<
https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/>
"As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one
company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are
guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing.
“The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company
that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that
offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its
site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge,
structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.”
In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before
2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated
text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can
scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which
could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained
on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The
article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped
for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing
designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models.
“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of
this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage [...] “Physical books
published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern
poisoning tools.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
