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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

That would make sense as an argument if the natural endpoint of these copies was preservation, and AI was disrupting that. But the natural next step for virtually all these books is to be recycled, not preserved. Books are generally not preserved. It is extremely normal for them to be pulped. Millions and millions of books are pulped every year.

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Might as well grind up the tablet of complaint to Ea-nāṣir and make cement out it, right? What use could there be in preserving the mundane facets of everyday existence?

It's more that, we don't need to preserve a million copies of the same mundane book. Losing a few copies to AI training is fine.

Preservation would be cool but what does that have to do with anything? The system is that the remaining copies have private owners and the private owners can do anything they want with them, including sell them or shred them.

Most of these owners aren't doing anything particular to preserve them, they're stacked up with 10,000 other TV Guides in a hoarder's moldy basement. Anyone interested in keeping October 1994's TV Guide pristine has had over 30 years to procure and protect their copy.

These particular buyers are converting their copy to a digital one that's getting some kind of use, which is better than the fate of 99.9% of the other copies.

I don't even think ownership rights are the principal component of this situation. It's true that in a different copyright regime, Anthropic could simply publish an archive of every book they scanned (and I think they likely would do that, if they could). But the primary reason these books get destroyed is that nobody cares about them. Old, rare books are a garbage disposal problem, not a cultural one. To me the most important thing to know about this story is that the AI companies are a tiny, tiny blip in the big picture of what happens to old physical books.

Everybody imagines libraries hoping against hope to get their hands on all these rare books so they can shelve them and preserve them for generations to come. But if you donate a box of old books to a public library, there's a good chance the clerical staff handling that donation is going to roll its eyes and cart the books out to a dumpster. Large public library systems have stopped taking book donations, for this reason. "Bring them to a thrift store" is what they'll tell you.

Yes, and this justifies the destruction of books on an industrial scale. I propose next we do children, ever tried dropping off an innocent child at a supermarket before? There’s a good chance they’ll just send them out into the streets!

If you weren't complaining about libraries doing it last year, I'm going to have a very hard time taking you seriously when you complain about AI companies doing it at a much smaller scale. You don't care about what's actually being done, you just care about who's doing it.

The argument wouldn't hold even if you had been on the library's case, because it misconstrues the normal lifecycle of a book. But we don't even get there unless you've been consistent about this, rather than instrumentalizing it at just this precise moment to jump on a trend story about hating AI.

When applied to ordinary mundane objects, this is the mindset that leads to pathological hording behavior. Ultimately I think it's rooted in a fear of, an attempt to deny, mortality and the passage of time.

Around a million books are destroyed each day in the US.

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