There are several things to criticise here, including the US’s terrible copyright laws and the publishers involved in that case who care more about in-print than out-of-print books.

But it’s the AI companies that are actively buying up and destroying books at an unprecedented scale, which is an action they’re choosing do to and certainly don’t have to do. Therefore that’s also where the immediate focus and attention needs to be

That’s the whole point: Companies are doing this because it’s easier and cheaper for them, and those doing it now are first-movers who don’t care about how catastrophic the end result will be for the rest of society as they’ll have their training data moat.

It should be obvious, but the things that are most profitable are not always the things that are best for society as a whole. That’s why we have regulation.

Digital copies can be altered at whim, as the only means to provide any sort of tracking or verifiability is through another external software system that itself has to be trusted.

Because it's not just one company doing this, it's dozens if not hundreds of them, all with huge budgets and all competing over the same dwindling supply of older books. What those talking about library disposals and similar measures are missing is the sheer scale that destructive book scanning for AI ingestion is operating with. It's unprecedented.

It's not impossible that in a few years the number of older physical books for sale anywhere will plummet to almost nothing and that in many cases that'll include the last copies anywhere of particular titles. Second-hand book stores will close, and a ton of niche knowledge might be lost forever. It'll also all have been done in relative secret, without any transparency or public record kept of what was lost.

Worse, it's something that can only be done once. If our societies don't do something about this now there isn't going to be a chance for a do-over. Once a physical book is destroyed it's gone forever, and we'll be lucky if there's a digital copy left. But even then digital copies don't provide the same level of forensic verifiability that physical copies do. Future researchers looking for material that might've been contained in books like these will be out of luck.

If our societies do nothing to stop this, we'll all be poorer for it.

You could overcome it through various means, including helping to set up a clearinghouse for bulk rights, implementing a data clean room approach that models could train on in situ, lobbying Congress for copyright law changes especially around orphan works, using Section 108 of the Copyright Act to set up a specific preservation vehicle like the HathiTrust, and other options.

I find it ridiculous that so many in this thread are acting as though AI companies are simply powerless to do anything but buy up and destroy these rare books.

Because none are.

They don't have to scan and destroy these books, it's an entirely voluntary choice.

You're defending the indefensible here.

That's not happening though.

It's not at all the same thing as still having the books themselves available somewhere.

Of course, because each company is happy to burn it all down to beat their competitors and being first to any content is most important, this will never happen.

AI companies are not doing the same.

For instance there were only limited production runs for a set of books on South Africa's participation in the Second World War, and getting hold of them is increasingly difficult. But they have ISBN numbers, so they fall within the group of books being collected and destroyed by AI companies, and as a result might disappear altogether, along with the knowledge inside them.

40°C with high humidity from 5am to 10am every day is not ‘beautiful weather’.

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