Books are seemingly more expensive than ever but paradoxically declining in material and substantial quality (i.e., are poorly edited and printed). Buying used books is just good financial sense.
Yes it is probably due to AI training. The clue is that it's bulk orders driving the increase.
The annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search.
One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.
It's because of American law. If it were sane, everyone could share. Instead, if there are 25 copies of a book in existence, 25 different AI companies could buy them and pulp them. Woe be it if some company's lawyer has decided that they need to buy a new copy for each model they train.
Otherwise, I think it's good that books are being scanned. Please, AI companies, keep all of the scans, clean them so they can be compressed tightly, back them up to an insane degree, encourage your employees to make their own archives and share them with their friends, and leak them to libgen, annas-archive, etc.
Whatever judge ruled that it was legal to scan and use books if and only if you DESTROY a copy of the book was truly a moron. The law gets bent by judges all the time to be practical and fair, they should have used this opportunity to give a more sane ruling.
What's the point in attacking the judge? Judges just apply the law as they find it, by analyzing the wording of the legislation and any binding precedents from previous cases. The judge is only a "moron" if they stated a point of law which is actually wrong (wrong in the sense of being contrary to the law, not wrong in the sense that you don't like it), and even then "moron" would be a pretty harsh assessment unless it's a glaring mistake. It's often the case that the law isn't obvious or entirely clear and judges have to make their best effort to work out the correct meaning. Even then, their job is to apply what they think the law intended to say, not what they think is morally the best interpretation.
If you really must call someone a moron, you should direct it at the legislators who made the law (or left it sufficiently unclear) which resulted in the judge's conclusion.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] threadThe annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search.
One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.
Otherwise, I think it's good that books are being scanned. Please, AI companies, keep all of the scans, clean them so they can be compressed tightly, back them up to an insane degree, encourage your employees to make their own archives and share them with their friends, and leak them to libgen, annas-archive, etc.
If you really must call someone a moron, you should direct it at the legislators who made the law (or left it sufficiently unclear) which resulted in the judge's conclusion.
https://annas-archive.gl/donate
I don't see how these companies are not already bankrupt given how much they subsidize
AI companies are shredding rare books
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738