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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna’s Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record.
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Gotta feed the machine.
I mean, these companies are speed-running atrocity after atrocity toward the end of humanity. There is no way this AI bubble ends without mass graves… not if we let them continue to decide how things go.
Non-profit Copyright Infringement (a.k.a. Piracy) is a Moral Duty, IMHO.
the problem is also that in “modern” books (like 50s, 60s, 70’s and so on) these books themselves also tend to decay and just crumble after a time, due to some sort of process they do to the paper to create it. In order to truly preserve them you’d almost need like some sort of conditioned environment with the same temperature, no sunlight, stuff like that. Its a shame really, then again nothing in the world was meant to last forever.
I encourage the conversion of books to digital formats, it is just that the method here is shortsighted. The physical copies can be useful if something goes wrong, and can be appreciated by some humans after the digital archival has redundancy.
true, if history has taught us anything its that archiving is important. and digital archiving is also very important. its just that well there could be a future were people don’t even know how to read out all these digital devices anymore. and then they’ll be back in the stoneage.
You may be fascinated by CollapseOS
Setting aside the bad ethics of destroying rare books, the capitalist in me is very confused: Wouldn’t you put in some effort to save the rare books, if only to sell them?
If you already have the data inside the books, you can put them up for auction, donating to libraries, and so forth. You get money, a reputation for ensuring that they find a home, have a physical backup if the storage drives fail, and so on.
…my inner capitalist is disillusioned. 🤨
The easiest, fastest, cheapest way to get good automated scans of every page of a book is to slice the spine off.
In some interpretation of copyright law, it’s considered a “transfer” rather than a “copy” if you destroy the physical original. (Ignore all subsequent copying of the digital version.)
Actually old and rare books are probably public domain, so that’s not an argument.
Also, most of the books they scan/destroy are low quality trashy novels that won’t even sell at thrift stores. But as they are written by humans it is still useful for training models.
Copyright nowadays is up from the original “25 years” to around “Death of author + 50 years” (a bit more in the US) which is almost always more than 100 years in total, so those “old” books are nowaday almost a century old or more.
(Well, sorta, if their copyright expired BEFORE new legislation was introduced to extend copyright length as has been regularly done for almost a century, those works didn’t got back under copyright after the extension, and as at least in the US copyright extension legislation was seeming driven by wanting to keep the first Mickey Mouse cartoon under copyright, at least in the US said “old” out of copyright books will mainly be from before 1928).
Not if the endgame is to control all Information and, if beneficial for you, to modify sources with no way to prove something different
There is a glaringly obvious issue with this article that I see a lot of people in the comments seem to have missed:
Only one copy of any given book exists The pretense to this entire thing is that AI companies are destroying the books both because of the process used AND to prevent competitors from accessing the book. There is more than ONE copy of that book. If you buy a book, that doesn’t prevent me from also buying that book. You can not like AI for a number of reasons, but this is just stupid.
NOTE: If destroying the book actually prevented competitors from accessing it, that means that all of these AI companies are only going out on the weekends to used bookstores looking for good deals on second hand books.
There are plenty of books out there that don’t have many copies.
If you can purchase a book at a bookstore, then it can be assumed there are sufficient copies in production. They aren’t buying rare books here.
They aren’t buying rare books here.
That’s exactly what I’ve heard they’re doing.
The best time to start was more than a year ago, the next best time to start is today.
How does one find the official Anna’s? I found a few that were shady af and were very obviously not real. Tor and i2p addresses are fine, too.
their wikipedia article should have the current domains, I was told before here
I wish I had a book scanner, I’d be digitizing every book on my shelf. I already have a good chunk of my forgotten realms stuff digitally (don’t ask where I got it) but there’s still a ton more I need, and I’ve finally gotten my spouse to read and their collection is getting almost as big as my own. There’s probably over 1,000 books between all my immediate family members.
I’m with you, mate! I want so badly to build one of these!
https://www.diybookscanner.org/en/intro.html
http://oldcomputer.info/hacks/diyscan/index.htm
https://www.diagtpro.com/scanning-made-easy-a-step-by-step-guide-to-building-a-diy-book-scanner/
https://www.instructables.com/Book-Scanner-Low-cost-easy-to-make-1000-pages-an-h/
God the future is depressing
It doesn’t have to be, just structurally people are incentivized to do this
And people would rather demand change just because they say so, versus changing any of the incentives involved.
We could just make these companies share their scans. Then it would only affect one (1) copy of every published work. There are no ongoing commercial concerns for a book that’s been out-of-print for thirty years.
The only book I have that might be worth scanning is Knight’s Modern Seamanship 13th edition from ~1960 (was provided to my mom as part of a record-finding request regarding my grandpa’s WW2 deployments, I have no idea why), but if my time in the Navy is any indication, its one of those things that was given during basic to all going through basic (I have a modern copy from 2007 as well), so idk if its a valuable contribution. Probably already in the archive.
I also have a copy of the joy of cooking from the 70s, and a Betty Crocker cookbook from the 50s, but I assume that’s also already in there. Plus some language textbooks and the like, some bird and geology books, some limnology books, etc. the sort of thing that’s definitely already there.
I’m willing to scan them, however a person does that, but I’m not willing to destroy them. The old books came from my grandparents, through my mom, and all of those people are long dead. Everything else is from my own education and I use them for reference.
There’s a ton of ancient documents and books that don’t have copies of them (Chinese stuff for example that wasn’t all digitized), please tell me data centers aren’t seriously trying to take those as well and burn those as well
I think its a solid bet to say that if there’s a price on it, data centers will pay.
That being said, China is famously protective of their shit. So if its in their hands, its probably safe.
Job Opening: Now Hiring
Description: Destroying the Library of Alexandria
Compensation: Minimum Wage ($7.25 per hour) plus free daily lunch (2 pizza slices)
Experience Required: Masters Degree in English, and at least 5 years experience working at a library or book store
Cover Letter: Please include a personal essay describing how destroying books gives you a personal sense of fulfillment
What if I just like to eat paper?
Obviously destroying books is the perfect job for me as it brings me closer to my german ancestors
AI companys would probably like this. Easier for them to get data.
Even if they do just end up using AA to build their data, at least WE get to also have a copy instead of it being destroyed.
Did you not even read the post? They ARE doing this and then destroying originals.
Nothing will stop corpos from getting data.
But we can prevent them from paywalling access by having archives of our own.
Hmm, “archive of our own” sounds like a great name for something.
Eh, it’s a bit long.
We should make it shorter, like with an acronym or something.
Well, clearly AOOO is the right choice here.
Anna’s is the real deal
We could probably recruit the special collections departments at university libraries to help since they’re already equipped, but how do we identify and procure what needs to be preserved? I kind of assumed most books were already being digitized. As a student I worked on a project digitizing old newspapers and entering basic metadata.
I sometimes try and track down rare books from the 20th century, sometiems less than 75 years old, only to.run into the problem that the only copy is in a rare books collection in a Canadian university or some shit like that
