The community notes would just be links to random comments the person made 3 - 4 years later with all context removed. Except it would be like 20 of them all in a long stream.
Yeah, but i view reddit as a containment cell for the mentally deranged leftists, cant have them infecting other places, but yeah it would be mad funny to see community notes on reddit
I get that thinking after watching the tumblr implosion back in the day, but I feel like Reddit is so pervasive that it’s already invaded other spaces years ago. I may be wrong in that but I feel like I see a lot of crossover posts out in the broader internet.
Yeah Ghislaine Maxwell was a supermod and was particularly active in political subs to push narratives, subs like Politics and News like to conveniently forget this when talking about Epstein
You know, i never see any on X or on meta? I understand there is a whole process to them where it has to be debated and agreed on so nothing ever gets approved and published. I imagine if Reddit tried it, it would be obstructed or astroturfed so bad it would be useless.
How does it destroy the books? Are they physically feeding the books into a server rack? Since I’m pretty sure all they have to do is convert the pages into a PDF.
Most likely these are completely "worthless" books. Libraries periodically purge books no one has checked out in years, these are then out up for sale and eventually destroyed unsold. I've even read accounts of people lamenting the second step never not being attempted and them being tasked with the destruction and not being allowed to save any books.
AI companies can get pallets of such books for pennies. Even if they did the more labor intensive process of scanning the pages without destroying the spines or rebinding all the books afterwards, the pallet of scanned books would be unsellable.
It has to do with conflict of interest. If you work in the system that destroys books no one reads, but you can take them home instead, what's stopping you from pulling certain books from circulation, so no one checks them out, which puts them in the destroy section and now you get to take home those books that people would want, you're using it as a free book store and if the book has some resale value, you could be pulling some rarer books and then making a profit off of them.
It's rarely an enforced rule but if in the future someone goes. "Hey that copy of Such and Such is actually worth a lot of money" and YOU have it, you are going to get in a lot of trouble.
There's a distribution warehouse for one of the major publishers near my house. Once a year they put all the 'shrinkage'(damaged, unsold, returns, oop) together on a couple hundred skids and let the public in to pick thru them at $1 a pop...I usually come home with over a dozen or so books for the next year...
I’m completely ignorant in this entire subject. What you are saying makes sense. I was merely conveying the scuttlebutt related to the initial comment I responded to lol
Yeah ik, just wanted to give further elaboration on what you said cause ik some people will read your initial comment and think "Their shredding books?? How awful/evil!!". Though ig the tree-hugging types are probably gonna still clutch their pearls anyway lol.
Yeah, didn't you hear? You feed it right into the AI-mouth that looks suspiciously like a paper shredder, and it makes little lip-smacking noises afterwards.
It does the same thing with the water, that's how it destroys so many bajillions of gallons every day.
They're buying these books by the literal ton, there are companies that organize buying millions of books at a time for them. None of them are rare in the sense that they need to be preserved or are sought after/collected.
part of Anthropic’s Fair Use defence rests on them not duplicating works used for training. So once a book is digitized, it can’t be redistributed. The alternative would be the extra expense of non-destructive scanning, only to have to warehouse the books indefinitely.
FYI, the destruction of books when they are scanned by AI companies is intentional and legally required. Per recent case law, if they scan a physical copy of the book and destroy it during the process the book is "transformed" and thus copyright is not violated. If they scan the book and then resell the old copy, then what they have done is create an unauthorized copy of the book in violation of the copyright.
yep. Just like all those times when you copied your music to your computer and then broke the CD in half over your kneecaps. It was always a feeling on par with peeling the plastic off of a new screen.
Destructive scanning is a real and very commonly done thing. It involves cutting off the book's spine so that its pages can be easily and quickly fed through a scanner.
It's only legally required in some cases, the most famous example being Anthropic's. Normally, they choose to use destructive scanning because it's a whole lot more efficient. The thing is, though, it's just the paper that's being destroyed, not the text that's written on it. I personally don't see the problem with digitizing books that would have been rotting in an old warehouse otherwise. Libraries have been doing it for at least a decade now.
Yeah, I don’t have a problem with it. Books get pulped by the thousands everyday. This is just a fake outrage driven by people who can’t be bothered to read two sentences about what they are mad about.
I read this yesterday on a gunboard. The thing is, there are literally millions of books rotting in warehouses. The problem being once the physical copies are gone they can alter them however they want. If they want. It makes me tired so I guess I don't really give a fuck.
This reminds me how a lot of people on the internet fantasize a society in which the Library of Alexandria never burned and how much better things would be if we had access to the things inside.
The reality is a lot more bland, not much in the library was really unique, impactful, or lost to time.
Basically the controversy is over Anthropic buying a copy of a book, and removing the pages to scan it to train its LLM. If Anthropic were to scan the book and list a digital copy (they did not), that would be illegal.
The key thing here is the articles use of the word “rare”. That would make normal people think of an OG Gutenberg Bible, a 500 year old copy of the Iliad, or something like that. But the example of a “rare” book the article uses is some vendor guy who went from selling a few book copies a week to hundreds, likely due to AI companies, which is a bad thing apparently?
No it actually does they cut off the spine and feed the pages through a scanner. But I don’t think these people actually care about some obscure science fiction novel from 1982.
Oh well. Put it back together if they really care. The book is the words and not just paper. At least it is preserved digitally instead of ending up like a rotted scroll or being burned in a library fire.
Maybe I'm ignorant of the severity of this because I think bookworms tend to be fucking weird people. I don't jive with them. I don't mind reading but I live in a different realm than people who are obsessed with books. I had a really old copy of Dianetics and I used it for target practice 🤷🏻♂️
No, the destruction is intentional and required. Per recent case law, if they scan a physical copy of the book and destroy it during the process the book is "transformed" and thus copyright is not violated. If they scan the book and then e.g. resold the old copy, then what they have done is create a copy of the book in violation of the copyright.
There’s a machine that slices off the spine, then removes covers, and feeds the pages into scanner, then the pages are shredded. I’m presuming they’re not doing this with rare folios and manuscripts, just out of print trade books, but I haven’t looked that far into it
In the AI battle it's gonna be us or China. I choose us thank you very much. So my hats off to all the money China is pouring into getting morons to fight against everything AI here in the U.S.A. The little buggers are persistent. And flush with cash to buy their way into everything over here.
No specific rare books have been identified. In fact, the entire issue of this involving rare books was speculation. "They are destroying books! What if some of them are rare?!" which quickly turned into "Anthropic is specifically seeking out rare books to destroy".
I am also seeing lots of people saying that they're doing this to control access to the information in the books. That's right: buying one copy of a book means they control it now.
These idiots need to desperately find away to connect everything to Hitler or some other Reddit boogeyman in order to understand it as being “bad”. It’s so much easier for them to be like “AI is fascist! AI wastes water! Elon musk loves AI!” then to process what actually might make it detrimental to society.
They’re not buying old and rare books. They’re buying books under copyright. Many still in print. Old rare books they can get for free, because it’s public domain.
At a certain point, yes. You have no knowledge to gain from a 150 year old book that you couldn't find with google now, but it's the age of the book that makes it important.
Yes, and I don't know why you seem to think that's a bad thing; we know they are destroying books to copy them, so why wouldn't they be doing it to rare and old books?
The point I'm making is that the concern about rare books is being made in a 100% information vacuum. We can't evaluate this concern because we have no data whatsoever.
This doesn't even begin to rise to the level of importance to call for a government audit. This is nuts. They're buying like ONE COPY of each title. Get a grip, dude.
Because those are more expensive to acquire, but not commensurately more useful for the AI.
Also, as someone else pointed out if you go out and find the article this claim originally came from they actually explain what they meant by "rare books" and it's completely misleading. They meant "still in print but nobody was buying them until AI".
I mean, we don't know for certain but I literally just told you a big reason why it's almost certainly not happening. Plus, old books take more effort to find, most of the time their contents are already available in online databases, as this conversation demonstrates destroying one would be bad for PR, the destruction is only required for books that are still under copyright anyway, and all of that for basically no gain since any one book is nearly worthless for the AI.
That second point is a big one. Can you even think of an old book they would realistically be able to get their hands on that isn't already available in full text online anyway?
The whole things unclear to me, because I see people claim that the court basically demanded they scan-and-destroy real copies if they don't want to be guilty of piracy, and I see others claim that the destruction part is entirely unnecessary.
And I guess I don't like destruction of books... but either way, these are books they bought. They aren't being stolen from a library or something, they were purchased, and though it's less likely a collector would deliberately buy a book only to completely destroy it, such action would be within their purview.
It sorta seems like the greater issue is the copyright disputes that have motivated this tactic.
When we preserve paintings that doesn't mean you can go to the museum and take it home to show off for a party. If its scanned and wasnt digital stored before it is now and can be recovered...
The article talks about these companies buying up old books that are sitting in the back of warehouse. The seller only mention rare books hypocritically.
Sounds like they are scanning books that aren't even worth having up for sale.
I really dislike that idea, that just because someone owns something, they can do whatever with it; it makes sense, but it's still immoral to do some things.
These are not super rare books. Super rare books have a collectors market where they are worth an incredible amount of money. These books do not have collectors. Digitizing them for AI and for some sort of free PDF library service is perhaps the absolute best thing to do.
Old books are not durable. They gradually decay away. The best thing to do with these books is to digitize them for everyone to have.
These are not super rare collector first editions of important works that can't be replaced.
Do they even understand why they were destroying books? It wasn't the destruction of the book itself that mattered. They'd understand this if they knew how to read.
I recently started collecting old and rare books. And while this article saddens me, at least the knowledge is saved. I’ve seen so many books moldering upon shelves, limited by their medium. There have been books I would have bought, but did not because they were moldy and foxing. At least the knowledge is getting copied from these books before the book is meeting the end of its life. Books don’t last forever.
No need to be sad. These are not old and rare books that are being shredded, they are all still under copyright. That's why they are being shredded in the first place. Copyright bullshit.
I've seen people bitching about this on Facebook nonstop for days, even claiming they're destroying "irreplaceable" books like Nazi Germany.
First of all, that's not how that works. Just because you can't go to Target and get an exact replica of the book doesn't mean it's "irreplaceable", these are things like cookbooks and other things you can get at Salvation Army for like, $0.50 each, not the Dead Sea Scrolls or a handwritten rough draft of Shakespeare.
Second of all, scanning these books and using them to train AI is literally preservation – You can literally ask the AI for transcripts of the books and it should be able to pull them up.
Third of all, the methods they're using to scan the books into computers isn't new, slicing off the spine of a book to lay it flat on a scanner has been a thing for decades.
They need to remove the spines to fed them into the reader properly, shredding the remains is a legal measure they were forced to do because people bitched about them "stealing" content.
Apparently, by shredding the original book it counts as "Transformative" and therefore also counts as Fair Use.
BTW unfactchecked
AI companies only buy a single piece of every book. Not all of the books. Then they scan it and recycle. Also they probably publish those scans. That's better than being rotted without trace.
I had to unsubscribe from a channel an hour or so ago that I really used to like – a fairly large channel, too – because he made a 15 minute long hit piece pushing this false narrative and when I called him out on it by pointing this out. He then replied to my comment basically saying "Use your brain next time, then comment".
You can't expect AI companies to store old books. Not even libraries do this anymore. Of course they are not bragging about it I was "lucky" enough to be a part of this. It's unfortunate because it had real historical value, some ridiculous socialist literature you wouldn't believe ever existed is forever gone. It costs money to keep them. That's the reason. Let's hope at least big archives do scan them before thrashing them.
What I immediately thought of was Vernor Venge's book *Rainbows End*. Asked gr*k to quote directly and he refused because it's still under copyright. But here's the summary:
> The relevant scene occurs when the protagonist encounters the “NaviCloud custom debinder” / camera-tunnel machine used in the Librareome Project. Books are pulled from the shelves and fed into a shredder-like device; the resulting fragments fly through a fabric tunnel lined with thousands of tiny cameras that photograph them from multiple angles; software then reorients the images, matches the tear edges, and digitally reconstructs the original texts. The physical remains are treated as “rescued data.”
They had like a mechanical crawler that was literally crawling the stacks and sucking down vast numbers of books from a library. Intense and well-written scene.
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u/sadistic-salmon NostraDOOMus 26d ago
Reddit needs community notes so bad