Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

> As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.

It does though. A lot of people seem to think "it's a book!!!" means it takes on some mystical intrinsic value. That's bullshit. There's an absolute mountain of worthless and near-worthless books. I bet the vast vast majority of these books are those books - after all that's what Amazon wants. A ton of human written text as easily as possible. They obviously aren't buying first editions of Oliver Twist, or even second editions of Harry Potter.

> We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked

Yeah... because then it would reveal how unimportant they are. This sort of outrage inflation is counter-productive. People see through it, lose trust, and then when something bad actually happens they won't believe you.

Culture of contempt is the name of the game: being outraged all the time is tiring, and tired people are easier to control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrage_industrial_complex

They've been very clear that these aren't "special" books. Your gotcha isn't a gotcha.

And come on. They're not revealing the titles because that would reveal which bookseller they worked with.

Who gets to decide what's "special"? Written works might be personal stories or expression of feeling.

I've read a lot of unknown old literature that has little to recommend it as far as literary history goes, but it all has a certain charm, and at the end of the day it was all the work of a human being who walked this earth just like we did and captured their thought on the page.

What if their family has an interest in the preservation of that text? What if they simply don't yet know of it, or couldn't afford it?

Yes all hypotheticals, but I think a lot of people are underestimating the potentially permanent damage being done to the public good just because the actions are not illegal.

Everyone should be uncomfortable with a single company unilaterally pillaging the public good for its own ends. Period.

IDK about you geniuses on hacker news, but I'd much prefer to pay a few hundred dollars for a rare book once to be able to read it than pay amazon token costs monthly to get the LLM's chopped and screwed regurgitation, without any recourse to even knowing where the information comes from.

Mmm, you may have mistaken my point. I'm not an AI-lover and I hate that these companies are doing this.

It would help if I could dig up the quote right now, but the example they gave is that some of these things are like... a walking guide to DC, or something like that. And not necessarily a good one! Many of these were churned out and weren't necessarily even special to the authors.

But they did highlight that beyond the authors, these have a great deal of value to historians, and are really quite important documents in that respect.

Then why does Amazon want them? Why train an AI on worthless books?

Individually you might be right. Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.

This is cultural violence on a massive scale.

>Then why does Amazon want them?

quantity has a quality of its own

>Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.

ask your aunt for the recipe, look it up online with a search engine, ask an LLM by describing how it tastes and the ingredients you remember, this is really not that complicated

>This is cultural violence on a massive scale.

could you be any more dramatic? you're acting like we are actually losing anything when in reality we're gaining from this, you'll just be able to ask the AI for the recipe instead of wasting hours and hours hunting down some old book and ordering it online for an exorbitant amount

What are we gaining other than your silly little hypothetical?

The whole problem here is:

- Not everyone agrees on the utility / value of AI. - A small handful of companies control frontier models and get to shape how these inputs are ultimately put to use. - As Sam Altman put it, they want to charge you, in perpetuity, for "intelligence" as a service. Contrarily, anyone can access a book usually for a one time purchase fee and read it forever. You'll be paying per token to look up auntie's recipe every time instead of just, you know, reading the book.

Not to mention you are erasing the voices of human beings who had lives and may have related their experiences and emotions in those texts. That anyone would be comfortable with a corporation they know nothing about destroying potentially unique information of the lives and stories of real human beings, locking it away forever as one granular component of a stochastic content generator, the human expression in its actual form never to be accessed again, is absolutely appalling to me.

I think you should reflect more on who will really benefit, who has the control, and why humanity as a collective is potentially losing as collateral, without having much say about it.

Just like with most things, LLM's are terrible at recipes if you are actually a good cook.

Your example is very flawed because if the LLM gave you the exact recipe then it would be infringement, but many recipes need to be exact. LLMs aggregate information so wanting a very specific recipe (to the point of hunting down an old cookbook) is a non-starter because it the LLM is really only guessing.

I agree with you on your point, but I just wanted to let you know that recipes can't be copyrighted.

If you write: "Smash one egg into that bowl and feel the power. Sprinkle salt onto it salt bae style." That's copyrighted and I can't copy that word for word.

But I can publish my own recipe which is an exact copy of yours but written like so:

Ingredients: 1 egg 1 teaspoon salt

Method: Combine egg and salt.

Or write that in any way I want that isn't a word for word copy of your recipe.

>Just like with most things, LLM's are terrible at recipes if you are actually a good cook.

all the more reason to feed them more training data on how to cook, for example cooking books

Oh no, some hypothetical person can't find a mediocre cookbook from 20 years ago. Amazon stop!!

Do you even hear yourself?

I've been looking for a recipe book that my mother used to own called "Taste of the Tropics". Every few years I search online, and while I find a listing from time to time, it's always been "Currently unavailable".

I just searched again now and found 3 used copies on AbeBooks for about US$11 incl. shipping. Absolutely made my day.

I don't know if adult me will enjoy it beyond the nostalgia, but there's a coconut cake recipe in there that I will never forget.

Like you said, just about nobody on planet earth would care if the billionaires ingested and then destroyed those final copies, but I'd have been gutted if they'd beat me to it.

Thanks for sharing. My comment clearly struck a bit of a nerve amongst some and resulted in some mildly nasty responses, at least by HN standards. Admittedly it was one of my more heated takes, too. But it was worth it for your anecdote. Enjoy the coconut cake.

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