[28304283409234]

One (1) company destroys and (illegally?) copies a rare book. This knowledge is now of that company, not of humanity. Other companies will feel the need to do the same and before you know it knowledge is walled off in the gardens of the AI companies, and the rare books are gone and destroyed.

[jstummbillig]

When are you or anyone more likely to get access to a rare book:

a) When a company has made a digitized copy of it

b) When a few previous hard copies are kept somewhere in the world

Idk what Anthropic plans to do with this, but note that my original comment was not about Anthropic at all. I simply think it's a good tradeoff to destroy a few copies of rare books if that helps digitizing them. I am not against simply legally forcing companies that do this to release those copies in due time. In the meantime I am also happy to have them as part of the LLM corpus.

> illegally?

No, copying rare books is very likely not illegal, because, presumably, they are quite old.

[pfdietz]

The scan doesn't go away, and can be released when the copyright expires.

Oh no, a lump of cellulose is gone. Will no one think of the fibers?

[collinmcnulty]

> can be released when the copyright expires

But it ... won't be? The companies have no motivation to do so. The copyright on lots of these books are surely already expired, so if they wanted to they could be putting these up now. I'm sure internally this is viewed as a corpus of knowledge they have that their competitors do not, so they will not release them unless something forces them to.

[pfdietz]

Yes, without any justification let's assume the worst. This is true good faith arguing.