- 28 minutes
Why? So their LLM’s can ingest the books and use them to churn out more AI slop?
- Deacon@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
You can only stave off model collapse so long.
It’s only a matter of time before most of the data going in to LLMs came out of one too.
Like I’m not even good at math or anything, much less computer science, but that seems obvious and inevitable to me.
Maybe someone smarter than me can chime in.
27 minutesIt’s kind of sort of already happening. Emdashes are fragments of it, a token saving strategy introduced by already trained on old books in their data sources. Model collapse is inevitable.
- FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish1 hour
Yeah, pretty awful on so many different levels.
Brilliant decision to train their models on the worst content to begin with.
- 7 hours
Bruh, this is literally like scientists scavenging metal from shipwrecks that predate the era of nuclear bomb testing, cause they need steel that isn’t contaminated by nuclear fallout for certain measuring equipment 😵💫😵💫
Great analogy for the shit we’re currently saturating our digital world with
- 2 hours
A guy I used to know who would go to estate sales looking for blacksmithing equipment once told me the market for old metalworking stuff is disappearing because too much stuff is being bought by companies én masse for this reason.
I don’t know if I believe that companies are buying small lot auctions and estate sales for old anvils, but he was sure convinced.
I like to joke I’m sitting on a pile of cash because my anvil isn’t radioactive. (it’s not a very good joke, but it carries some weight!)
- 2 hours
According to Wikipedia, while a market for old, low-background steel was real phenomenon for a few decades, that’s pretty much over.
World anthropogenic background radiation … began to fall in 1963 … and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels.[9] This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature.
So you may consider your friend’s estate-sale theory in light of that time-line.
but it carries some weight
Did you know about [email protected]?
- 2 hours
It sounds plausible enough, considering we apparently have physicists out there using lead from roman archeological artifacts in their contraptions 😅 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-lead-physics-archaeology-controversy/
- AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
Reminds me of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, who sketched ancient artifacts in his personal notebook and then destroyed the originals.
- crusa187@lemmy.mlEnglish6 hours
We also have no guarantee these books will be available at a later date in these digitized formats, nor that they won’t be altered to fit certain narratives which is of course trivial to do with digital copies. At a minimum these need public verifiable checksums to be relied upon.
I don’t like this and don’t trust it one bit.
These AI companies already showed their hand in trying to corner the PC component market with an end goal of users no longer being able to own their own PCs. Now they’re potentially trying to do this with all written recorded information.
How long until Altman’s Firemen show up at your door to burn your books?
- morto@piefed.socialEnglish3 hours
They even hve an economical incentive to destroy the books, because by doing so, they will get the data and prevent the competition from getting it for them
- 3 hours
Anyone who is not in favor of killing them at this point needs to die too. Or is just out of a coma.
- 3 hours
Silicon valley needs to burn
I mean it’s California so it just like does that so.etimes, but I mean the residents. The residents need to burn.
- Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
More that they are destroying the books in the process of digitizing them, they basically cut the pages out of the book and feed them into a scanner with a document feeder attached.
- T156@lemmy.worldEnglish1 hour
It’s worth pointing out that this is standard practice when digitising books in most places, if they’re not irreplaceable. Mass-produced books would fall under that category.
Turning the page and photographing what’s there is really only done for some books, which you can’t afford to destroy.
- Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish7 minutes
From what I’ve read previously, they’re destroying all the books, regardless if they’re historic and one-of-a-kind or a mass produced paperback.
Is it really destroying though? They’re digitizing them, and publishers still have the digital copies ready to print more at any time. So it’s not like they’re destroying the texts, they’re just shifting them.
Nobody complained when Google did this over a decade ago 🤷
When you say they’re “destroying the books” you make it sound like they’re erasing one of the last known copy of some important work when in reality, most of these books were purchased in bulk from bookstores and libraries that were planning on discarding them anyway.
Almost all these books were either headed to the dump or the recycling center. They’re just being digitized on the way.
Almost all these books were either headed to the dump or the recycling center.
My wife works at a law firm that contracts with “Books By The Yard”, which provides books purely for office aesthetics. For a few hundred bucks you can plaster a bookshelf full of material nobody will ever read, because they’re such a commodity.
It’s so crazy to see people ingesting this news from the conspiracy-brain perspective of “The AI companies are stealing all the knowledge!” without recognizing the more pressing reality of decade upon decade of publisher overproduction, resulting in a total devaluing of physical media for its academic importance.
Imagine going into hysterics because a warehouse full of shitty airport books went up in smoke, like it’s the Library of Alexandra that just burned down.
- 5 hours
When they destroy the physical copy they remove them from the antique stores market which often rely on circulation.
Edit: Also physical copies don’t require electricity, a device and internet access plus they are something you can own.
If you think any more than 0.1% of these physical books would ever have ended up in antique bookstores, you’re dreaming.
Think about how many books out there are things like Donald Trump’s biography, or pointless drivel from non-experts, self-help books that tell people to down “essential oils”, old editions of programming books, or just plain shitty fiction that never sold much in the first place.
It’s ok to throw trash away! Really!
physical copies don’t require electricity
Good luck reading by candle light.
I guess you must live in that part of Alaska where it’s night time for half the year and don’t have daylight.
More just the part of Alaska where I work most of the daylight hours and get my reading in before bed.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish5 hours
At least digital storage prices have only been going down in recent months, right? /s
- Hawke@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
Digitized for private consumption.
Nobody cares when Google did this or when archive.org does this, because they’re sharing the results with the world. (Idiotic shortsighted lawsuits from the authors guild notwithstanding)
- SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish7 hours
in this case they often are actually destroying them. they take them apart, beause it’s easier to scan than to use a proper book scanner
- Hawke@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
Yeah that’s true of Google as well I believe. I think Archive is more careful, but I’m sure some books get damaged in the process there as well.
I imagine they were talking about destruction in a practical sense. Disassembling the book and scanning it like that is faster and cheaper than purpose build book scanning machines.
Additionally, court documents indicate they generally just throw them away afterwards. So the knowledge is retained, but that book is destroyed.
https://tagteam.harvard.edu/hub_feeds/3415/feed_items/14341220
- 6 hours
The knowledge is retained and owned by a private corporation who now does not have to share what may have been a still under copyright, but now the corporation owns it? Make it make sense.
Yes. That does make sense.
If you bought a book, scanned it—destroying it in the process—then read it on your computer, that would be completely acceptable.
Why is it wrong when a corporation does the same thing?
They’re not claiming ownership of the copyrights, just ownership of a copy. Which is how copyright works.
- WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
Make it make sense
A robber barron class of psychopaths are running the whole damn show!
I’m waiting for the day when desperate LLM companies start paying people to post real human content, only for those people to just ask ChatGPT to do it.
- 3 hours
This is already happening.
They are paying people bottom market rates to generate unique written content and people are just having AI write it for them.
- TheBlackLounge@lemmy.zipEnglish5 hours
Supposedly the people paid to rate responses are already using AI
- pdxfed@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
“now you only posted 4 times today Jenny, do you just want to do the minimum?”
Big AI mostly switched to synthetic training data anyway. The books they’re digitizing are being used to gather knowledge, not writing styles or logic (mostly).
As in, when you ask ChatGPT how long some book is, it can just go check (if it’s in the database). It’s also useful if you ask about that book or about knowledge contained in that book. It’ll even reference books now (if you demand that in your prompt).
It’s not the same as earlier LLM tech which relied on scanned text to figure out how to respond to any given prompt (from a language standpoint). The “language” part of LLMs is a solved problem now (thanks to the synthetic training). At least for English 🤷
- AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
The article quotes a post from ISBNdb saying the issue is model collapse from training on synthetic data.
That’s like saying, “they had some failure modes from the synthetic data, so they should just obviously stop trying forever.”
They’ll just fix the edge cases and move on. Like any programming task.
- SparroHawc@piefed.worldEnglish7 hours
Nice that they’re actually buying them this time instead of just downloading torrents of book collections again.
- Kühlschrank@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
I imagine they already burned through literally all of the torrentable books
- HexesofVexes@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
Ah fuck… No wonder old maths texts are a nightmare to get hold of recently…
They first crashed RAM prices, the SSDs, and now books too?! Oh fuck 😭
