Short rant about the old books/AI thing

I’m really bothered by the moralistic discourse around the destructive scanning of old books. It feels like people are intentionally trying to make the conversation dumber, and with stuff like the known issue of Russian outrage bots, that might literally be the case.

1. Mostly nobody cared about the old books, in practice; there’s a hugely performative element to acting-like-we-cared-because-we-feel-we-should, or because it’s a bad look to admit that you don’t, actually.

(Sort of like how everybody “wants” to preserve all sorts of ancient dead languages but most people don’t want that enough to do anything about it. If you’re not willing to raise the baby yourself (and compensate the birth parent for all of the costs of pregnancy to their satisfaction) then I don’t care that you’re mad about an abortion. Deal with your feelings on your own, like a grownup; don’t make it anyone else’s problem.)

2. Some people really cared a lot about the old books, and that’s valid! It’s reasonable for committed preservationists to be upset, and there’s nonzero “they sold some of their old books thinking that those books were going to a loving home” in the mix, and some bewildered anger there makes sense to me. At least some of the books seem to have been bought under something of a bait-and-switch; I can empathize with being grumpy about that.

3. That being said, when you sell something, you’ve sold it. I am not on board with the expectation that you get to maintain meaningful control over a thing after you have been paid for it and it has passed out of your possession.

(I think contracts about what you will do with a pet that you purchase are also absurd and intrusive and I do not feel the slightest bit critical of people who outright lie on them, because the attempt to constrain the purchaser feels grotesque to me. If you want to e.g. make it illegal to own a non-spayed cat or to destroy an old book, make a law that covers all such cases evenly! If you can’t get that to happen, because the thing you want is actually not popular enough for others to agree that it should be banned, then make peace with it. Don’t sell the object if controlling its fate is important to you. If you lack the ability to fully and sufficiently vet the person you’re selling it to, and then something contra your values takes place, that’s on your shoulders.)

4. The text is being preserved! The text is being preserved. The text is being preserved. THE TEXT IS BEING PRESERVED.

I have seen virtually zero acknowledgements that what is happening is that the books are being SCANNED. Scanned. Saved. This is in many ways like getting butthurt about somebody transcribing cassette tapes to mp4s. A lot of this text is more likely to be read or to be relevant than it was sitting on a shelf.

5. That being said, there are genuine concerns re, like, “okay but what if the AI companies manipulate the text rather than authentically preserving it?” Or “what if the AI companies do not allow the text to be read any longer, and it’s just fully privatized?” Or “okay but what about the historical and aesthetic value of the physical books themselves, we want to preserve some of those old books BECAUSE THEY’RE OLD, not just because of the text they store.”

Each of these is a different conversation, and a different thread! Concern over information manipulation feels valid, and the way to solve it is transparency regulation. Concern over privatization ... idk, bro, the books were privately owned and sitting on a shelf, ignored by all but a tiny fraction of society? Now they’re privately owned by somebody else. If you want law to make text public, figure out a way to cause that law to happen? I’m on board.

Similarly, the issue of preserving old books for aesthetic and historical reasons feels like it’s larger/upstream; if you don’t like that people can buy things and then destroy them (in the process of transcribing) then do something about THAT, rather than stinking about books specifically? Convince billionaires to set up archives, or get regulation passed.

6. 7. 8. (There are other threads, too.)

None of this nuance is present in any of the conversation that I see unfolding. It’s all idiotic outrage on the level of “Data centers are DESTROYING our WATER” which is also false and obscuring a realer and more important conversation that isn’t meaningfully happening because the oxygen’s been sucked out of the room.

Grr.