We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
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@Epic_Null @Bredroll @JPummil @404mediaco And I guess it's also the reason why they'll never release the PDF or text files they now have in their possession. That, at least, would have been slightly comforting...
@jrdumas They do release it. It's in the agent and can be more or less extracted word-by-word. @Epic_Null @Bredroll @JPummil @404mediaco
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@blobster @404mediaco Just for clarity, ISBNs track each edition of a book; hardbacks and paperbacks will get different ISBNs.
So this is a sorta dumb way to do what they want to do.
(Eg, 0374275637 and 0374533555 are both Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, in hardback and paperback, respectively.) They may also be buying the same book with the ISBN-10 and ISBN-13, 978-0374533557 for the paperback.)
@adamshostack @blobster @404mediaco Both editions are being pulled from circulation and destroyed, though. Which I think might be the point.
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@adamshostack @blobster @404mediaco Both editions are being pulled from circulation and destroyed, though. Which I think might be the point.
@drwho @blobster @404mediaco Why would you bother scanning the same book twice?
I believe that most of the rare books being gathered are probably self-published works, which are both rare, and most of those are obscure for good reasons. (The recent growth of self-publish with Kindle changes the ratio somewhat.)
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@FediThing @Epic_Null @JPummil @404mediaco they are very much "do thing" and "ignore laws later"
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We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
@404mediaco
So they are not training AI, they want to be the gatekeeper of knowledge, with a fare.
We should buy books in bulk. -
@drwho @blobster @404mediaco Why would you bother scanning the same book twice?
I believe that most of the rare books being gathered are probably self-published works, which are both rare, and most of those are obscure for good reasons. (The recent growth of self-publish with Kindle changes the ratio somewhat.)
@adamshostack @blobster @404mediaco It gets one more copy out of circulation.
This feels uncomfortably like another step in the recapitulation of history.
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«These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all.»
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/I hope that booksellers raise prices for their rare books accordingly!
@nemobis I hope they stop fucking SELLING them to these cunts.
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We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
@404mediaco This just seems kind of desperate and futile. If their model can't perform well after it's been trained on every book that isn't out of print, what happens when they've scanned and destroyed every rare book too, and it still isn't good enough?
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We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
@404mediaco I saw a talk in 90s from the director of one of the copyright libraries (Cornell?) about the problems of preserving books. Some libraries chose de-acidification (slow, expensive) and some digitisation (destructive as we now all know).
- the question of what to digitise is not simple, it’s not just the text
- the purpose of digitisation is to make the content available to everyone
- presumably Amazon was unable to reach an agreement to access existing digitised content which is why it has to do its own? -
«These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all.»
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/I hope that booksellers raise prices for their rare books accordingly!
Some qualifications needed: https://mamot.fr/@nemobis/117111964050668486
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@JPummil @404mediaco they just cant be fucked to create nondestructive scanners, bunch of wankers
Create? The internet archive has been using nondestructive book scanners for years, it's nothing new.
It's also nowhere near as fast as just slicing off the spine and dropping the stack on a high speed ADF.
The machine is hungry. "Feed me, Seymour."
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@404mediaco I saw a talk in 90s from the director of one of the copyright libraries (Cornell?) about the problems of preserving books. Some libraries chose de-acidification (slow, expensive) and some digitisation (destructive as we now all know).
- the question of what to digitise is not simple, it’s not just the text
- the purpose of digitisation is to make the content available to everyone
- presumably Amazon was unable to reach an agreement to access existing digitised content which is why it has to do its own?@sf105 @404mediaco woah, steady on there: digitisation is not necessarily destructive, right? Whatever happened to scanning page by page?
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@Epic_Null @Bredroll @JPummil @404mediaco
I guess it's a fringe benefit that it will also gradually diminish the availability of reliable information, thus increasing the value of such information in our brave dystopian future. The motto can be "They who can afford books get to possess true knowledge."@GerardThornley @Epic_Null @Bredroll @JPummil @404mediaco everything old is new again
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@hakfoo @404mediaco Yeah. I'm not an expert in how training these models works, but I'd expect adding more input (to any already wildly massive set of training data) of old books that are inaccurate, outdated, or otherwise not generally of interest to modern readers will at best be a *very* marginal improvement to the model, and at worst bloat the model while make it produce more outdated and irrelevant information.
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@nemobis I hope they stop fucking SELLING them to these cunts.
@penguinflight @nemobis this
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We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
@404mediaco
Why do they destroy the book? -
@jrdumas They do release it. It's in the agent and can be more or less extracted word-by-word. @Epic_Null @Bredroll @JPummil @404mediaco
@lostgen
How can we do that?
@jrdumas @Epic_Null @Bredroll @JPummil @404mediaco -
@lostgen
How can we do that?
@jrdumas @Epic_Null @Bredroll @JPummil @404mediaco@AstroMancer5G @lostgen @jrdumas @Epic_Null @JPummil @404mediaco sometimes you can simply ask them
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We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
This must be stopped but wont be -
@sf105 @404mediaco woah, steady on there: digitisation is not necessarily destructive, right? Whatever happened to scanning page by page?
@misjavanlaatum @sf105 @404mediaco The only reason this is destructive is because they don't care about these texts. They're chopping the spines off to make the pages easy to toss on a scanner, just like any standard photocopier. Real preservation is done by hand, including scanning the pages and then correcting any distortion.
Like do you know the kind of books the best libraries have? Copies under lock and key, hundreds or thousands of years old, only accessible to be viewed by approved parties and only handled by a curator with white gloves, from bringing it out to turning the pages. If you suggested cutting the spine to scan one of those, they'd slap you back to when it was written!
