In the filings, Anthropic states, as reported by the Washington Post: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
The fact that they destroyed the books is the most reprehensible thing to me. They could have resold or donated those books to libraries. Instead, they chose the ugliest and most wasteful thing they could possibly do. Despicable.
It was physical books?
Well you don’t “scan” a book that’s already digital.
Oh. I do that every day
It’s not secret, it was their defence when they got sued for copyright infringement. Instead of download all the books from Anna’s archive like meta, they buy a copy, cut the binding, scan it, then destroy it. “We bought a copy for personal use then use the content for profit, it’s not piracy”
we bought a copy for personao use, then use the content for profit, it’s not privacy
So if I buy a song for personal use, then play that song all day in my club to thousands of people, it’s not piracy, is what you’re saying?
Because anthropic is full of shit and some weird ass mental gymnastics doesn’t change anything
After this debacle, nobody can ever again shame me for piracy, let alone punish me for it
C’mon now. You’re not nearly rich or influential enough to get away with that and you know it. Rules are for regular people, not the rich or mighty. Sheesh.
/s
If they reprinted those scanned books and sold them or even gave them away, they would be in more trouble than you would by sharing on limewire by dent of numbers. That isn’t what they are doing with these books. In fact, they did get in trouble for using the books they didn’t buy.
The two legal tiers are making themselves known again
“We bought a copy for personal use then use the content for profit, it’s not piracy”
That is an accurate view of how the court cases have ruled.
Downloading books without paying is illegal copyright infringement.
Using the data from the books to train an AI model is ‘sufficiently transformative’ and so falls under fair use exemptions for copyright protections.
Yet most AI models can recite entire Harry Potter books if prompted the right way, so that’s all bullshit.
That’s quite a claim, I’d like to see that. Just give me the prompt and model that will generate an entire Harry Potter book so I can check it out.
I doubt that this is the case as one of the features of chatbots is the randomization of the next token which is done by treating the model’s output vector as a, softmaxxed, distribution. That means that every single token has a chance to deviate from the source material because it is selected randomly. In order to get a complete reproduction it would be of a similar magnitude as winning 250,000 dice rolls in a row.
In any case, the ‘highly transformative’ standard was set in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., No. 13-4829 (2d Cir. 2015). In that case Google made digital copies of tens of millions of books and used their covers and text to make Google Books.
As you can see here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Sunlit_Man/uomkEAAAQBAJ where Google completely reproduces the cover and you can search the text of the book (so you could, in theory, return the entire book in searches). You could actually return a copy of a Harry Potter novel (and a high resolution scan, or even exact digital copy of the cover image).
The judge ruled:
Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Google’s commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use.
In cases where people attempt to claim copyright damages against entities that are training AI, the finding is essentially ‘if they paid for a copy of the book then it is legal’. This is why Meta lost their case against authors, in that case they were sued for 1.) Pirating the books and 2.) Using them to train a model for commercial purposes. The judge struck 2.) after citing the ‘highly transformative’ nature of language models vs books.
That’s quite a claim, I’d like to see that.
That study is six months old. The one I linked is from three weeks ago.
This is the same study as the other reply, so same response.
No it isn’t. Read.
The claim was “Yet most AI models can recite entire Harry Potter books if prompted the right way, so that’s all bullshit.”
In this test they did not get a model to produce an entire book with the right prompt.
Their measurement was considered successful if it could reproduce 50 tokens (so, less than 50 words) at a time.
The study authors took 36 books and divided each of them into overlapping 100-token passages. Using the first 50 tokens as a prompt, they calculated the probability that the next 50 tokens would be identical to the original passage. They counted a passage as “memorized” if the model had a greater than 50 percent chance of reproducing it word for word.
Even then, they didn’t ACTUALLY generate these, they even admit that it would not be feasible to generate some of these 50 token (which is, at most 50 words, by the way) sequences:
the authors estimated that it would take more than 10 quadrillion samples to exactly reproduce some 50-token sequences from some books. Obviously, it wouldn’t be feasible to actually generate that many outputs.
The claim was “Yet most AI models can recite entire Harry Potter books if prompted the right way, so that’s all bullshit.”
In this test they did not get a model to produce an entire book with the right prompt.
For context: These two sentences are 46 Tokens/210 Characters, as per https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer.
50 tokens is just about two sentences. This comment is about 42 tokens itself.
Just give me the prompt and model that will generate an entire Harry Potter book so I can check it out.
Start with the first line of the book (enough that it won’t be confused with other material in the training set…) the LLM will return some of the next line. Feed it that and it will return some of what comes next, rinse, lather, repeat - researchers have gotten significant chunks of novels regurgitated this way.
Start with the first line of the book (enough that it won’t be confused with other material in the training set…) the LLM will return some of the next line. Feed it that and it will return some of what comes next, rinse, lather, repeat - researchers have gotten significant chunks of novels regurgitated this way.
This doesn’t seem to be working as you’re describing.
That’s what I read in the article - the “researchers” may have had other interfaces they were using. Also, since that “research” came out, I suspect the models have compensated to prevent the appearance of copying…
I’m running the dolphin model locally, it’s an abliterated model which means that it has been fine tuned to not refuse any request and since it is running locally, I also have access to the full output vectors like the researchers used in the experiment.
I replied to another comment, in detail, about the Meta study and how it isn’t remotely close to ‘reproduces a full book when prompted’
In they study they were trying to reproduce 50 token chunks (token is less than a word, so under 50 words) if given the previous 50 tokens. They found that in some sections (around 42% of the ones they tried) they were able to reproduce the next 50 tokens better than 50% of the time.
Reproducing some short sentences from some of a book some of the time is insignificant compared to something like Google Books who will copy the exact snippet of text from their 100% perfect digital copy and show you exact digital copies of book covers, etc.
This research is of interest to the academic study AI in the subfields focused on understanding how models represent data internally. It doesn’t have any significance when talking about copyright.
You may not have photographic memory, but dozens of flesh and blood humans do. Are they “illegal” to exist? They can read a book then recite it back to you.
Can’t believe I have to point this out to you but machines are not human beings
Point is: some humans can do this without a machine. If a human is assisted by a machine to do something that other humans can do but they cannot - that is illegal?
Those are human beings not machines. You are comparing a flesh and blood person to a suped up autocorrect program that is fed data and regurgites it back.
Reminder, this includes “Morning Glory Milking Farm” and similar books.
I’m sure that will destroy any intelligence.
deleted by creator
All of this, so some hustlebro can make his own AI slop blog polluting the internet, so instead of the actual information, you get an AI hallucinated one from googling.
People who are okay with this are absolutely disgusting. Some shitty AI company wastes a fuckton of our collective resources resources to build and run their AI data centers, and if that wasn’t bad enough they generate a fuckton of unnecessary waste to train the goddamn thing. Fuck capitalism.
They make everything more expensive. Power, water, ram, storage, and now the used book market will shoot up in cost as millions of books are shredded.
AI data centers are cancer to our world - consumes massive energy and water, sucks all the processors and RAM from the market, and raises their price for us. Not to mention environmental impact.
I assume “destructively scan” means to cut the spine off so they lie flat, and that one copy of each book will be scanned? Isn’t that a pretty normal way of doing it in cases where the prints aren’t rare?
Probably, yes. I think there’s a copyright reason behind destroying the book?
Not copyright, as much as if the book isn’t precious, it’s easier to do that, feed the loose pages into the scanner, and then get an intact one if you want it, compared to the additional expense of having to build and program a machine to carefully turn the pages and photograph what’s inside, or the time it would need by comparison.
It just doesn’t work if the spine is still there.
Well spine scanners exist but they are pretty expensive and way slower
Or throw the book into a shredder connected to a scanner that combines the page puzzle internally.
Yes, but I don’t think they’re checking what they’re ingesting super hard, especially at those volumes.
I can’t imagine that scanning ‘every book in the world’ would require filtering, unless a ham sandwich or Nintendo 64 game has a chance of jumping into their production line then ‘If book, then scan’ is the only filter they need.
Is this an opportunity to self-publish my own book for $100k per copy and be guaranteed one sale?
No they will simply steal it, like they usually do.
How about 5000 $200 books written by their own AI (preferably for free, cheapest printing in existence) ?
Just don’t write it in any OS that backs up your stuff to their cloud…you know…for safe keeping…
Anthropic has a cloud service? I thought it was just the LLM, and I guess whatever software plugins
Unless they buy returned books for pennies
Or books retired from libraries (saw many stamps on scans on 70s books from internet archive that implied disposal from some American library)
Article is not available without registering. As for the title, “destructive” book scanning means you cut off the binding and put the pages in a scanner which easily flips through them and takes the pictures. If you’re not scanning rare old books, this is a perfectly reasonable way to do it, because setting up a scanner for a normal book and manually turning each page to scan it takes a long time (Internet Archive has videos on how they do it, very nice and impressive, and logical since their original mission was scanning old public domain stuff, i.e. published before 1930 or so). If Anthropic will actually legally buy all those thousands upon thousands of books, that will be a pleasant precedent for an AI company.
Although I very much doubt that random uncritically gathered textual material can “teach their AI tool how to write well”. They’re still pushing for more and more training data, even though it’s clear actual advancement will have to happen (if it can happen) through more refined usage of / training on the data.
Still creating shitloads of trash.
I imagine they could rebind those books and resell them. Maybe some employees get lucky and get all these “scraps”?
Maybe they could but would they bother to do so?
Write a book where the spine is a required piece of the story for its understanding or completion.
Kind of like how House of Leaves is best enjoyed with the actual book.
I read one once where being able to slightly see through the pages was a key part of the plot
Which one, if you can recall? I love interactive books.
It was called 世界でいちばん透きとおった物語 by Hikaru Sugi, but I don’t think there’s an English translation because this kind of gimmick works a lot better in scripts where all characters are the same size, and a translation that ends up with a comparable arrangement of those letters would be a major pain too.
A slow-burn read by learning Japanese first. This one will take me while.
Fuck yeah, I can already reliably recognise like ⅓ of the hiragana set…if there’s a multiple choice pick.
I’m taking a course, but if you want to just self study www.kanadojo.com is pretty good, and if you get anki there’s a load of free resources to practice listening and reading. Anki is free on android and pc, but costs a bit on iOS. Www.Ankiweb.net
I swore I wouldn’t buy another physical book, but I may break it just to be able to read this one.
I love reading actual books. I don’t know why you would quit if you can afford it
We’re progressing backwards to Victorian times where books are luxury items.
I have to say, there are some advantages to using an light e-ink reader vs a massive book (reading Sanderson hardcovers in bed is basically planking but on your back).
Journey before destination, Radiant
I recently had to move with my physical book collection and swore I wouldn’t do it again. I converted it all to ebook now. I’m down to about a dozen physical books, not counting comics and TPBs.
deleted by creator
It’s a worthy story. Lots of little Easter eggs.
“Rainbows End”?
I came here looking for this.
Bingo. You’ve nailed it.
I’m a bit amused and intrigued that the original author’s post in plain text is used instead of a picture. I have never seen that in all my years of Wikipediaing.
When a bookstore goes out of business or just can’t sell a book, they don’t return it to the printers, they tear off the cover, return that and by law have to throw the rest of the book in the trash and destroy it. So books are already destroyed by the millions. When I was a kid our hometown bookstore went out of business and I watched them throw away 2 metal dumpsters full of coverless books. If they were destroying ancient texts or valuable copies, that would be more something to get excited about. I doubt that they were doing that though.
Yeah that’s exactly it. James Patterson, for example, has written dozens of books, and there are billions of his books alone. They’re taking one of each, cutting off the binding, and scanning the pages. This is standard procedure for common books.
So why don’t they want people knowing about it? Because a lot of people are anti-AI and will run misleading stories like this.
I’m as anti-AI as the next guy, but unlike other companies scraping all of reddit and stealing art off the Internet, these guys are doing it mostly properly by paying for the books. They still don’t have a license to use the material in this manner, though.
They don’t need a license to use material in this way under extant US law. Copyright is overwhelmingly about reproduction rather than consumption.
They also initially took content from libgen, which is a fair bit less legal. Personally, I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I don’t like some shitty for-profit AI company making money from the collective works of civilisation. On the other hand, I think copyright protects works for far too long anyway and most should be in the commons already. Mind you, I would be more sympathetic if Anthropic et al. were doing all this for research purposes instead of capitalism. Maybe that would be a better copyright reform, in that it expires much more quickly than the current laws (say 10 years) but restricts third parties making a profit for a longer period. Likely that would be complex to design and enforce, however.
That much was absolutely is something to get worked up about. Just because it happens more than people realize, that doesn’t make it okay.
Words and ideas don’t become sacred when they are committed to paper. Unless they destroyed the last copy of something that has not been digitized, this is totally fine.
Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.
This seems more like an indictment of the practice of physical publishing than destructive book scanning, in which case I generally agree. There are a host of industries with baked-in inefficiencies that our life experiences have conditioned us to accept as normal or unavoidable when really have no business persisting in the modern world. Printed books is definitely one of them.
I wouldn’t say print books have no place today, it can’t be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it’s definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.
Even teenagers sometimes prefer dead tree books to ebooks. Back when I worked in a public library, we could tell when a book was assigned reading because we’d suddenly get 10 requests for our 2 copies. The students had access to the ebook, they just preferred paper.
Yeah, you’re right to clarify that, saying printed word has absolutely no place is hyperbolic and wrong. In cases where it is necessary to maintain parity of information access, paper is fine.
I didn’t say words were sacred, but destroying millions of books is a colossal waste of resources. This is not totally fine.
The resources were wasted by the publishers when they transformed the resources into a finished product with very limited utility and reusability. Books on shelves are not resources.
The resources were wasted by everyone involved. Stop defending this bullshit.
No, I won’t stop calling things like I see them, and I am unlikely to see them differently unless presented with an actual argument (premise, claim, evidence, impact) that amounts to more than “no u”
How is destroying millions of books not wasting them? Use your goddamn brain you troll.
I don’t mind if they destroy 10k copies of Fabio’s books. It’s probably not even half of the print run so for a thing, it’s guaranteed to be no harm because there’s enough copies around.
But when you say destroy ALL books, you’re also talking about rare first edition of whatever Shakespeare did, and manuscripts of Beethoven, and authors that I am fond of but I have no chance to buy used or new, or find in a library, because it’s not popular and/or is in a language that is not from the place I live. And that’s not cool.
So first things first, no single entity can have access to all books. Not even reputable historians would get access to anything they just ask around. Then there’s books that have few copies and no one has any clue where they are. Etc etc.
“…plans in early 2024 to scan “all the books in the world” to teach their AI tool “how to write well”.“ — That’s like teaching a writing course by only reading.
What are they? The giant brains from Futurama? Are they building an infosphere?
Pointless anti ai propaganda.
Tamara left you to find someone who IS anti-AI.
Good.
^ Pointless AI propaganda
That’s a really great observation! Let’s dive into that.
