Destroying the books too :(

Not to defend the AI crowd, but ever go to a Goodwill Outlet store? They usually have at least 1 gaylord box (the giant box on a pallet watermelons come in) full of books. Not sure how often they cycle those out, but I’m guessing pretty regularly. Multiply that by every semi major city Goodwill has a presence in. Add in other thrift sores with a similar quantity of books. You’re talking ALOT of books. SO MANY books are thrown out everyday. Including by libraries. I don’t really have a problem if some of those get diverted for a bit to be scanned. Yes, it’s sad to see books getting destroyed. But there’s alot of stuff people just really don’t want. And, if you REALLY want a villain, maybe you can blame copyright law? That’s part of the reason AI companies destroy the books - it helps to make their scanning efforts more legal. Absent that, they could probably be convinced to spend just a little more for nondestructive scanning, assuming they could find a home for the books they scanned (the sellers of these things couldn’t, so good luck).

If the AI companies were simply picking up books that were already going to a landfill, I don’t think that would bother anybody. That isn’t what we’re talking about here, though. These books are coming from booksellers, so it’s fair to guess that most of them are at least a notch or two above what you’d find in a Goodwill bargain bin.

Bibles. There are so many fucking bibles. When I worked for a church we probably had 20 people a year buy a while new set of new bibles for the church. Like - we already had like 3,000 bibles with a weekly attendance of about 500. We didn’t need new bibles, but people just kept giving them to us.

It’s the most-printed book of all time, and they just don’t stop making them. It’s insane.

The worst part is that they are destroying the books afterwards.

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.

Almost all these books were either headed to the dump or the recycling center. They’re just being digitized on the way.

Where does it say that in this article?

Nobody complained when Google did this over a decade ago 🤷

Yes they did?! That was a big controversy back in the day. You are engaging in historical revisionism right now.

When they destroy the physical copy they remove them from the antique stores market which often rely on circulation.

Edit: Also physical copies don’t require electricity, a device and internet access plus they are something you can own.

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!

Why would they scan that stuff though? That kind of mass market (human made) slop is easily available in digital form. We know the AI companies have engaged in mass digital piracy, including running massive torrenting operations. So if a digital copy exists, they probably already have it. And even if they have to buy it, purchasing an ebook is a lot cheaper than buying a physical one, shipping it, paying someone to scan it, etc.

I would think the old, the out-of-print, the rare, and never-before digitized are the only things worth buying and physically scanning in 2026. Everything else has already been scanned or was born digital-native.

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.

True, but irrelevant. Why would they care at all about the terms of a license? Again, they’ll happily engage in outright mass torrenting. Their legal theory is that using works to train LLMs is simply fair use. The ebook sellers may disagree, but it won’t stop them.

Haha: What you state is logical and reasonable. That position would be easy to defend, if the legal system around copyright made sense.

Unfortunately, it isn’t a logical system. You’re trying to apply copyright law—which has now been ruled on in court, officially making training AI with copyrighted material Fair Use.

The problem is that the issue with ebooks is all about contract law. Not copyright.

When you “purchase” an ebook (which is a misnomer), you’re actually signing a legally binding contract. A license, in effect, to use that copyrighted work for the sole purpose outlined in the contract. That outlined purpose expressly forbids using the work for anything other than you—the purchaser—reading it (usually on the platform they specify).

Having said that, many, many court rulings have found numerous license clauses like that to be unenforceable. That is, just because it’s written in the contract, doesn’t mean it’s legal.

The courts have ruled—thanks to everyone’s efforts fighting the MPAA, RIAA, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo in the 1990s and early 2000s—that everyone does have the legal right to “platform shift” whatever copyrighted works they own.

To get around that, those very same entities tried to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s rules about circumventing “copyright protection mechanisms” to try to make it illegal for people to platform shift their stuff anyway. That is, they added trivial encryption to all their platforms.

But it’s even more complicated than that! Because Congress gave the Librarian of Congress the power to say when it’s legal to circumvent such “copyright protections.” For example, technologies that aid the blind (I.e. gotta decrypt that file for the program to read it out loud).

There’s other exceptions and everyone fights to get more added whenever it comes up.

The key takeaway, though is that none of this complicated mess applies to physical books! So there ya go 😁👍

I imagine they were talking about destruction in a practical sense. Disassembling the book and scanning it like that is faster and cheaper than purpose build book scanning machines.

Additionally, court documents indicate they generally just throw them away afterwards. So the knowledge is retained, but that book is destroyed.

tagteam.harvard.edu/hub_feeds/3415/…/14341220

The knowledge is retained and owned by a private corporation who now does not have to share what may have been a still under copyright, but now the corporation owns it? Make it make sense.

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.

Now we just need to proof they’ve copied the files onto a second hard drive, so they own two copies

If we’re gonna keep it as a copyright issue, I think people are mostly mad they’re not able to reprint the books themselves if they wanted to. We’re not speaking from a copyright position

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.

I’m waiting for the day when desperate LLM companies start paying people to post real human content, only for those people to just ask ChatGPT to do it.

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 🤷

The article quotes a post from ISBNdb saying the issue is model collapse from training on synthetic data.

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.

The problem is that synthetic data is not fit for that purpose. The more of it you use, the worse at dealing with the edge cases LLMs get.

Think of it like this… You feed a language model a bunch of genuine human-written content. Great. Now it can produce the most likely text in a lot of cases. Word combinations that rarely appear in written language rarely get generated, so most of its synthetic data lacks those rare - but still valid - combinations.

Train it on this synthetic data, and now more outliers and rare combinations get filed off. Rinse and repeat.

It’s like saving a lossy file over and over again. It degrades each time.

They’re doing everything they can to avoid it, but it’s supposed to be tHe FuTuRe

Bruh, this is literally like scientists scavenging metal from shipwrecks that predate the era of nuclear bomb testing, cause they need steel that isn’t contaminated by nuclear fallout for certain measuring equipment 😵‍💫😵‍💫

Great analogy for the shit we’re currently saturating our digital world with

TIL

Tell me more about nuclear steel.

It’s actually the low radiation stuff from before the first nuclear bombs were detonated that we want. Turns out those kinds of bombs spread fallout and now literally everything on the planet has a trace amount

nice