>Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.
I honestly can't and I think you can't either or you would have used an example with books/printed media rather than film, an entirely different ballgame.
OK... I'm going to assume good faith even though your wording makes it somewhat unlikely.
Similar textual examples would be any text containing actual language as it's spoken in a given place or time. Or any factual textbook detailing the buildings present in a given location. Or any text book detailing a now defunct construction process. Or any text book (generally small run) detailing a niche interest, now missing ecosystem or the state of a particular political situation at a given time. Essentially all textual primary sources for events which are not currently considered important - but which we have no way of estimating the future importance of. One can continue to create countless counterfactual examples in this vein. My overall point is we cannot know what may be useful or even essential in the future, and knowledge should be preserved under the assumption that it is likely to be.
Historians frequently refer to this paradox - how everyday aspects of life are frequently not explicitly documented, since they're so obvious to the communities or communities of expertise that observe and carry them out. So it's actually incredibly important to preserve what seems like ephemera.
Hell we couldn't have AI training at all if we lacked the corpus of existing written literature - but there was no way any author could have anticipated this future utility more than a couple of decades ago.
1. If someone is acquiring books in bulk for bargain-bin prices and shredding them, they're books whose physical copies have essentially no market value and which, absent this buyer, were overwhelmingly headed for pulping or landfill anyway. Millions of books are destroyed every day.
Could one of these worthless looking books turn out to contain information historians care about in a 100 year? Sure. But that doesn't create an obligation for someone to pay to warehouse every extant copy forever. Physical Preservation has costs: space, cataloguing, handling, transportation etc. Archives and libraries have always had to make choices for this reason.
2. I'm not arguing that preservation has no value. The question is whether destroying a physical copy after digitizing it is a serious loss when talking about mass-produced printed material.
Was this the last surviving copy ? Is the information unavavilable in libraries, archives, other editions, scans, citations, contemporary works etc ? If not, nothing has been lost except one physical instance of a reproducible object.
Your film analogy worked a lot better because old film footage is often unique primary source material. A camera recording of a random brooklyn street in 1993 may literally be the only recording of those people, storefronts and circumstances. The nth printe dcopy of a technical manual is not analogous to that.
The medium obviously matters. One was designed to be cheap and mass produced. Almost anything published has copies in the hundreds or thousands at least and the chances you are concerning yourself with the 'last copy' of some valuable information you can't get elsewhere is minuscle. Film most certainly was not like that.
Assuming these texts exist in large quantities seems to definitionally contradict the term *rare* book. Plenty of books have small print runs or have reached out of print status.
One could obviously reproduce films too.
Ultimately, you don't know how big N is, and that's what matters. Part of the problem is there is no transparency around this. The population of all books != the population of a specific book or set of books. Assuming N is large when you have basically zero information on specifics is foolish. These books might be just as rare as a film for which only one source exists you don't know.
>Assuming these texts exist in large quantities seems to definitionally contradict the term rare book. Plenty of books have small print runs or have reached out of print status.
They're books that are no longer in print. Doesn't mean there aren't a lot of copies around.
>Ultimately, you don't know how big N is, and that's what matters. Part of the problem is there is no transparency around this. The population of all books != the population of a specific book or set of books. Assuming N is large when you have basically zero information on specifics is foolish. These books might be just as rare as a film for which only one source exists you don't know.
All of this is frankly irrelevant. Books that you buy in bulk at barging bin prices are books that have essentially no market value and were going to the pulp or landfill anyway. Nobody has an obligation to spend money to preserve every extant copy of every book forever. Millions of books are destroyed everyday. Even libraries and archives make these choices. I was simply pointing out the film analogy worked better, but it doesn't change anything.
Again, you're assuming a lot about this situation that we don't actually know to be true. For example, that these purchases are limited to "bargain bin" books that have essentially no market value. These may be cases we know about, that doesn't mean these are the only purchase happening. I would hypothesize that if we know about a few specific purchases there are probably many more we do not know about/haven't traced back to these companies.
You realize "market value" isn't the only kind of value too, right? Even books that are completely obsolete can have inherent historical value insofar as they enrich our understanding of the past and how human beings used to live. Contemporary market value isn't everything. There are plenty of works of scholarly interest that wouldn't command nearly requisite value to a NYT bestseller when you adjust for scale. That doesn't mean these books aren't worth keeping or aren't intellectually important.
Also, these books presumably even have some perceived value, otherwise these companies wouldn't think they were relevant for training, and wouldn't be spending money to purchase and scan them in the first place. The whole premise is that these books are valuable enough such that training on them will make the models valuable and make paying customers line up for tokens. This is an inherent imputation of value to these works on the part of these companies. You can't say, simultaneously "these books are worthless" yet somehow, at the same time, "they are worth something for producing artificial intelligence". Your assumptions don't make any sense.
> They're books that are no longer in print. Doesn't mean there aren't a lot of copies around.
Sure, but there also could be limited copies around. We don't know. We won't know unless these companies are more transparent about exactly what they are buying and scanning. It's that simple. If it's foolish to assume there might be limited copies, it's equally foolish to assume they have plentiful copies. We simply don't know.
> Nobody has an obligation to spend money to preserve every extant copy of every book forever.
I don't think anyone is claiming that. People are bothered because they (in my mind, rightly) recognize that old books are a historical record of human accomplishment and have some amount of cultural value. Letting a handful of companies further plunder the collective output of humanity and now, potentially keep it locked on their servers in perpetuity is something that should make you upset if you have any inkling of interest in the history of humanity or human accomplishment and if you have any sliver of curiosity about these things. If all you care about is the present and getting better LLMs, sure, I guess I understand why you don't care, but then I also think you are very unwise and myopic.
> Millions of books are destroyed everyday.
So what? Millions of crimes are committed every day, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be bothered by the crimes we hear about. Billions of pollutants are spewed into the environment every day. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to combat pollution. That's a pathetic attempt at justification. Also, there are clear distinctions between processes like libraries removing works they can no longer store and companies scooping up books for training and personal gain.
I honestly can't and I think you can't either or you would have used an example with books/printed media rather than film, an entirely different ballgame.