We are the books
Destructive book scanning is a bad reason to hate the AI companies, but a great metaphor for where this leads
Because I’ve seen this 404 Media story go around and get turned into conspiracy videos, let’s talk about the way AI companies are buying used books in bulk, destructively scanning them for training data, and discarding the remnants.
While the companies appear to not be very open about their book operations, there’s not really anything new or shady going on here, so far as I can tell. Destructively scanning books is a very old practice — much older than the AI companies. Scanning is best done with flat pages, which are hard to get while the book is bound. So to get quality scans, it’s best to remove the pages from their binding.
If you only wanted a book for the scan, there’s little point in putting it back together after, which would take time and money. Moreover, you would then have to do something with the reassembled book. Store it forever? Why? Sell it? Who will want your Franken-book when they could buy a never-disassembled one?
And if you’re an AI company, reselling the book might jeopardize your legal safe harbor. Courts have determined that using other people’s books as AI training data without permission or compensation is fair game, but only if you actually bought the book. I don’t think courts that busted AI companies for pirating books would look kindly on arguments that resold books were temporarily owned at time of scan.
Yes, as you may have heard, books from before the AI era are perhaps valued a little more because they won’t themselves be the product of AI. But no, companies are almost certainly not buying up the only copies of rare books, nor are they trying to remove books from circulation. This is not a conspiracy to monopolize the past and rewrite history, and if it were, this would be far from the biggest threat posed by these companies.
If you want to worry about where the book scanning leads, know that it feeds the race to build artificial minds that would treat humanity the way the AI companies treat books. Books aren’t being destroyed out of any hatred for the printed word, but out of indifference to the format. Companies are extracting only what they care about and discarding the rest.
What would superintelligences want from us? Not much, and not for long. Some physical hands to help bootstrap a more efficient and automated supply chain, maybe. Once that’s up and running, you should expect to be worth about as much as the empty spine of an old pulp novel on eBay.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.