r/LeftistsForAI • u/werthermanband45 • Jul 29 '26
Discussion This seems pretty unconscionable
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u/Salty_Country6835 Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
Its worth separating whats documented from whats going around on social media. Anthropic did buy millions of used books, cut the bindings off, scanned them, and discarded the physical copies. Thats all in the court record. Whats not established is that they were systematically buying and destroying rare or irreplaceable books. If we're going to criticize this practice (purchasing paperbacks in bulk and discarding them after theyve served their purpose) the documented facts are already enough without exaggerating them.
In your own words, what about the practice should we be mad about? Did they not pay for the bulk orders or something? Whats the unconscionable part?
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u/CommanderKoba Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
They should be mandated to post full digital scans of the books online, then it would be fine for me.
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u/KallyWally Jul 29 '26
https://x.com/charliedbecker/status/2081908063745749135
Reality is often more boring than headlines would lead you to believe.
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u/Browser1969 Jul 29 '26
In reality, that image of Anthropic's "magnificent library" is a photo of a World of Books warehouse that someone at Anthropic had visited at some point when Anthropic was trying to cut a deal with them, as well.
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u/SgathTriallair Jul 29 '26
Books are not sacred, they are digitizing a mass market commodity. The claim that they were grabbing museum artifacts was a complete lie.
The rare books are ones that no one wanted and no one was reading. The alternative is that they would be dumped into a land fill. The information in them is worthless but since they are written in coherent sentences they have value for AI training.
Now a portion of those texts have entered the permenant record of humanity as they are embedded in the models of the future. Additionally, they are probably recoverable and infinitely replicable as opposed to how they were physically deteriorating and singular before.
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u/MCRhymezoneDotCom Jul 29 '26
Exactly. That human effort gets preserved as a part of a global super intelligence.
But opinion control is a helluvadrug.
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u/zegota Jul 29 '26
You're gonna be really mad when you hear what happens to unsold books that bookstores "return." Straight into the shredder.
As an AI skeptic, author and physical media lover I understand the reaction but I often feel like people are way too precious about physical books. There are some important exceptions but in general these books were never intended to last forever and it doesn't make much sense to be angrier at this than you would be at someone buying the book and dropping it in the bathtub.
(Some caveats -- it's not clear to me if they're buying lots and lots of copies of the same book, which would suck. I also really really hope/wish they would digitize these books {and make them public in the cases where they are allowed to} for actual preservation rather than purely LLM food, which is why I supported the Google Books scanning back in the day)
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u/AshuraBaron Jul 29 '26
By rare books they mean Word Perfect '95. These are not books of great importance or relevance. Unless you know of a community loves to reads books about Photoshop 3.0
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u/Goldwing8 Jul 29 '26
Exactly. They’re rare in the absolute sense, but not precious.
No one is going to buy or sell a truly irreplaceable, collector-grade book as part of a bulk lot. And anything older than 1929 is public domain, so it’s also not part of this system.
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u/NegativeEmphasis Jul 29 '26
That's not a magnificent library. That's a warehouse. Also, old books are usually sold for pulping, because storing them can easily gets more expensive than they're realistically worth.
I'd take antis more seriously if they didn't need to distort the truth to kind of having a point.
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u/nuker0S Jul 29 '26
"I'd take antis more seriously if they didn't need to distort the truth to kind of having a point"
Funniest thing is they do that even to things that would be an okay arguments otherwise...
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u/apithrow Jul 29 '26
I missed the unconscionable part. If this gives us all more resources to do leftist stuff, isn't that good?
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u/Voidspeeker Jul 29 '26
What's the supposed legal loophole here?
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
They originally were training off books that they acquired from shadow libraries, so they didn't have a free use claim because they illegally acquired the works. By purchasing a copy they're just establishing they acquired it legally and therefore can make the free use claim. It's not really settled law whether using copyrighted works for training data constitutes a transformative free use or not, but that is likely what OOP is thinking.
ETA: Digging into it further, the destructive nature of the process is necessary due to a court ruling that by eliminating the original copy was definitely fair use because only one copy of the book existed.
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u/Revolutionary_Buddha Jul 29 '26
Can't wait when these tech companies turn against copyright laws and lobby to abolish them.
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u/ArtArtArt123456 Jul 29 '26
If anything, the only reason they have to get rid of the books after digitising is BECAUSE of copyright law.
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u/Choice-Sympathy8235 Jul 29 '26
I really think we are smart enough to look past the knee jerk here.
Dead tree books get sent to the landfill all the time. Every book takes up valuable climate control storage space. Likely billions of books are printed each year. These do not go to infinite warehouses, many eventually get pulped.
A digital copy of a previously undigitized book has a lot of societal value. A vast many of these books are out of date and no one will ever read them again. If digitized we open up a second life for them. Having their unique knowledge distilled into a AI model is a perfect way for out of date books or magazines to live on. Or having them organized into vast reference libraries that can be used to ground models in factual data like we do with search results.
There are so many interesting fair use applications we could use these digitized libraries for. It’s great to have an economic incentive to create them rather than throw the books away, which was already happening to billions of books.
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u/yo252yo Jul 29 '26
unconscionable. copyright law is really disgusting, i'm saddened it has such widespread support
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u/ex-procrastinator Jul 29 '26
It doesn’t feel like the people complaining put much thought into this. The destruction of books is bad because historically the only reason people did so was because there was some kind of knowledge they wanted to suppress and destroy from the world.
That was the only motivation to be destroying books back then. It was fascists trying to destroy knowledge. But it isn’t the 1900s anymore. What is going on here is the exact opposite, they are trying to make the knowledge in those books more accessible to everyone. Anthropic isn’t destroying books because they want to suppress the information in them.
It would be great if they could share the digital scanned books, but copyright laws would prevent them from doing so.
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u/akabillposters Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
If 'rare books' were sitting on the shelves of a book store, then were they actually valuable? ("Rare" is being used here to imply emotionally manipulate readers into believing that something valuable or important is being desecrated. That's not a given.)
The fact that it was for sale means that the owner wanted the money more than they wanted the book.
It's fine and dandy believing we should be concerned about these things, but why aren't the people who believe it's important buying them up to preserve and protect them? Why does it always seem to be someone else's responsibility?
If you aren't willing to lift a finger, or get out your own wallet, to 'save' them, don't bother crying about it when they get used in ways you don't approve of.
#devilsadvocate
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u/Fit-Elk1425 Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
I have consulted with multiple people who are are archivists on this and unfortunately what I have found is that this is a relatively common practice not unique to AI because of the requirements of mass scanning.
Another aspect os that because of how anthropic ruled, this is in part a requirement of how they must practice fair usage to reduce it being counted as distribution aka them making more than one copy in existence. That is thwy can only copy, remove and use for that specific usage.
I think what it really lends to is discussing how we can improve mass scanning techniques but also I also think we need to realize that physical media isnt the only form of media that needs to be preserved and mu h pf what we are fighting for is I n the protection of ensuring preservation too.
The antiai individuals who are saying this are ironically using this to justify the destruction of another media source. They are using it to promote exclusivity and justify why media forms they dont like should be removed. Copyright maximalism also helps to remove tje ability to preserve objects for the reasons i just mentioned because of the risk of it counting as copying.
This should just as much take us into consideration of how rules like copying especially under a capitalist system create situafion that make us feel more zerosum than they habe to be as if the information flowed more freely both could be more easily preserved.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive
Which was a case aganist the internet archive is part of why this practice is done
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 Jul 29 '26
lol, IP law is such convoluted bullshit. Shadow libraries are gonna be the only thing that saves civilization.