I don't see any mention of Project Ocean - AKA Google books. Before AI they endevoured to digitize books in a massive online library. This inccluded rare and out of print books many which are archived at libraries. Because they had to preserve the books and return them in the condition they received then they created elaborate technology to accomplish this. The project was met with significant legal challenges from authors and publishers which was eventually overcome. The legal precedents that were established from Project Ocean laid the ground work for the process as it exists today. Books from libraries are still being preserved.
Whenever I need something from Google Books I inevitably reach the message that this is a limited preview and the part I need is not included.
I thetefore feel the same way about Google Books that how I felt when I learned that What.cd went down: that I don't gain or lose anything anyway because I never had access to begin with, and that by not making it 100% publicly accessible you're asking for the data to one day disappear forever.
Big companies will read up the books and make their AI recite them from memory, but Archive.org was sued for renting one book on an exclusive basis (unless one would return, another wouldn't be able to rent)
Like all things, Google will eventually realize they cannot make significant ad revenue and they will eventually give up and discontinue serving this, though I doubt it's more than a scratch in terms of disk space.
It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.
It is not a big deal. Since the invention of the printing press any important
book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units.
Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity.
By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there are garbage. Most people clean their shelves with the books they don't care about, but preserve the ones that are good. If they are young people that inherited a house and don't care about books, they pick and sell the good ones, giving away the bad books.
If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more. That is, for every 100 books that are garbage there is one good quality book. It is very rare to find a jewel there.
> a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere
somewhere were we can't access it. as the article states: “permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers”
the issue isn't that the physical copy is gone, it's that they are preventing people from making digital copies that are actually accessible by destroying the physical copies.
> If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more.
archivists keep everything, because we don't know right now what will be important 100 years from now.
By any metric imaginable, it's making the information more accessible, not less. First, it's taking a single copy of a 10k physical print and it's making it digital. Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.
Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.
I happen to actually actively shop second hand bookstores, so I am potentially affected by this - as opposed to most people complaining because they don't like the idea. And I still absolutely support it.
>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.
For example, knowledge about how the book smells when you open it, something that reader do talk about enough I don't think this should be a strawman, is lost. But, that is about the experience of reading the book, not the knowledge of the book.
The exact text? Yeah, I think that is largely lost as well. This is a summary. And for rarer books, it will be a particularly bad summary. The basics of the book are being captured in a space that the right question that retrieve it, but worse than a sparksnote and any well read reader will tell you all the sorts of things a sparknotes already loses compared to reading the book directly.
But, that little bit of data is a bit more data than existed before, and future LLMs should get better at giving the information. So, in that sense, the knowledge is better being spread compared to copyright where the book stays in a warehouse until it is disposed of. If it was between this and a sparksnote of the book being made, the sparksnote is far better, but between this and the book simply being disposed of, then the LLM is better but far, far from great.
That's a lot of assumptions that goes into the judgment, which is probably why different people reach different conclusions. One person is imagine the alternate fate of this book being slowly rotting in a landfill, the other resting on a bookshelf where it is read at least once fully and then flipped through time to time, and neither are wrong.
> 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".
> permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers
History tells us that very few "permanent" situations are truly permanent.
Provided a set of information has value (which in this case it clearly does) then the overwhelming likelihood is that, eventually, through some method or other, the information will become public.
I think you may be greatly underestimating the long tail. Several times a year I read sources that reference older books that I can't find online. When I am able to locate them, they often cost at least several hundred dollars, sometimes into the 10s of thousands.
Exactly, also all those physical books would anyways get molded, eaten by moths or just naturally decay. It's not like the AI companies are obliterating every copy of every single book.
I have books, but they are just objects. They're nice objects, but just objects.
Fetishizing books isn't going to help.
In fact, most of those "rare" books don't sell because nobody wants them. The AI companies are making them even more rare, so the booksellers should be thankful.
Read more about this. Depends on the definition of the "big deal" but from what I can understand the problem is that they buy rare things - which exist in just several copies - and they tend to buy _all_ copies.
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.
>Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.
I honestly can't and I think you can't either or you would have used an example with books/printed media rather than film, an entirely different ballgame.
OK... I'm going to assume good faith even though your wording makes it somewhat unlikely.
Similar textual examples would be any text containing actual language as it's spoken in a given place or time. Or any factual textbook detailing the buildings present in a given location. Or any text book detailing a now defunct construction process. Or any text book (generally small run) detailing a niche interest, now missing ecosystem or the state of a particular political situation at a given time. Essentially all textual primary sources for events which are not currently considered important - but which we have no way of estimating the future importance of. One can continue to create countless counterfactual examples in this vein. My overall point is we cannot know what may be useful or even essential in the future, and knowledge should be preserved under the assumption that it is likely to be.
Historians frequently refer to this paradox - how everyday aspects of life are frequently not explicitly documented, since they're so obvious to the communities or communities of expertise that observe and carry them out. So it's actually incredibly important to preserve what seems like ephemera.
Hell we couldn't have AI training at all if we lacked the corpus of existing written literature - but there was no way any author could have anticipated this future utility more than a couple of decades ago.
I could see buying multiple copies being useful to mitigate problems, like damage.
But buying all the copies is categorically different and I cannot imagine why they would attempt that, except perhaps to prevent their competition from getting a hold of the same text?
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?
Beware that the notion of "quality" is entirely different for AI companies: they don't seek entertainment, but sentences in a language to train an LLM.
First of all, it IS destroyed and it is a big deal. Hardcover copies of books especially 1st - 2nd edition ones (even with mistakes) are rarer than digital scans.
Maybe the Bodleian Library at Oxford University should give all their rare books to AI companies to scan and destroy them since it is not a "big deal" anyway.
Except that when they did do a pilot with OpenAI to scan these rare books, [0] they did NOT destroy them. I wonder why?
Why wonder? The answer is abundantly clear if you follow the news. If a book is copyrighted under U.S. law, scanning and destroying counts as a format conversion which qualifies it as fair use, so there is no need to negotiate with copyright holders. See Judge William Alsup’s decision. If Anthropic did not destroy the books after scanning it would have not won the lawsuit, and scanning would be illegal. If a book is already out of copyright then of course they do not have to destroy it afterwards.
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 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.
>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.
Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today)
Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
> The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today
If I may be flippant, not to you but to the sentiment, skill issue.
We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.
And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era? What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time? What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?
> Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing.
The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.
Knowing and enacting are two distinct things, "you should do what I want you to do" means you're already doing the wrong thing, and yes, there is an agreement on what the right thing is, its what is ethical, that is, what non profits and archivists are forced to do.
The increase in people who believe that perception is reality has the logical consequences of people shouting their opinions loudly enough so that it becomes 'the right thing'
I don't think that changes the message at all. If a librarian doesn't like routine book destruction, they would still feel worse about this different thing that is happening.
Just go to a local library and ask a librarian or anyone who has a lot of books and tries to give them away; sadly, in most cases, they pick the valuable ones, and the rest just get sent for destruction (Burning).
> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.
But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, training is a lossy, noninvertible transformation. The LLM cannot legally produce the book verbatim, it will only spit out a regurgitation of the information, chopped and mingled into a broad information space.
Furthermore, these "magic machines" are not the property of the public. They are owned by a handful of corporations who want to charge you continuously for every token output by the machine. So, not only is the original text locked away forever behind company walls, you now need to pay for access to an approximation of the original contents which you can no longer even verify as being correct because the source is no longer accessible.
If you are cool with this, from a cost perspective you are cool with a deal whereby I trade you access to a definite resource for a one time fee of $N for, instead, a perpetual cost of $M to you every month/day/hour for access to an amalgam in which you cannot even determine what proportion of the resource you are actually getting. You're basically saying you're cool with me selling you some unknown portion of wine for a monthly subscription price instead of selling you a definitive amount of wine for a one time fee. lol.
Are you under the impression they scan the book, train on it, then destroy the digital copy? Because that's not what's happening. They scan it, and hold it forever to train future models on. The scan still exists, not available to the general public but that's no different than if they had bought the books and kept them in a private library closed to the public.
They're scans. Those are human-readable. They probably won't make them available to the public, which is the exact same state they would be in if they bought the books and just put them on a bookshelf in a warehouse.
Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.
> Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc.
I didn't fully understand why but apparently there is also a legal reason to destroy the books, it makes it them less likely to be considered copyright infringement.
Not really. Selling the book onward does seem legally dubious but legally nothing (yet) prevents you from storing the book in a warehouse. obviously it’s cheaper to dispose of them.
A lot of them are rotting. We are not talking "one of the three living copies of the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses". Rather "1956 statistics of the cultive of yuca in 'some small village from Mexico': a boring analysis". Those books have value to train LLMs as they are 100% free of AI text, but has been collecting dust (or rotting) in someone's room for decades, and no human is buying them even for 10 cents.
Also, Anna's text implies that the books are scanned and then mischievously destroyed so nobody has access again to the content. That's not the case: the books are "destroyed" before scanning, by dissasembling them in pages so they can be feed to the scanner. Scanning while keeping the book intact is difficult, as you need to software-unwarp the page before OCR'ing it, and expensive as you either need specialized scanners or humans doing it.
> 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.
They are ridiculous because the reality of the situation is boring. Boring doesn’t drive engagement. So, all the clickbait headlines and ragebait comments imply scandal. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get attention.
After being clickbaited and ragebaited, media consumers feel deeply anxious and angry. But, explaining that they are angry over a boring situation feels silly, not righteous. So, they give summaries, impressions, sometimes extrapolation of the bait they have been consuming. That feels righteous.
This observation applies to a wide variety of topics trending in the various media every day. Distinguishing injustice from ragebait unfortunately requires non-trivial effort from the reader.
>Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy?
Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed?
>Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.
When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.
No. Almost none of the books you donate to the library get to the shelves. If they can sell it, they will. Otherwise they are thrown away.
I even read on a web site of a librarian that their library had stopped accepting donations because "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash".
As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices.
Our local library-connected biannual book sale puts a large dumpster, about the size of an 18-wheel truck trailer, outside the warehouse where the sale is conducted. At the end of the sale it gets filled to the brim with waste inked cellulose, and sits there open in the weather until it's taken away for disposal.
> When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.
Many books aren't lent and not bought and most libraries have limited space to store such books, thus they go where old paper goes.
Of course some rarely lent books are important and for the one person asking for it in ten years really valuable, but many still have to go.
As someone who has gone to many many used book sales over decades… many of the books at a sale never get sold, guess what they usually get tossed in the dump. This includes your local library book sales. Books are heavy and worthless. Cheaper to throw away the ones that nobody picks up in a sale.
I know it comes at a shock but truly most books are absolutely worthless.
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.
All I’ve read, as far as sources go, is a number of rare book sellers saying they’ve had a big uptick in huge orders with no price haggling. Apparently that’s peculiar. And some of them seemed a little concerned.
Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince.
And I don’t have any reason to think some reddit librarian knows what’s going on, if anything, either way.
I heard from the first stories that virtually all of these books being ordered have ISBN numbers. Books that are rare that have ISBN numbers are rare because no one wanted them 99.9% of the time. Somebody wants every book, but you'd spend many, many years finding that somebody.
> 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!
> 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.
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.
Puts the burden on government to store what is probably 90% worthless material.
Copyright should really be amended so that once out of print and a grace period it’s free use. I am probably more of an anarchist in this regard. Similar to my belief that anyone should be able to ingest any data you put online, once a book is no longer being print it should be able to be used for commercial or personal use for free. Similar to a generic drugs.
There is far too much garbage that gets published, let the collective hive mind figure out what is valuable.
Since we are talking about a US perspective do you have evidence that backs this up? It just comes across as an empty statement. The government is the will of the people and I personally like the idea of fixing copyright instead of making the government store how to use windows 95 books.
Sure some governments and opinions would say so but you’re making a statement of zero impact. Fix the underlying copyright laws don’t create more rules.
Wait, so the library of congress is suddenly responsible for probably petabytes a day of incoming scans? To what end? Do they have to index it and make it available? Do they have to check the accuracy and integrity of the scans?
How does this help anything, except create more work to throw in the trash?
Actually - most jurisdictions that issue a publisher a unique root ISBN number have a stipulation that anything new published using that number must have a copy sent to them.
Looked into this a decade ago for publishing eBooks via my personal corp when eReaders and ePub were starting to hit big in the mainstream.
Wrong end of the pipeline; we should instead demand digital copies of media be sent to the Library of Congress in order to obtain copyright, along with a registration fee to pay for indefinite storage and other costs. Registration should be mandatory if you want copyright. For things like books where a machine readable text format existed, it should be mandatory to include (so no requiring OCR). Access to the archive should be available for research use (including ML training) at cost.
I'm only one person, but I scan old books that had an impact on me growing up, and upload them to archive.org. Thankfully there are others that do the same. (And to be sure, FWIW, these are books that have not been printed for about 50 years—I suppose the software community would call them abandonware.)
If they're 50 years old they're young, and archive.org will likely block access. If they're not already on annas-archive (or the copy there is trash), your best bet is an anon upload to libgen.
They cannot scan the books then resell them or donate them under current US copyright law. It’s not clear to me that they could warehouse them if they wanted. In the recent Bartz v Anthropic case the judge ruled this destruction as legal, saying
> The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.
So that there was still only one “copy” of the book. This is in compliance with the DMCA. You can make a personal digital copy of a work but then you cannot resell the hard copy and keep the digital one. Same principle applies here.
Nowhere in this description did it require destruction of the physical book. This is being done because it's easier to scan a shucked book, and this explanation is circulating because it's easier to blame it on the law and that pesky meddling government.
The ruling was that what they did was within the law, not required by law in every detail. They cannot resell the copies. I saw nothing in that ruling that required their destruction, because it is not required.
A person can digitize their own books without destroying the original. So can Anthropic. They are choosing to destroy the books for easier scanning and trying to palm off the blame for it.
Why would a company keep the hard-copy around at the risk of it being inadvertently given away, resold, etc.? It's a huge outstanding liability given that the illegal copying of works -- the other part of that case -- is what they settled out of court for some huge amount of money. Destruction is the only thing that makes sense.
I'm old enough to have been around when DCMA legislation was under discussion. Many people were dead-set against it and raised concerns over matters exactly like this. In Rainbows End (2006), Vernor Vinge wrote about a similar scenario where a robot went through the university library shredding books, and scanned the shredded pieces to recombined them into a digital archive.
Anthropic may be doing shady things and may have even done this on their own recognizance, we just don't know. As it stand, this is 100% a consequence of US copyright law, much of which was written by large corporations to protect their own assets.
I agree fully that it makes logistical sense. But it is not a legal requirement, and they should not be permitted to use that as an excuse to wash their hands of their own decisions.
1 point by jonhohle 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [–]
You’re missing the point. It doesn’t require that they destroy the book, but it precludes them from giving it away. It’s their property, so they can choose to store it, but that has real, ongoing cost and may eventually leave unusable books anyway due to fire, pests, water damage, etc. if they’re not maintained properly.
That’s an interesting angle. There’s probably some property value (though maybe not enough based on volume) to the books they purchased. I doubt there’s any value to the “backups” of those books. I’d imagine they’re normally transferable.
They cut the bindings off and feed loose leaf books through a document scanner. It would be difficult to store and probably unsellable, it's probably going in the trash.
To legally retain these scans, you must own the original book. You can sell or give away the original book (sans binding) but it's legally dubious as to whether the scan can be transferred along with it. So if Anthropic has no interest in storing thousands of loose leaf books, they are likely destroying both the original and scan as soon as possible.
At the end of the day, the only thing of value Anthropic has is the trained model which is definitely transferable.
>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.
Depends on the point being made about “historical precedent” and the lessons to be drawn from such.
Also, helps to clarify what exactly the commenter was referring to and possibly help distinguish the centuries-spanning decline of the Library of Alexandria from the violent fate of the Serapeum.
> 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.
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.
Are you really advocating for assuming things with no evidence, by presenting no evidence for why one should do so? That’s not especially rigorous thinking.
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'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.
I was with you until the water use. You're misinformed. There were at one point at least several data centers set to use evaporative cooling on well water.
Notably since all the controversy many data centers are very loud about being closed loop and with significant consideration given to other local impacts as well.
It's possible for a datacenter to use scarce well water irresponsibly.
They don't have to, and the vast majority don't.
The lie and moral panic is that all datacenters necessarily waste precious drinking water; it's patently false and used by agitators to push, unwittingly or not, a Chinese Communist Party agenda.
That AI consumes it at an abnormally high rate, presumably.
The claim never made sense to me either, I can only assume those that regurgitated such claims never worked with HPC or even general datacenters before.
Was recently talking to a (non-technical) friend about this, she was surprised after talking about the "insane water use for AI datacenters" when I responded that open-loop cooling is pretty rare for a datacenter and I've never actually seen it used before, versus closed-loop (or just regular air-based cooling) which has no real noticable water consumption.
Problem with data centers is that companies want to build them near densely populated areas that already have problems with water supply and high utility bills.
1. They don't HAVE to use water. Air cooling, closed loop cooling, waste-water cooling, and so on, are options. Easy to regulate. Evaporative cooling is more energy efficient though, but a complete non-issue in places with abundant water and a non-option elsewhere.
2. Datacenters have been shown to reduce utility prices. They provide suppliers with previsible long term demand which allows for cost-effective network and production planning.
That AI data centers are drinking up local ground water for cooling. It isn't (or wasn't) nonsense, though. It was/is a real thing, though it seems to be on the out in favor of closed loop cooling after the massive and still on-going public outcry.
> 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.
At the risk of angering the zeitgeist, destroying one or two or ten paper copies doesn’t make AI companies “become the only ones in the world with digital copies.”.
Big AI companies are leaving an easy opportunity on the table for establishing goodwill with the public.
Just publicize a rare books vault where you put the older editions that aren’t in a lot of library catalogs. Use non-destructive scanning for those.
Align yourself with the image of safeguarding something. It seems like a no-brainer given various themes I’ve been hearing in criticisms of these companies.
Maybe the hope was to just bury the book destruction under the rug, but the cat is out of the bag. Publicizing a state-of-the-art rare books preservation archive is now a good move.
Tech tends to love associating itself with a classical tradition or something. Name it after the library of Alexandria. It would be a huge cultural loss if that were to burn down again. Thank God for our big AI companies that keep the archive intact.
Actually, I assume it would be separate archives, since I assume there’s a something of an arms race in getting training data that competitors don’t have, but really, who would complain that there are multiple archives? That sounds like a good thing. And what big AI company would want to be the odd one out for not running an archive?
From what I understand, to work with copyrighted books they need to essentially format shift (i.e., scan and destroy the physical book). So a book vault would not solve this issue.
A book vault would still be useful for out-of-copyright works, but this would only cover a (probably relatively small) portion. Also, I'm not sure how easy it is to reliably determine copyright at scale, so they might just decide that it's not worth it.
At this point my only hope is that in the long run these scans make it to the public somehow (leaks, copyright changes/expiration, whatever), where they can then be accessed and preserved by everybody. Then we could have our true digital library of Alexandria.
I imagine they are only buying one copy of each book, thus only significantly affecting the supply of books that were already unfathomably rare. That may still be bad, but doesn't really support the "scan every book you can get your hands on before they are gone" narrative.
That doesn't mean I'm against that narrative; I'm a big supporter of shadow libraries and scanning every unscanned book. But connecting to the LLM narrative here seems opportunistic and populistic.
>I imagine they are only buying one copy of each book
The previously struggling second hand bookseller in my town has upgraded their car from a 15 year old hatchback Renault to a brand new Range Rover. Some Canadian company has been buying any book he can provide them for the last year. Their quotes aren't by number of books, or even weight, but by volume. As in, they pay him by the shipping container, and he sends several of those a month.
I think it's reasonable to assume the books in this supply chain which aren't destroyed in digitisation are just pulped and sold to Procter & Gamble for toilet paper manufacturing. I can't see any other fate for Anthropic's second and third copies of The twelfth edition of Vera Lynn's 1980's memoir "We'll Meet Again".
Doubtful. A robust protocol would be to scan several of each edition (to ensure no scanning errors), and scan each edition. Then too, these books are being purchased in lots with accidental duplicates, and all the major labs are doing it. So we're likely talking about tens of each book. For rare books - anything over a couple of hundred years old or small print runs either, that could well be most or even all copies. This wouldn't be immediately noticed either, especially if the books aren't currently considered noteworthy or well known.
I collect old books. It's not common to buy books at all yet to buy old books. Library sales as big as concerts exist, little book libraries everywhere but the used book stores are constantly closing.
I wish people cared 25 years ago. Unwanted books in boxes are everywhere. Its a false hysteria. You can still get any book you want, digitizing is the best bet for more readership.
If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.
Owning and storing physical books is not free, there is a real cost. Even owning and storing the scans is not free, especially when IP rights and challenges get involved, since a scanned book with no distribution is worthless.
I disagree with putting books on a pedestal and saying they must be protected. If they were any good, they would stand on their own, but if we have to run a moral crusade to save them, perhaps we are all better off if they're destroyed.
>If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable,
Sometimes I don't even know how to respond to comments here. I don't want to be rude, but you just have to give this a moment of thought. Is all the media that you find valuable common? I know that's not the case for me based on my own experience.
They may have been made scarce by many methods, perhaps a low print run; court rulings; burning in a revolution to suppress dissenting views; scanning to avoid competitors to get the content and prevent other LLMs to reference, search, or train on it. Perhaps it's a particular edition that is rare (e.g., the first edition had a different description and was thoroughly changed in the second edition of the book, which may be important to have all the facts from someone's biography).
So these books are not worth anything because they have so few copies but they are still worth including in only their models? Seems a bit contradictory
Not really. A trivial example: smut novels. I'm sure AI companies want them for training so their models work better as AI girlfriends/boyfriends, but I doubt much would be lost if the bottom 50% (by readership) of such books went into a woodchipper.
What you personally find important is not what everyone else finds important or inspiring. Destroying something takes it away from every single future human being.
You're confusing the worth of the book and its content. A book can be valuable (ie a rare bible print), whereas its content is not (we have all the bible variants copied).
That's what state libraries are for, although I understand that sometimes is hard to wrap around the concept of using public money for something different than producing money.
Nobody's said it in this thread so I'll drop it here where you ask "Why save physical books?"—
The problem isn't with morals or copyright. What we're up in arms about is case law. Past rulings have implied that destruction of books significantly contributes to the process being "transformative". This encourages companies to destroy the books. I think this is really dumb.
Why save physical books? It's because the reason to destroy them isn't good. If you think there's too many bad books out there, that's a different argument. Maybe your fight is against consumerism, I don't know.
Massively missing the point.
Having paper books isn't the point.
Preserving copies of books is the point, so history isn't lost.
Often those books only exist as paper copies due to their age.
I don't really care what happens to the paper copies, only that their content is preserved in a way that is accessible.
Anthropic's private servers aren't it.
I ask "more clean air", you answer "why, did you deserve it, having clean air is not free, there's a real cost"
Somebody else asks "We need more accessible energy", you answer "why we bother with your needs, you're not efficient, energy belongs to more efficient purposes, you can live without that much energy".
I can continue with more, but hope you got another viewpoint.
Btw, I'm disgusted there are "humans" like you in existence. We definitely don't share the same cultural ancestry, and I hope ours will prevail at the end, rather than cold blooded, mechanical "brains" like those of your kind.
> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.
The Gutenberg bible is rare, its content is not rare, and some would argue that the content itself is not valuable, and yet the Gutenberg bible is valuable.
So old books are valuable because old paper is valuable? I understand why the Gutenberg bible might be valuable but do we really need thousands of mass paperback novels?
Looking at my modest shelf of weird midcentury travel logs, I just want to be spared from this moralizing. This is just another case of everyone seeing store shelves as an extension of themselves, just like the decline of other physical media. If their knowledge was so precious then why was it not on the used bookstores and libraries to save them, especially when scanning has become so accessible in the last decade? Why did I find some of these books rotting in overpacked shelves and boxes?
Does adding an old book risk making the model worse? Off the top of my head:
- Reinforcing outdated, disproved or otherwise incorrect information.
- Reinforcing outdated forms of communication e.g purple prose.
You could counter both by giving more weight to recent text and I suppose the extra data may help for tracing references and the evolution of ideas through history. If this is what they are resorting to it does feel more like "marginal gains" territory rather than ASI imminent territory
Does the demonization of destruction of books mean I shouldn't delete downloaded e-books off my phone's Kindle app? All those precious bits, gone forever...
Because of copyright issues, countless books between around the 1930s until about 2000 were never digitized.
After around 2000 books started coming out in digital format, so at least there are digital copies of many of those, even if they are still under copyright.
I dunno, that "at least" worries me, digital actually more easier to be lost if it is under copyright, they just got deleted if they can not produce enough money. Physical may have higher chance to survive.
I have a year membership to AA now, been meaning to contribute for some time, archive.org is next on the list
Much like the pushback we are seeing from the citizenry against things like Flock and AI datacenters, we can push _forward_ too by ensuring important institutions (legal or otherwise) remain funded
archive.org is an incredible blessing that I never really respected enough until the last few years. I have bookmarks going back to the 90s, and for some reason, starting in 2015 or so, sites just started disappearing. I estimate at least 20% of my bookmarks are 404 now.
AI companies could certainly release the scans of any book that is no longer covered by copyright in the USA, for free download and get some positive publicity for a change.
I do wonder who is running PR at the major AI companies, as they seem rather insensate to how they are perceived...
The other thing they could be doing is using some of that lobbying money to try to reform copyright law to allow them to release the scans that are still covered.
It would likewise earn goodwill from a lot of people.
The United States can't make copyright weaker than what those agreements require without pulling out of the WTO.
The core of copyright law is about who has the right to redistribute a work. If I buy a print of a photograph, scan it and use that as my desktop image... I can do that. I cannot redistribute the scanned image, and if I was to sell the print later I should delete the scanned image.
Note that format shifting is covered under fair use... which is what training is taking place under. However, that doesn't mean that they can release that format shifted content... nor can then re-release the original work if they are retaining the format shifted content.
Under § 106 of the Copyright Law of the United States, the owner of the copyright in a work has the exclusive right to make copies of that work, unless an exception applies. When considering reformatting media, please note that individuals do not have an automatic right to reformat a work from one format to another. In order to legally convert media, your use must fall into one of the following categories:
you own the copyright in the work,
you have permission from the owner of the copyright, or
you have done a fair use analysis and have determined that fair use applies
They could be, however that would weaken their position as the sole source of knowledge which seems to me is half the purpose of their book destroying initiative.
I'm a little confused about the value of scanning rare books since this story came out. I have a small collection of "rare" books and they're not really bounties of information, at least not modern information. I know novel training corpus is important but the information in rare non-fiction books is commonplace or out-dated. And the information in old rare fiction-books are originals for which reprints exist or just uninteresting stories that aren't really worth anyone's time except collectors'.
It seems like it would be well within the charter of the Library of Congress to archive a complete scan of every book published in the United States. At least then we wouldn't lose the information. They can figure out distribution and copyright later.
The US Library of Congress is already a book depository, i.e., it has a copy of every book published in the United States. Same for the British Library for the UK and Ireland. Similar depositories exist for most other countries who care for their culture.
Which is really why the outrage cycle over Anthropic's actions is largely misplaced.
I think a solution to this could be for the government to require the companies to provide the original scans and OCR results to the government for safe keeping until copyright expires.
Clearly that makes assumptions about the function of government and the complacency of copyright holders.
The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves? Trying to keep an edge with their training sets? Isn't it ridiculous, considering the sheer size of them and statistical insignificance of the set differences?
> The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves?
How is this a question at all? They’re scanning books because the courts determined that it’s the only way to use that data. They are forbidden from using digital copies found on places like Anna’s Archive. They must acquire and scan the book.
They cannot redistribute the book. The Internet Archive tried that and the courts shut it down. You cannot scan a book and share it without violating copyright law.
> The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves?
Why on earth would they? Ultimate point for these companies is to make a ton of money, obviously they won't shoot themselves in the foot and give away whatever advantage they have, especially not to a free archive which is about doing good in the world, which probably isn't profitable enough for a company to care about.
Exactly. They set up this operation specifically to comply with the letter of copyright law and defend against publisher law suits. “Leaking” to Anna’s Archive is the last thing they’re going to do.
In my experience, when someone mentions burning library of Alexandria, they are either exaggerating, or have a poor grasp of history. Usually it's both. This post, the discussion, do not change my mind.
Is there any evidence the books are truly "destroyed" & not merely "disassembled"?
It's common practice to cut the spine & binding off a book, scan the loose pages, & drop the rubber-banded loose pages in a box somewhere. The book still exists, just without its binding.
No, it has value because it is the only means that are absolutely accepted to pay taxes and most legal judgements (i.e. obligations to the state that issued that currency.) If you don't have dollars and you need to pay US taxes, you have got to get some or you will go to jail.
The price they should have to pay for destroying a rare book (just to scan it) is making a pristine high resolution digital copy of it available to the public at no cost whatsoever.
I genuinely have yet to connect on this idea that we are “burning Alexandria” or AI companies are ruining the future of humanity because most of these books are absolutely junk.
I do think book copyright law needs a ton of work but I think most folks are simply taking their bias against AI and creating hyperbolic scenarios. I am sure there are some gems in the lot and I am equally certain they may be scanning dupes of the same material but even at scale I have a hard time seeing the significance. Most of these published work in the last 60 years is absolutely junk garbage. The good stuff usually has a lot longer run so more volume in circulation. You can go pick up lots of books that are 100+ years old for a couple bucks or cheaper because this stuff has no value.
Sorry for the copy-paste from elsewhere. I'm probably doxxing my online accounts with this. 100% my words tho and 100% I stand by this.
Really can't wait for this outrage cycle to finally die. There's a lot AI companies are doing wrong. The wording of Project Panama is really some villain-type shit. But if you stop and think about it, this is really not concerning. Like, at all.
0. In the Anglosphere, the British Library (UK and Ireland) and the US Library of Congress (USA) preserves all books published in their territories. So if Anthropic is pulling a 1984/Fahrenheit 451, "gating access to information", they are really doing a ridiculously bad job at it. I'm pretty certain similar depositories exist for other jurisdictions.
1. Rare does not automatically mean it has some obscure knowledge nor does it mean culturally/historically significant. The oldest book the news outlets could mention is a 1970s manual on soil mechanics (Guardian link in your sources). How "obscure" is the knowledge in there, you reckon? How culturally significant is that book? Odds are, a good chunk of that book is outdated knowledge at this point, useless for anything practical other than knowing what people in the 70s thought about soil mechanics. And for the latter, there are a bunch of other soil mechanics manuals from the 1970s lying around.
2. No, despite the admittedly cartoonishly villainous description of Project Panama, Anthropic is not out to get every single manual on soil mechanics from the 1970s out there. They just need to cover enough subject breadth in their training data set. Getting redundant copies is a waste of money. See also, point 0.
3. You argue a lot for the nostalgia and sentimentality of old books, which, okay, but that is hardly beside the point. Libraries and publishers destroy books at a greater scale than Project Panama when there's not enough demand for them. That's not an affront to history or culture just the consequence of economics (see also, point 0). Similarly, y'all outraged about old and second hand books being destroyed but odds are, they would've been trashed anyway even if Anthropic didn't get their hands on them. We've had all the time in the world for someone else to buy them to keep them from big bad Anthropic but no one did. I'm just happy for the booksellers who made some money out of this AI-infected timeline.
4. It's not like Anthropic is buying books from Dr. James Justin Sledge---books not covered by point 0 in other words---and chopping that up. The fact that one of their reported suppliers is "ISBNdb" should clue you in that they are interested in books from the ISBN era (and hence covered by point 0). Fact is, it's a terrible investment to "gate knowledge" from the really rare and old and culturally significant books. They are über expensive and for what? Even more useless is the AI trained on those books! Imagine asking ChatGPT how to cook a large squid and it answers in the style of Thomas Hobbes.
What’s really disgusting is how unnecessary this is.
LLMs have topped out in terms of language fluency. You’re not going to get a smarter model with 250 trillion tokens than with 25 trillion tokens. There are still other gains to be made in the LLM/LRM space, but they don’t require ripping up rare books.
And they’re doing it destructively because it’s cheaper. That’s it. They absolutely could scan nondestructively. They’re trillion-dollar companies, and they do this in a shitty way to save pennies.
This is only because this is a legal right granted as part of the purchase of copyrighted material, and because we have tried to stop AI companies from doing this with purely digital copies.
The insanity of attempting to prevent AI learning (which is a direct consequence of the nature of observable information) because of the myth of intellectual property is the main driver of this type of behavior.
the irony of scanning rare books to preserve them while the scanning pipeline is what's destroying the physical copies is going to be a great trivia answer in 50 years
I mean guys i get it, you have a bad day just once and you want to rewrite history, we all do, but geez... I guess just I feel destroying books should be classed as unethical. if i was ruler I think id ban it.
Yes, let's begin with the trials for all the librarians who have destroyed/trashed books over the year!
Nevermind that they do that because those books aren't being borrowed and no one wants to buy them. Destroying books to destroy knowledge is bad, destroying books because no one wants them or there are ample copies, _especially_ when those books go on to live forever as a digital copy, is a completely different story.
It boggles my mind that of all places, here on HN, people can't understand that. The knowledge is not destroyed, only the physical vessel.
bro if people on HN of all places are concerned of physical media being destroyed boggles ur mind then u need to read more about the damage caused to society by prior happenings.
I wasn't even making an unusual or particularly strong statement
Im going to try and be patient and explain my position. I just feel that actions that are destructive should always be seen through a lens of suspicion.
IE, lets destroy this wood to reduce the chance of wildfires. Ok, well why that wood? we sure there arent other interests at play? Ie a carpark wanting to be built by a local authority?
As you become older and witness large acts occur due to unclear scheming, you start to become sensitive towards destructive acts, feeling there should be a lens cast over it.
Maybe Im just paranoid.
Sure I can understand there must be tons of books that are not needed, but books, are object that include native function that IN the right context becomes priceless and hence should be treated with a degree of concern.
Nothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book. It's a completely different story from "prior happenings", to which I assume you mean book burning and the like. Pretending they are the same is intellectually lazy.
Thank you for your reply and request for clarification.
Yes destroying a book is in my opinion identical to a book burning.
One day there will be no hard copies, the digital books are hence vulnerable to patches, whether its due to a new political movement or a sudo abled hamster running on a keyboard... and if that occurs information will be permanently lost.
I would have thought a HN user understand well the importance of backups.
I dont want to sound mean, perhaps you also support keeping some hard copies as backups, but Im just explaining my concern.
To be honest I think everything I am saying is just common sense, I was just making a joke earlier about the architects deciding to do this because they had a bad tuesday.
I don’t get this latest anti AI talking point. They are digitizing the books preserving them forever.. are you upset that you don’t have access to it? Because you didn’t before either… stop whining and give AA some money.
I would suppose that most of the rare books in the world aren't for sale, so run no risk of being digitized and destroyed by Anthropic? They are probably forgotten somewhere on a shelf or in a box, slowly rotting. The reason these books are rare being that nobody wants them.
Agree. While it certainly isn't the most environmentally friendly to render huge stacks of paper into waste, the real issue is copyright creating scarcity (inability to copy the thing).
Are they? Or are they just using it for training and not keeping the digital copy afterwards? And even if they are keeping a digital copy, does that actually matter if they never release it?
You’re making a distinction here, but training is something you repeat for every new point release, so you need to keep the data if you want to use it for training.
The data of such a copy is nothing compared to the wider picture and the data can be used for future training, so even from a purely self interest perspective, they should be keeping the copy.
As for long term benefits, it could one day be sold as a service, once copyrights have expired on the works. We can't see it today, but that is purely the result of the law and what the law intended to do from the start, you don't see a copy unless you pay for your own.
Ideally, governments or international organizations should be doing this: "harvesting" all the media output by humanity and making it available for everyone, similar to the Library of Congress etc.
Heck even YouTube should be legally obligated to preserve videos, given how they now hold the largest visual documentation of human history.
How is Anna's Archive getting around the copyright violations of hosting all these books for access to all? I suspect it won't be long before they get sued and are forced to shut down. I spent some time reading the web site, and it doesn't look to be a well thought out project. Even the way it is organized leaved much to be desired. There's much more to library science and the organization of a vast collection of books than meets the eye.
They evade judicial enforcement and try to stay anonymous. They've certainly already been sued (and lost by not even turning up). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive#March_2026_pu... (Contrast to Sci-Hub trying to defend themselves in court, in India, and that leading to no new articles since several years ago.)
Unlike archive.org which is a real business, Anna's Archive is basically piracy.
You could try to sue them but you'd have to find them first.
This IMO makes them more resilient against that sort of thing, and also means they can actually do their job.
But scanning the books also helps those AI companies because ultimately
they want more data. Yes, they also destroy rare books to sabotage competitors, and thus also damage global society - a reason why these evil companies should be disbanded - but the article seems to not put any thoughts into things here, other than the superficial "they destroy books".
I guess they just cut the spines to speed scan the pages with a machine and then the resulting pile of papers is no longer worth anything, so they just dispose of it.
We've been seeing that headline for a few weeks now and I really don't understand the problem.
Companies are paying for the books now, great! And destroying a book is really the best way to scan it. I could destroy the books I buy myself if I wanted, they're my books and I can do whatever I want with them. A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies nowadays.
Now what books exist in a single copy that destroying it would amount to losing knowledge? In any case, I would also expect such books to be very old, have very little useful content for training to start with, and be expensive enough to buy to make training on them unprofitable.
So what's the problem here exactly?
Also from the article:
> It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.
I'm all love for Anna's archive, but still, I find it rich that they now find themselves in position to make strong ethical claims.
> A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies.
If you've read the articles covering this issue, you'll be aware the concern is over the fate of rare and out of print books, rather than your straw man (ie those available in 'thousands to millions' of copies).
> "A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market - but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed," says Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's.
> "But we have, and have sold, books which are for example the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century.
> "It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."
Is there any indication that Anthropic is destroying books from the 18th century? Even the BBC quote is a conditional. Emphasis added:
> "It would be a much more significant problem IF one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."
I agree with the sentiment of course but it is really a huge IF they are doing that.
IF they wanted to train on, say, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, why buy an expensive edition from the 1600s when they would get the same text from a Penguin edition for a fraction of the price? It gets much cheaper secondhand too of course.
I'll go further, why would they want to train on expensive rare and out of print books? Are they, perhaps, competing on an AI benchmark based on extensive medieval knowledge of the cosmos? There's been a lot of pearl-clutching about lost obscure knowledge but y'all really reckon that kind of knowledge is valuable to LLMs?
The British Library has a large quantity of books that have literary, academic, cultural or bibliopolical significance but are too niche to ever see print new print runs.
This idea that there can only be merit in a work if it's commercially viable is incredibly ignorant, and if that becomes the standard for whether a work is preserved or not, we stand to lose a great deal of our cultural heritage.
The problem is that you probably do little research or read very few old books.
There are multiple instances of a book being referred within another book, while at the time the author had access to it, we might not have it today. Taking a rare book and destroying absolutely erases that link we have with the past.
You not seeing a problem with this is the core issue, it's probably why the people doing it (it's people destroying these books not aliens) just shrug and don't feel too bad doing that.
Old books are even more crucial than today's books due to how uncommon it was to have something written/printed and bound. Many unique and single copy books explain to us a ton of things about the past, sometimes for funsies and sometimes for useful findings. Destroying old books is akin to destroying the closest we got to time machines.
Surely the people granted a legal monopoly to print the books will have kept a copy of the masters in order to reprint any lost works. Surely copyright works as intended for the public good and isn't just rent seeking. Surely.
I can't tell if you're making a joke but many (most?) rare books predate the modern copyright regime and the original printing plates are somewhere in a 17th century midden heap.
The books being destroyed are not afaik those sort of books. They are just out of print modern books, that are still under copyright (and hence can't legally be scanned non-destructively).
> They are just out of print modern books, that are still under copyright
OR in-print modern books that they can get for cheaper by buying used. The whole thing is a manufactured outrage over something that doesn't matter. They aren't breaking into museums to steal their only copy of a book and burn it. They are digitizing books. If anything I commend them for what they are doing. If the alternatives were that book rotting on a shelf or being thrown away they doing a great service preserving it, even if they don't make it available publically (which they can't for copyright reasons). It's literally no different from them stocking a private library with these books, except it's better because digital copies are much easier to preserve.
It is also legal to buy potatoes and burn them, nobody would care if I do it. But if I buy up a food supply enough to feed a country and burn it it would be wrong.
I think the problem is precisely that for some books there are not too many copies around like you described and if they destroy them we might eventually lose access to them directly. It might sound too extreme, but I understand the fear behind this.
> We've been seeing that headline for a few weeks now and I really don't understand the problem.
It’s powerful symbolism. It reminds me of that tone-deaf iPad ad that sparked outrage in 2024. The one where all the cultural artifacts were crushed in an industrial press to make a soulless slab of glass. And that was Apple, who is generally well-liked by the public.
> I could destroy the books I buy myself if I wanted, they're my books and I can do whatever I want with them.
Of course you can. Nobody is saying these companies aren't allowed to do what they're doing.
But what they're doing is disgusting and something I can't forgive. It's an escalation of the attacks against society that these companies have been engaging in from the beginning. This isn't about legality, this is about what's right.
> Our ideal is to scan and upload all the world’s publications before publishers completely block knowledge, and before AI companies scan and destroy all the world’s books and papers.
Isn't this just doing the work for the AI companies??? Then the AI companies can simply download a copy of Anna's Archive.
> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things.
Baloney. They aren't forced to destroy books. They could leave well enough alone and not scan them to begin with. They're voluntarily choosing to do this.
Let us not forget they own the books. They bought them legally on the open market. Also, no modern book truly is destroyed forever, there are always libraries of record with a copy.
> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things
This is such dangerous train of thought, to give them the benefit of being forced to destroy books. Why is that exactly, and who is forcing them? You can also, you know, find another way?
Like the data centers who currently use very dirty energy acquisition methods (not all of them), are they also "forced" to do this, because they too need to make as much money as the other ones? How long would you continue this idea of others "forcing" for-profit companies to try to make more money, regardless of consequences?
Destroying books used to be an obvious dumb, stupid and shit idea, not sure how somehow a for-profit company making of a digital copy for themselves of the book before destroying it, suddenly makes it not a shit idea for the rest of humanity.
It is a shit idea. But that's copyright law for you - if you want to digitise the work for yourself, you according to latest precedents have to destroy the copy you digitised ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
I don't blame the companies for either wanting digitised works, nor following the law. I blame the absurd court ruling, and I blame the publishers for not having digitised the old works themselves, in which case they could just sell e-books to the labs... They are after all the only ones who can legally do it non-destructively.
But why do they have to do this at all? If it's a shit idea, and you cannot do something without negative side-effects of it, can't you just not do it? Why these companies absolutely have to do this?
Yeah, which is completely fine. There's a major difference between:
A. Company destroys a book forever for training. Its scan is locked away forever in company records. In this case:
- This information is locked away in the improvisations of an LLM. It is no longer possible to directly access the information as written by the human being that authored it. This constitutes the loss of literary history, or at least loss of access to that history to the general public.
- The price of the book is no longer distinct from the general price of "inference". It becomes increasingly impossible to pay for specific information, instead you are charged by the meter for general machine inference, which doesn't even give you access to a specific text.
- The provenance of information is totally destroyed. This causes potentially unresolvable problems of authority and citation. If the original source is lost, how are we to know if a random LLM claim about an obscure topic or specific niche text is even true or just hallucinated?
B: Company uses freely available scanned copy of the text:
None of the issues above obtain, since anyone can still access the actual book. Most importantly, this reduces the power companies have to force everyone to continually pay for a derivative form of the book's information in perpetuity in the form of token costs.
Then give up training on antiquated books. Why does an LLM aimed at providing utility for people living in 2026 need to be trained on rare (thus probably obscure) texts of yore in the first place?
Because these companies have no real strategy beyond trying to capture any and all information they possibly can to try and lock it away and charge the public for it in perpetuity.
Why are these books "rare"? Because no one wants them. Why then are we up in arms over their destruction? These sensational headlines make it seem as though a copy of the Codex Sassoon 1053 is being destroyed, when in fact these are just obscure books that no one cares about.
The rhetoric on this topic is reminiscent of the rhetoric regarding data centers: some noxious combination of misinformation, misunderstanding, and sensationalism, wielded against technological progress.
It is quite disappointing to see them not using the type of machines that don't actually destroy the books, like, afaik, Internet Archive is using.
Using a few gas generators for a transitional period isn't great either, but effect of those is very temporary. I fear permanence in this individual deal with the devil made for speed and cost.
The problem is the choice made here: this is the world's 2 major governments choosing to give very large legal advantages to AI models, over actual people, in copyright. US and EU governments obviously want AI models to make everything from books to movies in the future, and this is a conscious choice both governments are making without consulting people.
Here's another question: The exact reasoning for copyright is made clear in the constitution: "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
What courts changed is failing to promote the progress of science and useful arts by destroying knowledge/art/books and access to those books, supposedly with the goal of maintaining market demand for those books. I mean this reasoning is so bad, so warped it could be used as James Bond villain humor.
Courts have failed to provide authors and inventors with exclusive rights, in fact they have destroyed a right authors effectively had. This decision goes against both the spirit and letter of the law, all because billionaires don't want to respect copyright anymore.
If you're going to do this, why have copyright at all? Can someone explain to me HOW you can explain that the constitution still supports this system?
But, of course, it gets worse. EU courts have decided the opposite, namely that without the author's permission you are not allowed to train an ML model on their texts. Ie. this becomes an additional right authors have, an additional thing authors can license (or not). Now that SOUNDS good, and you can bet the EU commission will be publishing about that. But it isn't good.
Of course the EU has demonstrated their usual do-nothing attitude. They have stated they are not going to do anything about people outside of the EU blatantly violating EU law, and let them profit inside the EU of violations of EU law, thereby destroying authors' income. As to the question why there is any need for EU law if you're not going to act on law violations ... no answer on that front.
To put it differently: why is chatgpt.com, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, ... not banned across the EU? Why are payments involving violating models allowed to go through, given that EU courts have sided with authors? What is the point of having EU laws at all?
But it's far worse: the EU commission is attempting to make their employees use a US model (chatGPT [2]), in violation of EU law, internally in their own organizations. Now from what I hear, they're failing at making people use it, WHILE paying US companies for illegal models.
I mean I hate what the US government has done, but the EU is far worse. They are officials, they are the institutions ... and their public claim to defend authors, their court judgements, their public stance ... is just an outright lie. I mean how else can you call this? 90% of the people involved here are lawyers, from the very top to the bottom rungs, all overwhelmingly lawyers. They know they are going against their own law, and doing it anyway. That is, at best, lying. The EU commission, even the courts and the EU's own bureaucracy will not follow the law internally, NOR are they making anyone else follow EU law!
The real effect of EU decisions: only Mistral, and other EU model providers are forbidden from, and punished for training on copyrighted data without permission. Everyone outside of the EU can just do it without permission and will not face any kind of consequences for that in the EU. EU companies (ie. hugging face) are hosting, for free, models in blatant violation of EU law.
Which is even worse than the US government stance in my opinion. EU has directly chosen for the worst possible of all combinations:
a) EU companies making ML models have to self-sabotage against their competition.
b) EU authors receive ZERO protection from the law. Not because the law doesn't support their case, but because the institutions whose only reason for existence is to enforce the law won't do their job. In fact THEY THEMSELVES violate EU authors rights.
Obviously, under these circumstances, AI model companies are going to outcompete musicians, authors, even movie studios. It's only a matter of time. And that is not a given, it is an explicit choice both the US and EU governments are making.
Ok . How trustworthy is the claim . It maid by a resource that on its own has problems with copyright.
Overall , smells like propaganda. How many books on earth you can openly buy that has practical “knowledge” value , not just historical one , and exist only in one physical implementation ( book ) . There were numbers of initiatives for a decade to digitalize all valuable knowledge.
It seems the initiative was secretive for a different reason . Buying a single book not allows you to distribute the content of the book , hence 1.5 billions fines.
Usually I personally not on copyright people side , but in this case you clearly see the system functioning. Know knows how the book business will look like in 10 years , but now book publishers doing their job by brining ai companies to court
I don't see any mention of Project Ocean - AKA Google books. Before AI they endevoured to digitize books in a massive online library. This inccluded rare and out of print books many which are archived at libraries. Because they had to preserve the books and return them in the condition they received then they created elaborate technology to accomplish this. The project was met with significant legal challenges from authors and publishers which was eventually overcome. The legal precedents that were established from Project Ocean laid the ground work for the process as it exists today. Books from libraries are still being preserved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/appeals-court-ru...
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
Whenever I need something from Google Books I inevitably reach the message that this is a limited preview and the part I need is not included.
I thetefore feel the same way about Google Books that how I felt when I learned that What.cd went down: that I don't gain or lose anything anyway because I never had access to begin with, and that by not making it 100% publicly accessible you're asking for the data to one day disappear forever.
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi
Big companies will read up the books and make their AI recite them from memory, but Archive.org was sued for renting one book on an exclusive basis (unless one would return, another wouldn't be able to rent)
Like all things, Google will eventually realize they cannot make significant ad revenue and they will eventually give up and discontinue serving this, though I doubt it's more than a scratch in terms of disk space.
It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.
It's data for their AI pipeline. Basically digital gold.
They are also an AI company now. Why would they stop?
Also, why would they ever share their collection?
Book scans, secreted away, are worthless to the public.
They could use them as training data, without providing access the actual books.
Internet Archive version: https://openlibrary.org/
Info on where to send books not yet in their collection: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
Mobile apps to determine if they need a book: https://help.archive.org/help/donate-books-app-for-ios-and-a...
Web app: https://archive.org/want/?mode=donation_book
For example, I sent in a copy of Systems Bible when Tony Hoare passed (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324054) and paid for it to jump the digitization queue.
It is not a big deal. Since the invention of the printing press any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units.
Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity.
By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there are garbage. Most people clean their shelves with the books they don't care about, but preserve the ones that are good. If they are young people that inherited a house and don't care about books, they pick and sell the good ones, giving away the bad books.
If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more. That is, for every 100 books that are garbage there is one good quality book. It is very rare to find a jewel there.
> a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere
somewhere were we can't access it. as the article states: “permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers”
the issue isn't that the physical copy is gone, it's that they are preventing people from making digital copies that are actually accessible by destroying the physical copies.
> If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more.
archivists keep everything, because we don't know right now what will be important 100 years from now.
> somewhere were we can't access it
By any metric imaginable, it's making the information more accessible, not less. First, it's taking a single copy of a 10k physical print and it's making it digital. Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.
Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.
I happen to actually actively shop second hand bookstores, so I am potentially affected by this - as opposed to most people complaining because they don't like the idea. And I still absolutely support it.
>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.
Depends upon what you want.
For example, knowledge about how the book smells when you open it, something that reader do talk about enough I don't think this should be a strawman, is lost. But, that is about the experience of reading the book, not the knowledge of the book.
The exact text? Yeah, I think that is largely lost as well. This is a summary. And for rarer books, it will be a particularly bad summary. The basics of the book are being captured in a space that the right question that retrieve it, but worse than a sparksnote and any well read reader will tell you all the sorts of things a sparknotes already loses compared to reading the book directly.
But, that little bit of data is a bit more data than existed before, and future LLMs should get better at giving the information. So, in that sense, the knowledge is better being spread compared to copyright where the book stays in a warehouse until it is disposed of. If it was between this and a sparksnote of the book being made, the sparksnote is far better, but between this and the book simply being disposed of, then the LLM is better but far, far from great.
That's a lot of assumptions that goes into the judgment, which is probably why different people reach different conclusions. One person is imagine the alternate fate of this book being slowly rotting in a landfill, the other resting on a bookshelf where it is read at least once fully and then flipped through time to time, and neither are wrong.
> 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".
> permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers
History tells us that very few "permanent" situations are truly permanent.
Provided a set of information has value (which in this case it clearly does) then the overwhelming likelihood is that, eventually, through some method or other, the information will become public.
> 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.
I think you may be greatly underestimating the long tail. Several times a year I read sources that reference older books that I can't find online. When I am able to locate them, they often cost at least several hundred dollars, sometimes into the 10s of thousands.
Whenever my wife wants to visit antique stores, I always look for old books. I have found several 100+ year old gems.
Exactly, also all those physical books would anyways get molded, eaten by moths or just naturally decay. It's not like the AI companies are obliterating every copy of every single book.
I have books, but they are just objects. They're nice objects, but just objects.
Fetishizing books isn't going to help.
In fact, most of those "rare" books don't sell because nobody wants them. The AI companies are making them even more rare, so the booksellers should be thankful.
Somehow I don't think they're looking for the books that have been copied over and over.
Read more about this. Depends on the definition of the "big deal" but from what I can understand the problem is that they buy rare things - which exist in just several copies - and they tend to buy _all_ copies.
Here we have another entry in the long list of "things described on the Internet that never happened".
Most old books that are rare and unpreserved are so because their value is marginal, so nobody has bothered to collect and preserve them.
But where did you hear that they’re buying “all copies”? And to what end?
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.
>Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.
I honestly can't and I think you can't either or you would have used an example with books/printed media rather than film, an entirely different ballgame.
OK... I'm going to assume good faith even though your wording makes it somewhat unlikely.
Similar textual examples would be any text containing actual language as it's spoken in a given place or time. Or any factual textbook detailing the buildings present in a given location. Or any text book detailing a now defunct construction process. Or any text book (generally small run) detailing a niche interest, now missing ecosystem or the state of a particular political situation at a given time. Essentially all textual primary sources for events which are not currently considered important - but which we have no way of estimating the future importance of. One can continue to create countless counterfactual examples in this vein. My overall point is we cannot know what may be useful or even essential in the future, and knowledge should be preserved under the assumption that it is likely to be.
Historians frequently refer to this paradox - how everyday aspects of life are frequently not explicitly documented, since they're so obvious to the communities or communities of expertise that observe and carry them out. So it's actually incredibly important to preserve what seems like ephemera.
Hell we couldn't have AI training at all if we lacked the corpus of existing written literature - but there was no way any author could have anticipated this future utility more than a couple of decades ago.
Where did you see they tend to buy all the copies? This comment is the first time I've heard of this.
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?
I could see buying multiple copies being useful to mitigate problems, like damage.
But buying all the copies is categorically different and I cannot imagine why they would attempt that, except perhaps to prevent their competition from getting a hold of the same text?
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?
It really does seem like an organized operation, given that it's so prevalent and they all seem to be in lockstep with their specious claims.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this outrage is fueled by the same actors as the AI data center water outrage. Whoever they are
what is your source?
Beware that the notion of "quality" is entirely different for AI companies: they don't seek entertainment, but sentences in a language to train an LLM.
First of all, it IS destroyed and it is a big deal. Hardcover copies of books especially 1st - 2nd edition ones (even with mistakes) are rarer than digital scans.
Maybe the Bodleian Library at Oxford University should give all their rare books to AI companies to scan and destroy them since it is not a "big deal" anyway.
Except that when they did do a pilot with OpenAI to scan these rare books, [0] they did NOT destroy them. I wonder why?
[0] https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/services/research-partnerships...
Why wonder? The answer is abundantly clear if you follow the news. If a book is copyrighted under U.S. law, scanning and destroying counts as a format conversion which qualifies it as fair use, so there is no need to negotiate with copyright holders. See Judge William Alsup’s decision. If Anthropic did not destroy the books after scanning it would have not won the lawsuit, and scanning would be illegal. If a book is already out of copyright then of course they do not have to destroy it afterwards.
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 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.
>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.
Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today)
Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.
And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era? What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time? What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?
I don't understand what you're trying to say here.I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing.
The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.
This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is.
The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.
Knowing and enacting are two distinct things, "you should do what I want you to do" means you're already doing the wrong thing, and yes, there is an agreement on what the right thing is, its what is ethical, that is, what non profits and archivists are forced to do.
> This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is.
The internet has amplified voices who say things to signal rather than do things to change.
That's orthogonal to knowing what "the right thing" is.
The increase in people who believe that perception is reality has the logical consequences of people shouting their opinions loudly enough so that it becomes 'the right thing'
That’s just not true. There is a clearly a right thing to do in many circumstances.
Well if you're appealing to librarians:
"Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on.
Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that...."
https://bsky.app/profile/annabookwriter.bsky.social/post/3mt...
I don't get the point of this one. We not talking about "retiring books", we talking about "rare but still fine books".
I don't think many Liberians like the idea that they have to do it; it is just one of those things that has to be done, sadly.
I don't think that changes the message at all. If a librarian doesn't like routine book destruction, they would still feel worse about this different thing that is happening.
They should be happy to have a job at all in the Republic of Liberia.
A quick search suggests that most "weeded" books are sold on or donated rather than burnt or sent to landfill. Do you have sources that say otherwise?
Just go to a local library and ask a librarian or anyone who has a lot of books and tries to give them away; sadly, in most cases, they pick the valuable ones, and the rest just get sent for destruction (Burning).
It is pretty standard procedure.
Oho you think they're buying common books? Books they can find online already?
> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.
But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, training is a lossy, noninvertible transformation. The LLM cannot legally produce the book verbatim, it will only spit out a regurgitation of the information, chopped and mingled into a broad information space.
Furthermore, these "magic machines" are not the property of the public. They are owned by a handful of corporations who want to charge you continuously for every token output by the machine. So, not only is the original text locked away forever behind company walls, you now need to pay for access to an approximation of the original contents which you can no longer even verify as being correct because the source is no longer accessible.
If you are cool with this, from a cost perspective you are cool with a deal whereby I trade you access to a definite resource for a one time fee of $N for, instead, a perpetual cost of $M to you every month/day/hour for access to an amalgam in which you cannot even determine what proportion of the resource you are actually getting. You're basically saying you're cool with me selling you some unknown portion of wine for a monthly subscription price instead of selling you a definitive amount of wine for a one time fee. lol.
Are you under the impression they scan the book, train on it, then destroy the digital copy? Because that's not what's happening. They scan it, and hold it forever to train future models on. The scan still exists, not available to the general public but that's no different than if they had bought the books and kept them in a private library closed to the public.
Destroying the physical copy inflates the value of the retained digital copy
> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned
But unreadable by humans, right?
They're scans. Those are human-readable. They probably won't make them available to the public, which is the exact same state they would be in if they bought the books and just put them on a bookshelf in a warehouse.
Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.
No, they are destroying them because that’s the way that they can keep a digital copy legally.
This is not true. Google Books does not destroy books. No court has ruled that you must destroy books to legally keep a digital copy.
You don't know that. A major part of the problem here is the lack of transparency.
Keep in mind we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.
> we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.
Pretty feeble investigative journalism if they cannot give us the names of even 5 such books we are supposed to be outraged about.
While not an authoritative source... https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_... (and not actual book titles)
> Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc.
So... something like Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 - https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe...
I make no claims that that's a such a book that's been ordered, but that's the type of book that the reddit post references.
They are destroying them because it’s easier to scan them if you slice the binding.
I didn't fully understand why but apparently there is also a legal reason to destroy the books, it makes it them less likely to be considered copyright infringement.
Not really. Selling the book onward does seem legally dubious but legally nothing (yet) prevents you from storing the book in a warehouse. obviously it’s cheaper to dispose of them.
And very hard to re-assemble after you have done that. They are not in the book binding business.
Those books at the flea market aren't "rotting", they are available for sale.
You seem perfectly fine living in a world where your flea market is devoid of books.
A lot of them are rotting. We are not talking "one of the three living copies of the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses". Rather "1956 statistics of the cultive of yuca in 'some small village from Mexico': a boring analysis". Those books have value to train LLMs as they are 100% free of AI text, but has been collecting dust (or rotting) in someone's room for decades, and no human is buying them even for 10 cents.
Also, Anna's text implies that the books are scanned and then mischievously destroyed so nobody has access again to the content. That's not the case: the books are "destroyed" before scanning, by dissasembling them in pages so they can be feed to the scanner. Scanning while keeping the book intact is difficult, as you need to software-unwarp the page before OCR'ing it, and expensive as you either need specialized scanners or humans doing it.
No, they are not. A lot of them are rotting and get thrown or given at the end of the day.
You’re equating something being ubiquitous and affordable with it not being valuable.
Yes, there are plenty of books, many were printed, many have lasted a very long time (plenty over 100 years!).
That says more about the success and utility of the technology than it does about whether individual books should be shredded.
> 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.
They are ridiculous because the reality of the situation is boring. Boring doesn’t drive engagement. So, all the clickbait headlines and ragebait comments imply scandal. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get attention.
After being clickbaited and ragebaited, media consumers feel deeply anxious and angry. But, explaining that they are angry over a boring situation feels silly, not righteous. So, they give summaries, impressions, sometimes extrapolation of the bait they have been consuming. That feels righteous.
This observation applies to a wide variety of topics trending in the various media every day. Distinguishing injustice from ragebait unfortunately requires non-trivial effort from the reader.
>Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy?
Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed?
>Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.
When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.
No. Almost none of the books you donate to the library get to the shelves. If they can sell it, they will. Otherwise they are thrown away.
I even read on a web site of a librarian that their library had stopped accepting donations because "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash".
As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices.
What happens when the books don't sell?
Our local library-connected biannual book sale puts a large dumpster, about the size of an 18-wheel truck trailer, outside the warehouse where the sale is conducted. At the end of the sale it gets filled to the brim with waste inked cellulose, and sits there open in the weather until it's taken away for disposal.
They are thrown away, which has been happening since forever, and nobody ever gave a fuck until AI got involved.
> When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.
Many books aren't lent and not bought and most libraries have limited space to store such books, thus they go where old paper goes.
Of course some rarely lent books are important and for the one person asking for it in ten years really valuable, but many still have to go.
As someone who has gone to many many used book sales over decades… many of the books at a sale never get sold, guess what they usually get tossed in the dump. This includes your local library book sales. Books are heavy and worthless. Cheaper to throw away the ones that nobody picks up in a sale.
I know it comes at a shock but truly most books are absolutely worthless.
The average lifespan of a library book is 26 loans. For a popular book that could be less than a year.
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.
I don’t think any of these people know.
All I’ve read, as far as sources go, is a number of rare book sellers saying they’ve had a big uptick in huge orders with no price haggling. Apparently that’s peculiar. And some of them seemed a little concerned.
Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince.
And I don’t have any reason to think some reddit librarian knows what’s going on, if anything, either way.
> Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince.
Then they should list the names of these books otherwise I say they're alarmist.
If they have, I haven’t seen it.
It’s very possible I’ve just missed deeper reporting, obviously.
But otherwise I agree. I’m neither losing sleep over it or just trusting that these (historically kinda scummy) businesses are actually behaving.
If there’s a serious problem I’d like to see something more concrete. Same for hand-waving the question.
I heard from the first stories that virtually all of these books being ordered have ISBN numbers. Books that are rare that have ISBN numbers are rare because no one wanted them 99.9% of the time. Somebody wants every book, but you'd spend many, many years finding that somebody.
If they have no value why are they being acquired and scanned?
> 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!
> 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.
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.
Puts the burden on government to store what is probably 90% worthless material.
Copyright should really be amended so that once out of print and a grace period it’s free use. I am probably more of an anarchist in this regard. Similar to my belief that anyone should be able to ingest any data you put online, once a book is no longer being print it should be able to be used for commercial or personal use for free. Similar to a generic drugs.
There is far too much garbage that gets published, let the collective hive mind figure out what is valuable.
> Puts the burden on government to store what is probably 90% worthless material.
That's what governments are for.
Since we are talking about a US perspective do you have evidence that backs this up? It just comes across as an empty statement. The government is the will of the people and I personally like the idea of fixing copyright instead of making the government store how to use windows 95 books.
Sure some governments and opinions would say so but you’re making a statement of zero impact. Fix the underlying copyright laws don’t create more rules.
Wait, so the library of congress is suddenly responsible for probably petabytes a day of incoming scans? To what end? Do they have to index it and make it available? Do they have to check the accuracy and integrity of the scans?
How does this help anything, except create more work to throw in the trash?
This is already required for new books published in the US, and has been for more than one hundred years.
It’s called “mandatory deposit”
Actually - most jurisdictions that issue a publisher a unique root ISBN number have a stipulation that anything new published using that number must have a copy sent to them.
Looked into this a decade ago for publishing eBooks via my personal corp when eReaders and ePub were starting to hit big in the mainstream.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+books+are+published... https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+megabytes+average+b... https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+3+megabytes+times+2....
Wrong end of the pipeline; we should instead demand digital copies of media be sent to the Library of Congress in order to obtain copyright, along with a registration fee to pay for indefinite storage and other costs. Registration should be mandatory if you want copyright. For things like books where a machine readable text format existed, it should be mandatory to include (so no requiring OCR). Access to the archive should be available for research use (including ML training) at cost.
The Library of Congress already has a copy of every book published in the US. How would this help?
So now the Library of Congress has to manage all these submissions whenever someone scans something? How do you even go about enforcing such a thing?
I love this idea. At least make them turn it into some form of a public good.
Surely they have the high quality scans, but there would probably be the same legal restrictions to just share the archive.
I'm only one person, but I scan old books that had an impact on me growing up, and upload them to archive.org. Thankfully there are others that do the same. (And to be sure, FWIW, these are books that have not been printed for about 50 years—I suppose the software community would call them abandonware.)
If they're 50 years old they're young, and archive.org will likely block access. If they're not already on annas-archive (or the copy there is trash), your best bet is an anon upload to libgen.
Obviously. Copyright infringement is settled law.
From their perspective, it's training data that their competitors don't have. If they make it available, they fill in their moat.
They cannot scan the books then resell them or donate them under current US copyright law. It’s not clear to me that they could warehouse them if they wanted. In the recent Bartz v Anthropic case the judge ruled this destruction as legal, saying
> The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.
So that there was still only one “copy” of the book. This is in compliance with the DMCA. You can make a personal digital copy of a work but then you cannot resell the hard copy and keep the digital one. Same principle applies here.
Nowhere in this description did it require destruction of the physical book. This is being done because it's easier to scan a shucked book, and this explanation is circulating because it's easier to blame it on the law and that pesky meddling government.
So if I scan a book, sell it, and keep using the scan, is that legal? (Spoiler: That's not legal. It's a violation of IP law.)
Selling it is not allowed. The inability to sell it does not require its destruction.
But copyright law does, because otherwise you have two copies.
This isn't theoretical, AI companies have finished lawsuits about this and this was the ruling.
The ruling was that what they did was within the law, not required by law in every detail. They cannot resell the copies. I saw nothing in that ruling that required their destruction, because it is not required.
A person can digitize their own books without destroying the original. So can Anthropic. They are choosing to destroy the books for easier scanning and trying to palm off the blame for it.
Why would a company keep the hard-copy around at the risk of it being inadvertently given away, resold, etc.? It's a huge outstanding liability given that the illegal copying of works -- the other part of that case -- is what they settled out of court for some huge amount of money. Destruction is the only thing that makes sense.
I'm old enough to have been around when DCMA legislation was under discussion. Many people were dead-set against it and raised concerns over matters exactly like this. In Rainbows End (2006), Vernor Vinge wrote about a similar scenario where a robot went through the university library shredding books, and scanned the shredded pieces to recombined them into a digital archive.
Anthropic may be doing shady things and may have even done this on their own recognizance, we just don't know. As it stand, this is 100% a consequence of US copyright law, much of which was written by large corporations to protect their own assets.
I agree fully that it makes logistical sense. But it is not a legal requirement, and they should not be permitted to use that as an excuse to wash their hands of their own decisions.
Citation please? Bartz v Anthropic seems pretty clear, see also Authors Guild v Google and RIAA v Diamond Multimedia.
1 point by jonhohle 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [–]
You’re missing the point. It doesn’t require that they destroy the book, but it precludes them from giving it away. It’s their property, so they can choose to store it, but that has real, ongoing cost and may eventually leave unusable books anyway due to fire, pests, water damage, etc. if they’re not maintained properly.
I love how sci-fi authors like Ray Bradbury toyed around with a similar issue but then got it so wildly wrong.
More importantly: Once Anthropic is gone, all knowlege is lost.
It will probably be actioned off in the bankruptcy proceedings.
That’s an interesting angle. There’s probably some property value (though maybe not enough based on volume) to the books they purchased. I doubt there’s any value to the “backups” of those books. I’d imagine they’re normally transferable.
They cut the bindings off and feed loose leaf books through a document scanner. It would be difficult to store and probably unsellable, it's probably going in the trash.
To legally retain these scans, you must own the original book. You can sell or give away the original book (sans binding) but it's legally dubious as to whether the scan can be transferred along with it. So if Anthropic has no interest in storing thousands of loose leaf books, they are likely destroying both the original and scan as soon as possible.
At the end of the day, the only thing of value Anthropic has is the trained model which is definitely transferable.
> 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.
If they were just chopping them up without scanning them first, then sure, but I think that scanning books and burning books are polar opposites
Burning books and destroying them in a way that nobody else can access the content anymore is a distinction without a difference.
>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.
Copyright law eating itself…
> 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?
Is there a difference with regard to the metaphor?
Depends on the point being made about “historical precedent” and the lessons to be drawn from such.
Also, helps to clarify what exactly the commenter was referring to and possibly help distinguish the centuries-spanning decline of the Library of Alexandria from the violent fate of the Serapeum.
> 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.
It's probably good to remind ourselves though of how disgusting they can be.
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.
Are you really advocating for assuming things with no evidence, by presenting no evidence for why one should do so? That’s not especially rigorous thinking.
It's likely more along the "fool me twice" category of wisdom. The opposite would instead be a kind of naive thinking.
They have already gotten to Archive.org. Books that were available to borrow are no longer 'available'. SMH
I've scraped all the stuff I am interested in. There's a whole r/datahoarders so I'm not alone. ;-)
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).
we also did without air conditioning, plumbing, democracy, and human rights for millenia, and I wouldn't want to give any of those up
If you are suggesting that air conditioning, plumbing, democracy, and human rights are bad for society then I am missing the analogy.
Nobody will ask you, they'll be taken from you, in case you missed what happens around.
The age-old cry of the aging population, faced with tech that didn’t exist when they were young. Turn back time!
I’m reminded of the screeds about the dangers of novels.
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.
I was with you until the water use. You're misinformed. There were at one point at least several data centers set to use evaporative cooling on well water.
Notably since all the controversy many data centers are very loud about being closed loop and with significant consideration given to other local impacts as well.
Yep. I was personally misinformed the same way at some point. Never expected evaporative cooling to be so popular, but it is.
It's possible for a datacenter to use scarce well water irresponsibly.
They don't have to, and the vast majority don't.
The lie and moral panic is that all datacenters necessarily waste precious drinking water; it's patently false and used by agitators to push, unwittingly or not, a Chinese Communist Party agenda.
Nuclear killed itself (vast cost overruns); there was no need for hallucinated foreign influences.
But I understand blaming your energy waifu for its own failure is unacceptable for nuclear bros.
> This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic, along with the water use nonsense
What was nonsense about water use?
That AI consumes it at an abnormally high rate, presumably.
The claim never made sense to me either, I can only assume those that regurgitated such claims never worked with HPC or even general datacenters before.
Was recently talking to a (non-technical) friend about this, she was surprised after talking about the "insane water use for AI datacenters" when I responded that open-loop cooling is pretty rare for a datacenter and I've never actually seen it used before, versus closed-loop (or just regular air-based cooling) which has no real noticable water consumption.
It was never that dramatic, and it’s declining day by day. It’s a panic over a real but small problem.
Order of magnitude more water is lost from wasted irrigation (e.g. during rain, of fallow fields, sprayed into windy air, etc) than data centers.
Problem with data centers is that companies want to build them near densely populated areas that already have problems with water supply and high utility bills.
1. They don't HAVE to use water. Air cooling, closed loop cooling, waste-water cooling, and so on, are options. Easy to regulate. Evaporative cooling is more energy efficient though, but a complete non-issue in places with abundant water and a non-option elsewhere.
2. Datacenters have been shown to reduce utility prices. They provide suppliers with previsible long term demand which allows for cost-effective network and production planning.
That AI data centers are drinking up local ground water for cooling. It isn't (or wasn't) nonsense, though. It was/is a real thing, though it seems to be on the out in favor of closed loop cooling after the massive and still on-going public outcry.
The outcry over data centers using a fraction of the water used for things like golf courses or growing alfalfa in a desert.
> 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.
At the risk of angering the zeitgeist, destroying one or two or ten paper copies doesn’t make AI companies “become the only ones in the world with digital copies.”.
Big AI companies are leaving an easy opportunity on the table for establishing goodwill with the public.
Just publicize a rare books vault where you put the older editions that aren’t in a lot of library catalogs. Use non-destructive scanning for those.
Align yourself with the image of safeguarding something. It seems like a no-brainer given various themes I’ve been hearing in criticisms of these companies.
Maybe the hope was to just bury the book destruction under the rug, but the cat is out of the bag. Publicizing a state-of-the-art rare books preservation archive is now a good move.
Tech tends to love associating itself with a classical tradition or something. Name it after the library of Alexandria. It would be a huge cultural loss if that were to burn down again. Thank God for our big AI companies that keep the archive intact.
Actually, I assume it would be separate archives, since I assume there’s a something of an arms race in getting training data that competitors don’t have, but really, who would complain that there are multiple archives? That sounds like a good thing. And what big AI company would want to be the odd one out for not running an archive?
From what I understand, to work with copyrighted books they need to essentially format shift (i.e., scan and destroy the physical book). So a book vault would not solve this issue.
A book vault would still be useful for out-of-copyright works, but this would only cover a (probably relatively small) portion. Also, I'm not sure how easy it is to reliably determine copyright at scale, so they might just decide that it's not worth it.
At this point my only hope is that in the long run these scans make it to the public somehow (leaks, copyright changes/expiration, whatever), where they can then be accessed and preserved by everybody. Then we could have our true digital library of Alexandria.
I imagine they are only buying one copy of each book, thus only significantly affecting the supply of books that were already unfathomably rare. That may still be bad, but doesn't really support the "scan every book you can get your hands on before they are gone" narrative.
That doesn't mean I'm against that narrative; I'm a big supporter of shadow libraries and scanning every unscanned book. But connecting to the LLM narrative here seems opportunistic and populistic.
>I imagine they are only buying one copy of each book
The previously struggling second hand bookseller in my town has upgraded their car from a 15 year old hatchback Renault to a brand new Range Rover. Some Canadian company has been buying any book he can provide them for the last year. Their quotes aren't by number of books, or even weight, but by volume. As in, they pay him by the shipping container, and he sends several of those a month.
I think it's reasonable to assume the books in this supply chain which aren't destroyed in digitisation are just pulped and sold to Procter & Gamble for toilet paper manufacturing. I can't see any other fate for Anthropic's second and third copies of The twelfth edition of Vera Lynn's 1980's memoir "We'll Meet Again".
Doubtful. A robust protocol would be to scan several of each edition (to ensure no scanning errors), and scan each edition. Then too, these books are being purchased in lots with accidental duplicates, and all the major labs are doing it. So we're likely talking about tens of each book. For rare books - anything over a couple of hundred years old or small print runs either, that could well be most or even all copies. This wouldn't be immediately noticed either, especially if the books aren't currently considered noteworthy or well known.
"I imagine they are only buying one copy of each book…"
I doubt that corporations of this scale do that extra kind of… book-keeping. They more than likely buy books by the pound.
The dissonance when a cause you support is loudly represented by disingenuous types.
At some point they’ll hit on data center water consumption as yet another reason to support the cause.
I collect old books. It's not common to buy books at all yet to buy old books. Library sales as big as concerts exist, little book libraries everywhere but the used book stores are constantly closing.
I wish people cared 25 years ago. Unwanted books in boxes are everywhere. Its a false hysteria. You can still get any book you want, digitizing is the best bet for more readership.
You ask "Why destroy physical books?"
I ask "Why save physical books?"
If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.
Owning and storing physical books is not free, there is a real cost. Even owning and storing the scans is not free, especially when IP rights and challenges get involved, since a scanned book with no distribution is worthless.
I disagree with putting books on a pedestal and saying they must be protected. If they were any good, they would stand on their own, but if we have to run a moral crusade to save them, perhaps we are all better off if they're destroyed.
>If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable,
Sometimes I don't even know how to respond to comments here. I don't want to be rude, but you just have to give this a moment of thought. Is all the media that you find valuable common? I know that's not the case for me based on my own experience.
They may have been made scarce by many methods, perhaps a low print run; court rulings; burning in a revolution to suppress dissenting views; scanning to avoid competitors to get the content and prevent other LLMs to reference, search, or train on it. Perhaps it's a particular edition that is rare (e.g., the first edition had a different description and was thoroughly changed in the second edition of the book, which may be important to have all the facts from someone's biography).
So these books are not worth anything because they have so few copies but they are still worth including in only their models? Seems a bit contradictory
Not really. A trivial example: smut novels. I'm sure AI companies want them for training so their models work better as AI girlfriends/boyfriends, but I doubt much would be lost if the bottom 50% (by readership) of such books went into a woodchipper.
What you personally find important is not what everyone else finds important or inspiring. Destroying something takes it away from every single future human being.
You're confusing the worth of the book and its content. A book can be valuable (ie a rare bible print), whereas its content is not (we have all the bible variants copied).
That's what state libraries are for, although I understand that sometimes is hard to wrap around the concept of using public money for something different than producing money.
Libraries tend to regularly destroy books as well. And they aren't scanning them first either.
Doesn't that make them even worse?
"State libraries" such as the Library of Congress. (Which is not regularly destroying books, AFAIK.)
Good point, why waste time deciphering old badly burnt scrolls when anything worthwhile should have been preserved.
If the Romans had the printing press we'd have a lot more of those scrolls.
Nobody's said it in this thread so I'll drop it here where you ask "Why save physical books?"—
The problem isn't with morals or copyright. What we're up in arms about is case law. Past rulings have implied that destruction of books significantly contributes to the process being "transformative". This encourages companies to destroy the books. I think this is really dumb.
Why save physical books? It's because the reason to destroy them isn't good. If you think there's too many bad books out there, that's a different argument. Maybe your fight is against consumerism, I don't know.
> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable
"likely" being the keyword here, what about heavily censored books?
Massively missing the point. Having paper books isn't the point. Preserving copies of books is the point, so history isn't lost. Often those books only exist as paper copies due to their age. I don't really care what happens to the paper copies, only that their content is preserved in a way that is accessible. Anthropic's private servers aren't it.
> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.
That's what I keep saying about the van Goghs I burn to heat my home but everyone is still mad at me!
I ask "more clean air", you answer "why, did you deserve it, having clean air is not free, there's a real cost" Somebody else asks "We need more accessible energy", you answer "why we bother with your needs, you're not efficient, energy belongs to more efficient purposes, you can live without that much energy". I can continue with more, but hope you got another viewpoint. Btw, I'm disgusted there are "humans" like you in existence. We definitely don't share the same cultural ancestry, and I hope ours will prevail at the end, rather than cold blooded, mechanical "brains" like those of your kind.
> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.
The Gutenberg bible is rare, its content is not rare, and some would argue that the content itself is not valuable, and yet the Gutenberg bible is valuable.
Same can be said about many books.
Right but is an AI company going to destroy a Gutenberg bible? No, as you said the content is not rare, and that's what they want.
So old books are valuable because old paper is valuable? I understand why the Gutenberg bible might be valuable but do we really need thousands of mass paperback novels?
Ask: valuable to whom and why?
- Reader: narrative
- Collector: scarcity of the physical artifact
- AI Company: language samples (quantity, variety), facts
I agree with you for the same reason I think McDonald's is the best restaurant in the world!
Looking at my modest shelf of weird midcentury travel logs, I just want to be spared from this moralizing. This is just another case of everyone seeing store shelves as an extension of themselves, just like the decline of other physical media. If their knowledge was so precious then why was it not on the used bookstores and libraries to save them, especially when scanning has become so accessible in the last decade? Why did I find some of these books rotting in overpacked shelves and boxes?
Does adding an old book risk making the model worse? Off the top of my head:
- Reinforcing outdated, disproved or otherwise incorrect information.
- Reinforcing outdated forms of communication e.g purple prose.
You could counter both by giving more weight to recent text and I suppose the extra data may help for tracing references and the evolution of ideas through history. If this is what they are resorting to it does feel more like "marginal gains" territory rather than ASI imminent territory
Does the demonization of destruction of books mean I shouldn't delete downloaded e-books off my phone's Kindle app? All those precious bits, gone forever...
Because of copyright issues, countless books between around the 1930s until about 2000 were never digitized.
After around 2000 books started coming out in digital format, so at least there are digital copies of many of those, even if they are still under copyright.
I dunno, that "at least" worries me, digital actually more easier to be lost if it is under copyright, they just got deleted if they can not produce enough money. Physical may have higher chance to survive.
What is the deal with AI Companies buying old books to scan and then destroy them?
https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1vszifd/what_...
I have a year membership to AA now, been meaning to contribute for some time, archive.org is next on the list
Much like the pushback we are seeing from the citizenry against things like Flock and AI datacenters, we can push _forward_ too by ensuring important institutions (legal or otherwise) remain funded
archive.org is an incredible blessing that I never really respected enough until the last few years. I have bookmarks going back to the 90s, and for some reason, starting in 2015 or so, sites just started disappearing. I estimate at least 20% of my bookmarks are 404 now.
archive.org itself reminds me of the Library of Alexandria. It is irreplaceable, and this is a disaster waiting to happen.
AI companies could certainly release the scans of any book that is no longer covered by copyright in the USA, for free download and get some positive publicity for a change.
I do wonder who is running PR at the major AI companies, as they seem rather insensate to how they are perceived...
The other thing they could be doing is using some of that lobbying money to try to reform copyright law to allow them to release the scans that are still covered.
It would likewise earn goodwill from a lot of people.
Copyright law is an implementation of international treaties.
Berne Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention (182 parties)
TRIPS Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement (164 parties - part of WTO)
The United States can't make copyright weaker than what those agreements require without pulling out of the WTO.
The core of copyright law is about who has the right to redistribute a work. If I buy a print of a photograph, scan it and use that as my desktop image... I can do that. I cannot redistribute the scanned image, and if I was to sell the print later I should delete the scanned image.
Note that format shifting is covered under fair use... which is what training is taking place under. However, that doesn't mean that they can release that format shifted content... nor can then re-release the original work if they are retaining the format shifted content.
https://library.georgetown.edu/copyright/fair-use-reformatti...
They could be, however that would weaken their position as the sole source of knowledge which seems to me is half the purpose of their book destroying initiative.
That's why the "but it's illegal" propaganda is so unconvincing for me. It's really "but it's illegal (and we want to keep it that way)".
PR only cares that the company is percieved as unstoppable & inevitable.
If their PR teams did have a response to these actions, it would be something to the effect of:
"would you rather china destroy all the books and gatekeep the knowledge?"
I'm a little confused about the value of scanning rare books since this story came out. I have a small collection of "rare" books and they're not really bounties of information, at least not modern information. I know novel training corpus is important but the information in rare non-fiction books is commonplace or out-dated. And the information in old rare fiction-books are originals for which reprints exist or just uninteresting stories that aren't really worth anyone's time except collectors'.
It seems like it would be well within the charter of the Library of Congress to archive a complete scan of every book published in the United States. At least then we wouldn't lose the information. They can figure out distribution and copyright later.
The US Library of Congress is already a book depository, i.e., it has a copy of every book published in the United States. Same for the British Library for the UK and Ireland. Similar depositories exist for most other countries who care for their culture.
Which is really why the outrage cycle over Anthropic's actions is largely misplaced.
Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (in favor of Google) 2015 that similar actions constituted "fair use".
> A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese).
I do not know much about Anna’s. Is it Chinese or is this just one of many worldwide helpers?
I think a solution to this could be for the government to require the companies to provide the original scans and OCR results to the government for safe keeping until copyright expires.
Clearly that makes assumptions about the function of government and the complacency of copyright holders.
The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves? Trying to keep an edge with their training sets? Isn't it ridiculous, considering the sheer size of them and statistical insignificance of the set differences?
> The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves?
How is this a question at all? They’re scanning books because the courts determined that it’s the only way to use that data. They are forbidden from using digital copies found on places like Anna’s Archive. They must acquire and scan the book.
They cannot redistribute the book. The Internet Archive tried that and the courts shut it down. You cannot scan a book and share it without violating copyright law.
> You cannot scan a book and share it without violating copyright law.
Hence the “leaking” part.
> The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves?
Why on earth would they? Ultimate point for these companies is to make a ton of money, obviously they won't shoot themselves in the foot and give away whatever advantage they have, especially not to a free archive which is about doing good in the world, which probably isn't profitable enough for a company to care about.
Because that’s illegal.
Exactly. They set up this operation specifically to comply with the letter of copyright law and defend against publisher law suits. “Leaking” to Anna’s Archive is the last thing they’re going to do.
The illegal part is (or ideally should be) using the books in their training. The morally right action is to make it public afterwards.
America is interesting.
* download and publish a book as an individual -> 100% lifetime jail + 10x your whole lifetime earnings/revenue - Aaron Swartz
* download and publish a book as a company -> fine 1% of revenue
* scan and publish a book as an individual -> legal issues, 100x fines of your yearly 50k donations
* scan and "publish/train" a book as a company -> okay, lets ban chinese models, they are distilling your model
A more honest framing would be: "The judge ordered the destruction during scanning because of stupid copyright laws"
In my experience, when someone mentions burning library of Alexandria, they are either exaggerating, or have a poor grasp of history. Usually it's both. This post, the discussion, do not change my mind.
Why are people acting like books can’t be reprinted?
You have to have a sample to be able to reprint it.
Good thing the books are being scanned, then. The copyright owners know just who to go to get the sample.
Is there any evidence the books are truly "destroyed" & not merely "disassembled"?
It's common practice to cut the spine & binding off a book, scan the loose pages, & drop the rubber-banded loose pages in a box somewhere. The book still exists, just without its binding.
Again, rare and valuable are not the same thing. A $2 bill is not as valuable as you think it is, unless you think it is $2.
Value is entirely in the eye of the beholder - money itself only has value because enough of us agree that it does.
No, it has value because it is the only means that are absolutely accepted to pay taxes and most legal judgements (i.e. obligations to the state that issued that currency.) If you don't have dollars and you need to pay US taxes, you have got to get some or you will go to jail.
It's not bitcoin.
The price they should have to pay for destroying a rare book (just to scan it) is making a pristine high resolution digital copy of it available to the public at no cost whatsoever.
Do you think they will make all of that publicly available after it's been scanned?
I genuinely have yet to connect on this idea that we are “burning Alexandria” or AI companies are ruining the future of humanity because most of these books are absolutely junk.
I do think book copyright law needs a ton of work but I think most folks are simply taking their bias against AI and creating hyperbolic scenarios. I am sure there are some gems in the lot and I am equally certain they may be scanning dupes of the same material but even at scale I have a hard time seeing the significance. Most of these published work in the last 60 years is absolutely junk garbage. The good stuff usually has a lot longer run so more volume in circulation. You can go pick up lots of books that are 100+ years old for a couple bucks or cheaper because this stuff has no value.
Sorry for the copy-paste from elsewhere. I'm probably doxxing my online accounts with this. 100% my words tho and 100% I stand by this.
Really can't wait for this outrage cycle to finally die. There's a lot AI companies are doing wrong. The wording of Project Panama is really some villain-type shit. But if you stop and think about it, this is really not concerning. Like, at all.
0. In the Anglosphere, the British Library (UK and Ireland) and the US Library of Congress (USA) preserves all books published in their territories. So if Anthropic is pulling a 1984/Fahrenheit 451, "gating access to information", they are really doing a ridiculously bad job at it. I'm pretty certain similar depositories exist for other jurisdictions.
1. Rare does not automatically mean it has some obscure knowledge nor does it mean culturally/historically significant. The oldest book the news outlets could mention is a 1970s manual on soil mechanics (Guardian link in your sources). How "obscure" is the knowledge in there, you reckon? How culturally significant is that book? Odds are, a good chunk of that book is outdated knowledge at this point, useless for anything practical other than knowing what people in the 70s thought about soil mechanics. And for the latter, there are a bunch of other soil mechanics manuals from the 1970s lying around.
2. No, despite the admittedly cartoonishly villainous description of Project Panama, Anthropic is not out to get every single manual on soil mechanics from the 1970s out there. They just need to cover enough subject breadth in their training data set. Getting redundant copies is a waste of money. See also, point 0.
3. You argue a lot for the nostalgia and sentimentality of old books, which, okay, but that is hardly beside the point. Libraries and publishers destroy books at a greater scale than Project Panama when there's not enough demand for them. That's not an affront to history or culture just the consequence of economics (see also, point 0). Similarly, y'all outraged about old and second hand books being destroyed but odds are, they would've been trashed anyway even if Anthropic didn't get their hands on them. We've had all the time in the world for someone else to buy them to keep them from big bad Anthropic but no one did. I'm just happy for the booksellers who made some money out of this AI-infected timeline.
4. It's not like Anthropic is buying books from Dr. James Justin Sledge---books not covered by point 0 in other words---and chopping that up. The fact that one of their reported suppliers is "ISBNdb" should clue you in that they are interested in books from the ISBN era (and hence covered by point 0). Fact is, it's a terrible investment to "gate knowledge" from the really rare and old and culturally significant books. They are über expensive and for what? Even more useless is the AI trained on those books! Imagine asking ChatGPT how to cook a large squid and it answers in the style of Thomas Hobbes.
What’s really disgusting is how unnecessary this is.
LLMs have topped out in terms of language fluency. You’re not going to get a smarter model with 250 trillion tokens than with 25 trillion tokens. There are still other gains to be made in the LLM/LRM space, but they don’t require ripping up rare books.
And they’re doing it destructively because it’s cheaper. That’s it. They absolutely could scan nondestructively. They’re trillion-dollar companies, and they do this in a shitty way to save pennies.
Why not force them to release their records? Some legislation would help. If they are scanning the world's books, the results should be open.
This is only because this is a legal right granted as part of the purchase of copyrighted material, and because we have tried to stop AI companies from doing this with purely digital copies.
The insanity of attempting to prevent AI learning (which is a direct consequence of the nature of observable information) because of the myth of intellectual property is the main driver of this type of behavior.
the irony of scanning rare books to preserve them while the scanning pipeline is what's destroying the physical copies is going to be a great trivia answer in 50 years
Savonarola Altman
I’ll leave
I mean guys i get it, you have a bad day just once and you want to rewrite history, we all do, but geez... I guess just I feel destroying books should be classed as unethical. if i was ruler I think id ban it.
Yes, let's begin with the trials for all the librarians who have destroyed/trashed books over the year!
Nevermind that they do that because those books aren't being borrowed and no one wants to buy them. Destroying books to destroy knowledge is bad, destroying books because no one wants them or there are ample copies, _especially_ when those books go on to live forever as a digital copy, is a completely different story.
It boggles my mind that of all places, here on HN, people can't understand that. The knowledge is not destroyed, only the physical vessel.
bro if people on HN of all places are concerned of physical media being destroyed boggles ur mind then u need to read more about the damage caused to society by prior happenings.
I wasn't even making an unusual or particularly strong statement
Im going to try and be patient and explain my position. I just feel that actions that are destructive should always be seen through a lens of suspicion.
IE, lets destroy this wood to reduce the chance of wildfires. Ok, well why that wood? we sure there arent other interests at play? Ie a carpark wanting to be built by a local authority?
As you become older and witness large acts occur due to unclear scheming, you start to become sensitive towards destructive acts, feeling there should be a lens cast over it.
Maybe Im just paranoid.
Sure I can understand there must be tons of books that are not needed, but books, are object that include native function that IN the right context becomes priceless and hence should be treated with a degree of concern.
Nothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book. It's a completely different story from "prior happenings", to which I assume you mean book burning and the like. Pretending they are the same is intellectually lazy.
Thank you for your reply and request for clarification.
Yes destroying a book is in my opinion identical to a book burning.
One day there will be no hard copies, the digital books are hence vulnerable to patches, whether its due to a new political movement or a sudo abled hamster running on a keyboard... and if that occurs information will be permanently lost.
I would have thought a HN user understand well the importance of backups.
I dont want to sound mean, perhaps you also support keeping some hard copies as backups, but Im just explaining my concern.
To be honest I think everything I am saying is just common sense, I was just making a joke earlier about the architects deciding to do this because they had a bad tuesday.
I don’t get this latest anti AI talking point. They are digitizing the books preserving them forever.. are you upset that you don’t have access to it? Because you didn’t before either… stop whining and give AA some money.
I would suppose that most of the rare books in the world aren't for sale, so run no risk of being digitized and destroyed by Anthropic? They are probably forgotten somewhere on a shelf or in a box, slowly rotting. The reason these books are rare being that nobody wants them.
Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383026
Project Unica is an initiative by the University of Illinois Libraries to scan and preserve publications that exist as only a single known copy: https://news.illinois.edu/u-of-i-librarys-project-unica-pres...
What often gets missed is that they are buy one physical copy and turning it into a digital copy.
They have done zero to destroy the durability. In fact, it’s probably more durable.
If the physical copies are scarce, that is due to the publisher and copyright laws and not them buying and converting a single copy.
>that is due to the publisher and copyright laws
Agree. While it certainly isn't the most environmentally friendly to render huge stacks of paper into waste, the real issue is copyright creating scarcity (inability to copy the thing).
> turning it into a digital copy.
Are they? Or are they just using it for training and not keeping the digital copy afterwards? And even if they are keeping a digital copy, does that actually matter if they never release it?
> Or are they just using it for training
You’re making a distinction here, but training is something you repeat for every new point release, so you need to keep the data if you want to use it for training.
They are. They can’t release it; that would be copyright infringement. But they’re absolutely planning to make further use of the book later.
The data of such a copy is nothing compared to the wider picture and the data can be used for future training, so even from a purely self interest perspective, they should be keeping the copy.
As for long term benefits, it could one day be sold as a service, once copyrights have expired on the works. We can't see it today, but that is purely the result of the law and what the law intended to do from the start, you don't see a copy unless you pay for your own.
Ideally, governments or international organizations should be doing this: "harvesting" all the media output by humanity and making it available for everyone, similar to the Library of Congress etc.
Heck even YouTube should be legally obligated to preserve videos, given how they now hold the largest visual documentation of human history.
How is Anna's Archive getting around the copyright violations of hosting all these books for access to all? I suspect it won't be long before they get sued and are forced to shut down. I spent some time reading the web site, and it doesn't look to be a well thought out project. Even the way it is organized leaved much to be desired. There's much more to library science and the organization of a vast collection of books than meets the eye.
They evade judicial enforcement and try to stay anonymous. They've certainly already been sued (and lost by not even turning up). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive#March_2026_pu... (Contrast to Sci-Hub trying to defend themselves in court, in India, and that leading to no new articles since several years ago.)
Unlike archive.org which is a real business, Anna's Archive is basically piracy. You could try to sue them but you'd have to find them first. This IMO makes them more resilient against that sort of thing, and also means they can actually do their job.
Anna's Archive merely indexes copyrighted content. It doesn't host.
But scanning the books also helps those AI companies because ultimately they want more data. Yes, they also destroy rare books to sabotage competitors, and thus also damage global society - a reason why these evil companies should be disbanded - but the article seems to not put any thoughts into things here, other than the superficial "they destroy books".
I guess they just cut the spines to speed scan the pages with a machine and then the resulting pile of papers is no longer worth anything, so they just dispose of it.
During World War II and its immediate aftermath, between 35 million and 40 million books were destroyed in Germany due to Allied actions
They did rather bring that on themselves though
But think of the books!
Since when books have become a supply limited asset ?
Try and read a book that’s been burnt and find out
Ever since someone dredged up this old nothingburger of news from 2024 and made it the latest outrage bait.
We've been seeing that headline for a few weeks now and I really don't understand the problem.
Companies are paying for the books now, great! And destroying a book is really the best way to scan it. I could destroy the books I buy myself if I wanted, they're my books and I can do whatever I want with them. A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies nowadays.
Now what books exist in a single copy that destroying it would amount to losing knowledge? In any case, I would also expect such books to be very old, have very little useful content for training to start with, and be expensive enough to buy to make training on them unprofitable.
So what's the problem here exactly?
Also from the article:
> It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.
I'm all love for Anna's archive, but still, I find it rich that they now find themselves in position to make strong ethical claims.
> A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies.
If you've read the articles covering this issue, you'll be aware the concern is over the fate of rare and out of print books, rather than your straw man (ie those available in 'thousands to millions' of copies).
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o
> "A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market - but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed," says Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's.
> "But we have, and have sold, books which are for example the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century.
> "It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."
Is there any indication that Anthropic is destroying books from the 18th century? Even the BBC quote is a conditional. Emphasis added:
> "It would be a much more significant problem IF one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."
I agree with the sentiment of course but it is really a huge IF they are doing that.
IF they wanted to train on, say, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, why buy an expensive edition from the 1600s when they would get the same text from a Penguin edition for a fraction of the price? It gets much cheaper secondhand too of course.
I'll go further, why would they want to train on expensive rare and out of print books? Are they, perhaps, competing on an AI benchmark based on extensive medieval knowledge of the cosmos? There's been a lot of pearl-clutching about lost obscure knowledge but y'all really reckon that kind of knowledge is valuable to LLMs?
Rare and out of print does not mean important or valuable.
It doesn't automatically mean pointless or worthless, either. And it's too late to judge either way once it's been destroyed.
Usually it means the opposite. Books that are old and valuable tend to be out of copyright, so they do see new printing runs.
The British Library has a large quantity of books that have literary, academic, cultural or bibliopolical significance but are too niche to ever see print new print runs.
This idea that there can only be merit in a work if it's commercially viable is incredibly ignorant, and if that becomes the standard for whether a work is preserved or not, we stand to lose a great deal of our cultural heritage.
Presumably, being from the 18th Century, copyright law wouldn't apply?
Detestable if they're doing it anyway to prevent competitors getting hold of it.
The problem is that you probably do little research or read very few old books.
There are multiple instances of a book being referred within another book, while at the time the author had access to it, we might not have it today. Taking a rare book and destroying absolutely erases that link we have with the past.
You not seeing a problem with this is the core issue, it's probably why the people doing it (it's people destroying these books not aliens) just shrug and don't feel too bad doing that.
Old books are even more crucial than today's books due to how uncommon it was to have something written/printed and bound. Many unique and single copy books explain to us a ton of things about the past, sometimes for funsies and sometimes for useful findings. Destroying old books is akin to destroying the closest we got to time machines.
Surely the people granted a legal monopoly to print the books will have kept a copy of the masters in order to reprint any lost works. Surely copyright works as intended for the public good and isn't just rent seeking. Surely.
I can't tell if you're making a joke but many (most?) rare books predate the modern copyright regime and the original printing plates are somewhere in a 17th century midden heap.
The books being destroyed are not afaik those sort of books. They are just out of print modern books, that are still under copyright (and hence can't legally be scanned non-destructively).
> They are just out of print modern books, that are still under copyright
OR in-print modern books that they can get for cheaper by buying used. The whole thing is a manufactured outrage over something that doesn't matter. They aren't breaking into museums to steal their only copy of a book and burn it. They are digitizing books. If anything I commend them for what they are doing. If the alternatives were that book rotting on a shelf or being thrown away they doing a great service preserving it, even if they don't make it available publically (which they can't for copyright reasons). It's literally no different from them stocking a private library with these books, except it's better because digital copies are much easier to preserve.
It is also legal to buy potatoes and burn them, nobody would care if I do it. But if I buy up a food supply enough to feed a country and burn it it would be wrong.
I’m confused - are you intending to say Anthropic and Google are buying ALL the books?
I think the problem is precisely that for some books there are not too many copies around like you described and if they destroy them we might eventually lose access to them directly. It might sound too extreme, but I understand the fear behind this.
The problem is we don't know what we're losing, due to lack of transparency.
> We've been seeing that headline for a few weeks now and I really don't understand the problem.
It’s powerful symbolism. It reminds me of that tone-deaf iPad ad that sparked outrage in 2024. The one where all the cultural artifacts were crushed in an industrial press to make a soulless slab of glass. And that was Apple, who is generally well-liked by the public.
> I could destroy the books I buy myself if I wanted, they're my books and I can do whatever I want with them.
Of course you can. Nobody is saying these companies aren't allowed to do what they're doing.
But what they're doing is disgusting and something I can't forgive. It's an escalation of the attacks against society that these companies have been engaging in from the beginning. This isn't about legality, this is about what's right.
> Our ideal is to scan and upload all the world’s publications before publishers completely block knowledge, and before AI companies scan and destroy all the world’s books and papers.
Isn't this just doing the work for the AI companies??? Then the AI companies can simply download a copy of Anna's Archive.
At least the knowledge will be available to everyone instead of mashed together and regurgitated poorly through proprietary LLMs.
At least there will be a copy left for us. The AI companies won't share these books in their original form.
Because it's illegal. That's the whole reason they are shredding books in the first place, because copyright law forces them to do stupid things.
Google wanted to share the whole of Google Books 15 years ago, too, but they were sued to hell, so now you get a watered down search functionality.
The poow AI execs being forced to commit acts of intewwectual tewwowist when all they wanted was to cynicawwy make the wowld a wowse place
> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things.
Baloney. They aren't forced to destroy books. They could leave well enough alone and not scan them to begin with. They're voluntarily choosing to do this.
Let us not forget they own the books. They bought them legally on the open market. Also, no modern book truly is destroyed forever, there are always libraries of record with a copy.
> Let us not forget they own the books.
That's rather beside the point. I don't think anyone is arguing that what they're doing is in some way illegal.
> no modern book
I'm less concerned about modern books.
Copyright law didn't force them to torrent terabytes of books what they did and got caught doing so.
I'm not convinced they destroy the books to obey the law, lol.
Google probably wanted to sell the whole of Google Books.
> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things
This is such dangerous train of thought, to give them the benefit of being forced to destroy books. Why is that exactly, and who is forcing them? You can also, you know, find another way?
Like the data centers who currently use very dirty energy acquisition methods (not all of them), are they also "forced" to do this, because they too need to make as much money as the other ones? How long would you continue this idea of others "forcing" for-profit companies to try to make more money, regardless of consequences?
Destroying books used to be an obvious dumb, stupid and shit idea, not sure how somehow a for-profit company making of a digital copy for themselves of the book before destroying it, suddenly makes it not a shit idea for the rest of humanity.
It is a shit idea. But that's copyright law for you - if you want to digitise the work for yourself, you according to latest precedents have to destroy the copy you digitised ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
I don't blame the companies for either wanting digitised works, nor following the law. I blame the absurd court ruling, and I blame the publishers for not having digitised the old works themselves, in which case they could just sell e-books to the labs... They are after all the only ones who can legally do it non-destructively.
But why do they have to do this at all? If it's a shit idea, and you cannot do something without negative side-effects of it, can't you just not do it? Why these companies absolutely have to do this?
Well, they want to use the book they own in digital format. They own it, they get to decide what to do with it.
What's shit about it ? They're buying books that would be headed for the pump or trash heap anyway. Millions of books are trashed or pulped every day.
Yes, government regulations are almost always behind commercial entities making seemingly irrational choices.
Yeah, which is completely fine. There's a major difference between:
A. Company destroys a book forever for training. Its scan is locked away forever in company records. In this case:
- This information is locked away in the improvisations of an LLM. It is no longer possible to directly access the information as written by the human being that authored it. This constitutes the loss of literary history, or at least loss of access to that history to the general public.
- The price of the book is no longer distinct from the general price of "inference". It becomes increasingly impossible to pay for specific information, instead you are charged by the meter for general machine inference, which doesn't even give you access to a specific text.
- The provenance of information is totally destroyed. This causes potentially unresolvable problems of authority and citation. If the original source is lost, how are we to know if a random LLM claim about an obscure topic or specific niche text is even true or just hallucinated?
B: Company uses freely available scanned copy of the text:
None of the issues above obtain, since anyone can still access the actual book. Most importantly, this reduces the power companies have to force everyone to continually pay for a derivative form of the book's information in perpetuity in the form of token costs.
I much prefer B.
B is illegal, and Anthropic ate a billion dollar fine for trying it, so you can’t even claim they don’t want to.
Then give up training on antiquated books. Why does an LLM aimed at providing utility for people living in 2026 need to be trained on rare (thus probably obscure) texts of yore in the first place?
Because these companies have no real strategy beyond trying to capture any and all information they possibly can to try and lock it away and charge the public for it in perpetuity.
Destroying history is a crime against humanity.
Why are these books "rare"? Because no one wants them. Why then are we up in arms over their destruction? These sensational headlines make it seem as though a copy of the Codex Sassoon 1053 is being destroyed, when in fact these are just obscure books that no one cares about.
The rhetoric on this topic is reminiscent of the rhetoric regarding data centers: some noxious combination of misinformation, misunderstanding, and sensationalism, wielded against technological progress.
It is quite disappointing to see them not using the type of machines that don't actually destroy the books, like, afaik, Internet Archive is using.
Using a few gas generators for a transitional period isn't great either, but effect of those is very temporary. I fear permanence in this individual deal with the devil made for speed and cost.
The problem is the choice made here: this is the world's 2 major governments choosing to give very large legal advantages to AI models, over actual people, in copyright. US and EU governments obviously want AI models to make everything from books to movies in the future, and this is a conscious choice both governments are making without consulting people.
Here's another question: The exact reasoning for copyright is made clear in the constitution: "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
What courts changed is failing to promote the progress of science and useful arts by destroying knowledge/art/books and access to those books, supposedly with the goal of maintaining market demand for those books. I mean this reasoning is so bad, so warped it could be used as James Bond villain humor.
Courts have failed to provide authors and inventors with exclusive rights, in fact they have destroyed a right authors effectively had. This decision goes against both the spirit and letter of the law, all because billionaires don't want to respect copyright anymore.
If you're going to do this, why have copyright at all? Can someone explain to me HOW you can explain that the constitution still supports this system?
But, of course, it gets worse. EU courts have decided the opposite, namely that without the author's permission you are not allowed to train an ML model on their texts. Ie. this becomes an additional right authors have, an additional thing authors can license (or not). Now that SOUNDS good, and you can bet the EU commission will be publishing about that. But it isn't good.
Of course the EU has demonstrated their usual do-nothing attitude. They have stated they are not going to do anything about people outside of the EU blatantly violating EU law, and let them profit inside the EU of violations of EU law, thereby destroying authors' income. As to the question why there is any need for EU law if you're not going to act on law violations ... no answer on that front.
To put it differently: why is chatgpt.com, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, ... not banned across the EU? Why are payments involving violating models allowed to go through, given that EU courts have sided with authors? What is the point of having EU laws at all?
But it's far worse: the EU commission is attempting to make their employees use a US model (chatGPT [2]), in violation of EU law, internally in their own organizations. Now from what I hear, they're failing at making people use it, WHILE paying US companies for illegal models.
I mean I hate what the US government has done, but the EU is far worse. They are officials, they are the institutions ... and their public claim to defend authors, their court judgements, their public stance ... is just an outright lie. I mean how else can you call this? 90% of the people involved here are lawyers, from the very top to the bottom rungs, all overwhelmingly lawyers. They know they are going against their own law, and doing it anyway. That is, at best, lying. The EU commission, even the courts and the EU's own bureaucracy will not follow the law internally, NOR are they making anyone else follow EU law!
The real effect of EU decisions: only Mistral, and other EU model providers are forbidden from, and punished for training on copyrighted data without permission. Everyone outside of the EU can just do it without permission and will not face any kind of consequences for that in the EU. EU companies (ie. hugging face) are hosting, for free, models in blatant violation of EU law.
Which is even worse than the US government stance in my opinion. EU has directly chosen for the worst possible of all combinations:
a) EU companies making ML models have to self-sabotage against their competition.
b) EU authors receive ZERO protection from the law. Not because the law doesn't support their case, but because the institutions whose only reason for existence is to enforce the law won't do their job. In fact THEY THEMSELVES violate EU authors rights.
Obviously, under these circumstances, AI model companies are going to outcompete musicians, authors, even movie studios. It's only a matter of time. And that is not a given, it is an explicit choice both the US and EU governments are making.
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/f0b8d4c3-51aa...
[2] in their source you can see what models they were likely using internally 2 years ago: https://github.com/openeuropa/gpt-at-ec-php-client
Ok . How trustworthy is the claim . It maid by a resource that on its own has problems with copyright.
Overall , smells like propaganda. How many books on earth you can openly buy that has practical “knowledge” value , not just historical one , and exist only in one physical implementation ( book ) . There were numbers of initiatives for a decade to digitalize all valuable knowledge.
It seems the initiative was secretive for a different reason . Buying a single book not allows you to distribute the content of the book , hence 1.5 billions fines.
Usually I personally not on copyright people side , but in this case you clearly see the system functioning. Know knows how the book business will look like in 10 years , but now book publishers doing their job by brining ai companies to court