A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

jvanderbot

An instant and obvious good these companies could do is to digitize these books ala google books.

Cthulhu_

This is a good thing to a point, right? They sell heaps of stock, some old / outdated stock (like "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" as per the article), in bulk, at full price, no questions asked. Retailer's dreams come true. (I don't believe them being digitized for consumption by AI will impact book sales much, as ebooks, google books, project gutenberg, etc didn't either)

BLKNSLVR

Is this a second form of AI psychosis, as in AI training corpus psychosis? The need for all the content, Moar!! Feed me. Is this the Paperclip Maximiser in the form of the Training Material Maximiser? Will it be that, in the end, the lack of "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" was the cause of driving rule hallucinations in all previous models? Will this finally get OpenAI back in front of Anthropic? Hurrah! We found it!

vintermann

> with a focus only on books with an ISBN number, the identification system introduced in 1966 So it's not likely to be rare and precious books. It's things which are already in the Library of Congress or its many equivalents. If they're forced by laws to destroy the results of the scans after training on them, as some have implied, that's bad, on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep the scans, or even the transcripts, that's probably an improvement on the status quo, to be honest. I've had family members in the used books business, and trust me the fate of the vast majority of these books was always to be pulped.

ck2

if they are going to just violate copyright blatantly and price is no object why not just every textbook for every subject in high school and college?

paweladamczuk

> “Under German law scanning books – regardless of the purpose – would not be permissible and constitute a clear violation of copyright law,” Excuse me, what?

lluisantoni

I didn't think about this happening. It reminds me of the cross-border challenges with crypto. Each country has laws to control its author rights or money supply, but those are hard to enforce in the international setup.

khalic

Not exactly top journalism...

stockresearcher

In the case of English-language books, they’re just working to legitimize the stuff they already obtained via, um, dubious methods. Public domain books - no need to bother, they’ve scraped PG and any other source and can do with it what they like. Used booksellers should raise the price of used books that are of no interest to any real reader.

criddell

When I hear these stories of AI companies buying all the books, I think back to Kevin Kelly in 2008 or 2009. He talked about how books are less expensive than at any other time in history and easier to buy and that could change so it makes sense to buy a lot of books. > [...] I was near to the point of actually digitizing and getting rid of all my paper books. > I was that close about five years ago, but then I had an epiphany. I went to private library, and I realized that books were never as cheap as they are today. They never will be as cheap, and that there's some power about having these things in paper always available, no batteries, never obsolete, and that if you made a library now, you would never be able to make some of these libraries in 50 years, so I decided to keep and to cultivate this paper library as something that was going to be powerful in the future. I remember seeing photos of his library but can't find them anymore. This is the only thing I could find: https://colossus.com/article/flounder-mode/

VladVladikoff

I wish we had competent regulators. Force the scans to be purchased through an official repository. Save the scans and sell them to other companies who also want to train models. Force the companies to make all book requests through the official repository. Give some portion of money paid back to the publishers. This is a solvable problem.

Oarch

Can't these genius AI companies spend a few pennies to develop a non-destructive book scanner? What's the use of all this AI if they can't figure out this relatively simple task.

ilamont

Two American self published nonfiction authors I know reported large purchases of new books earlier this year, more than 50 units at a time, via Amazon. This is unusual because the books are not well known. Because the books do not sell well otherwise, they were very few used copies available for sale on Amazon. Here's my AI theory: someone is purchasing lots of books en masse to be packaged and sold for LLM training to multiple clients (not just a single company like Anthropic), but only scanning once and then reselling the scans while preserving a "chain of custody" proof that individual copies were purchased. Claude shot that idea down for reasons related to the intricacies of US first sale doctrine and copyright law, but had an ambiguous response when I proposed that it might be Chinese companies doing something similar for training AI models that are intended for possible resale to overseas markets.

palmotea

If the orders are that obvious, someone should create some print-on-demand slop and fill the order with it.

ButlerianJihad

The other day I watched a news clip from somewhere in Chicago, around 3 dumpsters full of books and learning materials. Apparently, a chain of charter schools had been merged into a public Unified School District (elementary). So when this branch of the school closed for the summer, officials went through their inventory and storage, and trashed a lot of stuff. Especially textbooks and novels that were deemed unfit by the new cirriculum they were adopting. There were other materials, including unused and still-wrapped items, markers, pens, etc. And an informal council of neighborhood women had gathered to weep and wail and bemoan the loss of all these precious materials. They were jumping in and sifting through the treasures of the dumpsters, trying to "rescue" as much as they could (this is dubious in legality, as the trash of a place does remain as its private property, and they may have been trespassing to do it.) And the news was so sympathetic about this tragic loss. But I have no sympathy for this. School materials are quickly outdated. The onward march of curriculum revisions demands that there is waste. No textbook lasts more than a few years, or even more than a semester in colleges, for sure. Also, here is a big point: storage costs. A school or any institution cannot afford to store worthless items or keep them around beyond their useful life. Storage space must be reclaimed. Furthermore, if you're sifting through unusuable stuff and you're on the clock, you may not have time to re-home donations and sell the good stuff. You just toss it and get on with business. And these women didn't seem to comprehend the ongoing costs of storing outdated stuff, and they were berating these schools for discarding good stuff, and crying injustice. And I think that intellectuals today worship books. The books are their gods and the libraries are their temples. And they are unduly outraged about damage to their poor, precious books, and they don't care what subject they are. Some of these rare books, folks, are software manuals that are 30 years old. Some of the rare books that AI ingests are also these outdated textbooks that nobody could use. So here is my attitude: most used-book stores today with a storefront are essentially hoarders with a business plan. They get a cat or two, they unleash their personal book-hoard onto commercial property, and then they struggle to keep their litterboxes empty and their doors open, because nobody wants books anymore . The disconnect here is that plenty of people are willing to cry injustice about destroying books, but are they willing to store them, curate a collection, catalog the books, read the books and share the books with others? I know that I am not. I converted to an electronic collection and I will not look back. I think others need to come to terms with that. It's not your books. Any bookstore receiving an order for 5,000 books needs to shut up, take the money, ship the books, and laugh all the way to the bank.

ChrisArchitect

Related: AI companies are shredding rare books https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738