This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
When Kojima scans feet, he does not destroy them.
AI is not my thing. I don't really appreciate these companies scanning everything under the sun, but this is a case where Google did it better. They used a custom scanner that didn't require books to be destroyed in order to scan.
That's what they tell you, but really they hire cheap labor working for pennies in poor countries flipping books. Do you really believe google has Infrastructure to scan all the books in the world in decent amount of time, because I have bridge to sell.
The fact that they destroyed the books is the most reprehensible thing to me. They could have resold or donated those books to libraries. Instead, they chose the ugliest and most wasteful thing they could possibly do. Despicable.
99.99999% of the time libraries don't want donated books. Honestly don't know if they ever want them (outside of genuinely rare/interesting ones, and even then). Their collections are usually meticulously curated and are basically the children of whomever is currently responsible for them. Libraries throw away books at a prodigious rate as they wear, or their circulation numbers drop, or because they just run out of space.
Honestly I have no real issue with people destroying (most) books. It's 2026 we have access to printers and presses, we can literally make more books on demand, and again for the V A S T majority of books that's more than good enough (again, not counting anything rare/valuable/interesting but also at that point they kinda cease to become just "books" as the value is more tied than the object itself than the text within)
What I have a massive issue with is them hoarding this information, and/or very, VERY, likely breaking any licensing the book may be under. And on top of that seemingly doing a fucking horrible job at actually creating something worthwhile from this massive waste of man-hours and resources.
It was physical books?
Well you don't "scan" a book that's already digital.
Oh. I do that every day
It's not secret, it was their defence when they got sued for copyright infringement. Instead of download all the books from Anna's archive like meta, they buy a copy, cut the binding, scan it, then destroy it. "We bought a copy for personal use then use the content for profit, it's not piracy"
we bought a copy for personao use, then use the content for profit, it's not privacy
So if I buy a song for personal use, then play that song all day in my club to thousands of people, it's not piracy, is what you're saying?
Because anthropic is full of shit and some weird ass mental gymnastics doesn't change anything
After this debacle, nobody can ever again shame me for piracy, let alone punish me for it
C'mon now. You're not nearly rich or influential enough to get away with that and you know it. Rules are for regular people, not the rich or mighty. Sheesh.
/s
Oh I know, but that why I'm getting more and more "Fuck the rules, fuck your laws, until they're the same for everybody"
If they reprinted those scanned books and sold them or even gave them away, they would be in more trouble than you would by sharing on limewire by dent of numbers. That isn't what they are doing with these books. In fact, they did get in trouble for using the books they didn't buy.
The two legal tiers are making themselves known again
“We bought a copy for personal use then use the content for profit, it’s not piracy”
That is an accurate view of how the court cases have ruled.
Downloading books without paying is illegal copyright infringement.
Using the data from the books to train an AI model is 'sufficiently transformative' and so falls under fair use exemptions for copyright protections.
Yet most AI models can recite entire Harry Potter books if prompted the right way, so that’s all bullshit.
That's quite a claim, I'd like to see that. Just give me the prompt and model that will generate an entire Harry Potter book so I can check it out.
I doubt that this is the case as one of the features of chatbots is the randomization of the next token which is done by treating the model's output vector as a, softmaxxed, distribution. That means that every single token has a chance to deviate from the source material because it is selected randomly. In order to get a complete reproduction it would be of a similar magnitude as winning 250,000 dice rolls in a row.
In any case, the 'highly transformative' standard was set in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., No. 13-4829 (2d Cir. 2015). In that case Google made digital copies of tens of millions of books and used their covers and text to make Google Books.
As you can see here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Sunlit_Man/uomkEAAAQBAJ where Google completely reproduces the cover and you can search the text of the book (so you could, in theory, return the entire book in searches). You could actually return a copy of a Harry Potter novel (and a high resolution scan, or even exact digital copy of the cover image).
The judge ruled:
Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Google’s commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use.
In cases where people attempt to claim copyright damages against entities that are training AI, the finding is essentially 'if they paid for a copy of the book then it is legal'. This is why Meta lost their case against authors, in that case they were sued for 1.) Pirating the books and 2.) Using them to train a model for commercial purposes. The judge struck 2.) after citing the 'highly transformative' nature of language models vs books.
That’s quite a claim, I’d like to see that.
That study is six months old. The one I linked is from three weeks ago.
This is the same study as the other reply, so same response.
No it isn’t. Read.
The claim was "Yet most AI models can recite entire Harry Potter books if prompted the right way, so that’s all bullshit."
In this test they did not get a model to produce an entire book with the right prompt.
Their measurement was considered successful if it could reproduce 50 tokens (so, less than 50 words) at a time.
The study authors took 36 books and divided each of them into overlapping 100-token passages. Using the first 50 tokens as a prompt, they calculated the probability that the next 50 tokens would be identical to the original passage. They counted a passage as “memorized” if the model had a greater than 50 percent chance of reproducing it word for word.
Even then, they didn't ACTUALLY generate these, they even admit that it would not be feasible to generate some of these 50 token (which is, at most 50 words, by the way) sequences:
the authors estimated that it would take more than 10 quadrillion samples to exactly reproduce some 50-token sequences from some books. Obviously, it wouldn’t be feasible to actually generate that many outputs.
The claim was “Yet most AI models can recite entire Harry Potter books if prompted the right way, so that’s all bullshit.”
In this test they did not get a model to produce an entire book with the right prompt.
For context: These two sentences are 46 Tokens/210 Characters, as per https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer.
50 tokens is just about two sentences. This comment is about 42 tokens itself.
Reminder, this includes "Morning Glory Milking Farm" and similar books.
I'm sure that will destroy any intelligence.
All of this, so some hustlebro can make his own AI slop blog polluting the internet, so instead of the actual information, you get an AI hallucinated one from googling.
People who are okay with this are absolutely disgusting. Some shitty AI company wastes a fuckton of our collective resources resources to build and run their AI data centers, and if that wasn't bad enough they generate a fuckton of unnecessary waste to train the goddamn thing. Fuck capitalism.
They make everything more expensive. Power, water, ram, storage, and now the used book market will shoot up in cost as millions of books are shredded.
AI data centers are cancer to our world - consumes massive energy and water, sucks all the processors and RAM from the market, and raises their price for us. Not to mention environmental impact.
I assume "destructively scan" means to cut the spine off so they lie flat, and that one copy of each book will be scanned? Isn't that a pretty normal way of doing it in cases where the prints aren't rare?
Is this an opportunity to self-publish my own book for $100k per copy and be guaranteed one sale?
Article is not available without registering. As for the title, "destructive" book scanning means you cut off the binding and put the pages in a scanner which easily flips through them and takes the pictures. If you're not scanning rare old books, this is a perfectly reasonable way to do it, because setting up a scanner for a normal book and manually turning each page to scan it takes a long time (Internet Archive has videos on how they do it, very nice and impressive, and logical since their original mission was scanning old public domain stuff, i.e. published before 1930 or so). If Anthropic will actually legally buy all those thousands upon thousands of books, that will be a pleasant precedent for an AI company.
Although I very much doubt that random uncritically gathered textual material can "teach their AI tool how to write well". They're still pushing for more and more training data, even though it's clear actual advancement will have to happen (if it can happen) through more refined usage of / training on the data.
Write a book where the spine is a required piece of the story for its understanding or completion.
Kind of like how House of Leaves is best enjoyed with the actual book.
I read one once where being able to slightly see through the pages was a key part of the plot
