymore (some old books are, well, really old). Does Anthropic make sure to track down, contact and then share the digital copy they make with those who have rights on the work? If not, they are not making it in any way easier to re-print the books, while making their supply more scarce (they destroy existing embodiments).

> Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws,

> Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.

Isn't this a contradiction? I mean, maybe you can invoke a fair use policy if an LLM spits out some text from the scanned book, but then you are _not_ "making it available to literally billions".

> History tells us that very few "permanent" situations are truly permanent.

If you destroy the only copy of a physical artifact, the situation is as permanent as it can get.

Exactly. Calling anything on an SSD permanent is criminal.

> I've seen no evidence that Amazon or others are buying $10k books to scan into their corpus.

Have you seen evidence that they’re buying only readily available books that are plentiful on the market?

For one they've already used the entire library genesis. Anything not in there is going to be obscure in some capacity.

Why would amazon buy "crap"? Surely they want their model to succeed and they want to train it on valuable input, no? They have more than enough resources to determine whether or not the books are worth buying. They have been in book selling for a long time.

Good article, but I still feel unsatisfied because even it cannot find an example of a book that’s actually been lost because of the destructive scanning frenzy (it only lists books that hypothetically could be lost because there’s not many physical copies available for sale online.).

If anyone has an example, I’d love to hear it.

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This is a classic mistake. We have no way of estimating the future value of a given book. It's perceived current value (a large part of which is simply obscurity) may be low. But it's future value - to historians, ethnographers, to researchers seeking a specific fact or example of language use or a hundred other things - is literally inestimable.

To take a crude example in a different medium - new york in the 90s - widely documented right? Yet, if you want to find high definition video of street life in a given burrough on a given day or year, you're faced with an enormously difficult task. There were some HD test videos done in Manhattan in the late 90s (which have been posted to Hackernews before), but there's no equivalent for the other burroughs. Your best best would be finding original negative out takes or location scouting footage from feature films, a very hard task. That's only 30 years ago. Outside of the focal points of the worlds attention - English language, rich countries, places in the news, contemporaneous sources for 'non notable' events (lifestyle, how people spoke dressed etc) is surprisingly poorly preserved.

Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.

I'd also be curious about the provenance of that statement. Why would they buy all copies? What would be the purpose of scanning multiple copies?

It’s just another lie of the type these threads tend to be filled with nowadays.

Of course they aren’t buying “all copies”, and that wouldn’t even be possible in most cases since such books are usually flea market/attic material and most copies aren’t for sale (or even catalogued) to begin with.

I’d be interested to learn who comes up with such lies though. Is it really just random people venting their frustration, or some kind of organized astroturfing operation?