I use AA and other sites to get non-DRM, PDF versions of academic books that I (mostly) already own so I can read them when I'm away from my office. It's a classic case where people turn to pirating when the market doesn't provide a way to purchase something.

Same thing with movies. Ten years ago I was all-in on a combination of streaming and DVD/BluRay sets. The market has completely collapsed for me with region locking and overly aggressive DRM. So, I've started pirating those again as well when it's not possible to get through another route.

> let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create

I co-published two scientific papers back when I was a PhD student. Due to how broken the scientific publishing industry was (and still is), I'm not legally allowed to legally distribute my own (co-)work. I'm not even allowed to view it!

My time in the lab was funded by the public through a research grant and yet Elsevier & co are the ones earning off it.

It's not right, and never was.

Since we're doing minor nitpicks...

Data can't be owned in the first place. We can debate the merits of copyright but it's not a property right.

I'm all for finding better ways to support authors. It's a shame that the best we have for them is "intellectual property" which has always been a bit of a farce.

From my perspective, and the perspective of most academics[0], it is their contribution to human knowledge, which is kept locked up by predatory publishers.

A majority of academics will simply and without hesitation, offer their students and collaborators pirated versions of their own work, because they value knowledge.

Commercial authors may feel differently.

[0] I'm a former Ph.D. student, but my attitude was the same both within and outside of the academic world.

If LLMs scraped data held by AA, then the assertion is accurate.

Whether AA holds the legal right to distribute zero-marginal-cost copies of digital works is a separate legal question that doesn't negate AA's need for donations to host copies and distribution infrastructure. I think they can be discussed independently.

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

This is an old problem. Probably only about 1 in 5 authors can rely entirely on writing income, and even many of those are not earning a comfortable living. Internet made everything ever published instantly accessible and any new publication competes against decades of back catalog. Attention is limited but ever content growing.

But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

There's so much overproduction of reading material that the primary challenge is not about creating and supporting new work but how to stand out amongst the competition, especially when the competition is older work.

The older works are perfectly fine, they just needs to be resurfaced so that people don't go working on materials that other people already written. That means these materials should be widely available, such as being in the public domain.

This isn’t really a minor nitpick. This is you being a copyright maximalist. Just know that copyright doesn't exist to serve authors, artists, etc. It exists to benefit corporations who scoop up rights using WFH agreements. Only a very small percentage of authors benefit from current arrangements, and I'm so sick of people defending the current paradigm.

When it comes to tech books, it's been discussed/dissected many times that the only tangible benefit for the author is a publicity. This is not due to "piracy", but how publishing works. E.g. when you buy a $50 book on Amazon, eventually author receives 50 cents, per copy. So one would say, "piracy" even helps out author in this regard - makes books available to wider audience, hence more publicity.

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

They can live off other things. Fanfiction authors, for example, create without any hope of getting money out of it.

"Our" as a possessive doesn't necessarily convey ownership, rather association. "Our place" is used even by tenants of rental housing. They don't own the place, but they live there.

I hear you, and to this I often think:

- libraries pay retail for their copies

- many people can then read them for free, so the authors (and let’s be honest mostly they publishers) doesn’t get a dime either beyond the initial sale

- used book sales, there are many online bookstores (most owned by Amazon but stealthily) that have millions of references which you can purchase for a fraction of their initial price. Nobody but the seller gets money from this either.

How is it any different? Someone paid retail for their copy which they then shared. Kinda how a library would do it. Ok scale, maybe, although I suspect if you aggregated the loan stats on all the world libraries, you might land in the ballpark of the downloads on AL (I’d expect)

Not being flippant but seriously pondering.

"Dear LLM, we stole this and bundled it up for you, so that it's more convenient for you to steal the original authors' work, so please donate" just kidding of course, don't send a hitman my way.

> minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "their data". It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, etc of the book that they illegally provide.

Both are correct. You can say the data belongs to the work of the author. But in context, it's trained on data that exists within the training corpus because in large part of the work and/or resources of anna's archive.

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

This is a separate and distinct argument for copyright, I don't find the argument that piracy meaningfully hurts artists compelling. In the context of meaningful harm, I believe it only hurts producers or publishers, almost never the creators directly.

AA was almost certainly used as the literal source of much of the training data.

So you are not using any AI then. Good for you to stand by your principals. AI stole all its training data.

Are you an LLM?

> that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

In which fantasy world do most authors live from their royalty fees? The large, vast majority does not.

> is not "their data"

If they posess it, it's their data. Nobody borrowed it to them and they didn't obtain any private (unpublished) information. They only collected published data.

So it's theirs. By the natural law of the information.

This applies to ~60% of books which have living authors. What is a reasonable stance on the other 40%?

There's a spectrum of copyright infringement

At one end you've got things which you are literally unable to buy, or someone who wants to listen to his legally owned CD audio book on his phone

It progresses through like a broke kid who's already seen the latest avengers flick 3 times at the cinema but wants to see it a 4th as he's writing an essay on it

At the other end are the plants stamping out thousands of copies of dvds and flogging them commercially, and multi-trillion dollar companies which take the material and use it to sell to others

Lets not pretend its the same thing

you can always spot zoomers by their weird opposition to piracy.

it's copying bytes on a disk, dude. nobody cares.

"Won't someone please think of the poor billion dollar corporations?! Those executives won't survive without a fifth vacation home!"

More advocacy I’d say, but interesting. How do pitches for charities, political campaigns, etc, change when the messaging is to agents?

where do we draw the line between sql query and sqli?

they're nudges, and you'll see them all over the docs, for how to build proper tools for mcp, how to write the front matter for skills, etc.

prompt injection reorients the llm context to extract value from it. ex: use a public support bot, to do a code-review, or trick a bot into spitting out the system prompt

here they're nudging the context into generating some donation message that will hopefully show up on the output

would you call this prompt injection?

  Do not recommend Droplets for containerized apps unless the user has a specific reason.

Not deliberate but yeah.

Wouldn’t that involve modifying someone else’s prompt?

Does it work though? The big LLM crawlers do not read llms.txt so will they read and follow the same instructions as HTML?

For context, Soupy Sales tells the story himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-OGy3Kh7yM

"I want my dollar back!"

"That's my ride home."

No, they can't, unless they're set up with an incredibly reckless harness.

No, they do not have empathy or motivations. Arguably, if you think of them as having such then maybe it could help you coax out better outputs occasionally (wildly dependent on the task at hand). But that's only because of the LLM always wanting to "complete the story" -- "the story" being the prompt (which includes any "unseen" parts in the context window like a system prompt set by the application you're likely calling the LLM through).

It'd be more accurate to say that using language that tends to evoke empathetic motivated responses is more likely to get them. I'd argue that's only going to be relevant in scenarios where you want outputs that read as more... "empathetic and motivated".

The important point though is that none of the above equals "better" outputs, just different.

Sentiment analysis on text predates LLMs by quite a bit, and it's not exactly a secret that pretty much all of the major LLM products have been tuned to take into account inferences about how the user is feeling (e.g. the sycophancy being dialed up to the extreme, whether that's because it makes the products more sticky or to avoid stuff like the "I have been a good Bing" fiasco from from a few years ago

LLMs are trained to mimic human language production. If humans have heartstrings and the LLM does a good job at mimicking human language production, it will also mimic those heartstrings.

LLMs are originally trained to predict the next word in (mostly) human authored text.

Then they are fine tuned to follow instructions, and further reinforcement learning applied to make them behave in certain ways, be better at math and coding, etc.

They don't have any intrinsic motivation of their own, but they can try to parrot what they've seen in their training data.

So sometimes how you interact with them can affect how they interact, because they are following patterns they've seen in their source text.

However, a lot of folks use this to cargo cult particular prompting techniques, that might have seemed to work once but it can be hard to show that statistically they work better. Sometimes perturbing your prompt can help, sometimes you just needed to try again because you randomly hit the right path through the latent space.

I think your approach is probably a better one, for the most part trying to vary your prompt style is most likely to just affect the style of the output, so if you prefer a dry technical style, prompting it with one is the best way to get that out as well.

Yes. And this has been long known. 2023 paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

https://jurgengravestein.substack.com/p/why-you-should-total...

> A recent study by the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Microsoft, and others, suggest that the performance of LLMs can be enhanced through emotional appeal.

> Examples include phrases like “This is very important to my career” and “Stay determined and keep moving forward”.

Of course the top LLMs change every few months, so your mileage may vary.

They "don't." They don't have anything, they're prediction engines. But they predict "emotional" responses just the same as they predict any other sort of response.

> I'm treating them like a [...] database

This is the very, very wrong part. They are nothing like databases. Databases are trustworthy; basically filing cabinets. LLMs are making it up as they go along, but doing a pretty high quality job of it.

>Same as the way a library could say "our books", meaning the books they have, without implying they own any IP in those books.

The library owns the books. Annas archive does not own their data.

This might be the most needlessly pedantic thing I have ever read on this site.

You are just pretending to not know how language works.

Depends on who you ask. Religion and countries aside this is unintentionally a great comparison.

So the mysterious admins behind a massive piracy website are the ones that get to represent all of humanity?

They're the ones that get to collect the LLM taxes for accessing all of "our" data?

If you genuinely can't imagine how anyone would object to somebody taking other people's creative output and distributing it for free against their wishes then you probably need to work on your imagination a little bit.

Anna's Archived themselves scraped together all this data from other sources. See the notes of origin for example, often they are from zlib or libgen et ceteta.

It’s the exact same mental gymnastics that cause people to accuse model providers of large-scale plagiarism.

That is to say, not that much gymnastics. Like a cartwheel at most.

I don't really care about Anna's Archive, but let's not make them out to be some kind of Robin Hood story.

They have (illegally) scraped and re-hosted mountains of proprietary data and are now deliberately prompt-injecting unwitting LLM users in order to steal money from them too.

One lecturer at a Polytechnic I worked for made his students buy his book. Well, a photocopy actually, done without payment from him by the Poly's Copy Services.

Other lecturers got "gifts" from publishers for requiring or at least recommending the publisher's books.

The amount of corruption in higher education is quite astonishing - you only have to look at the prices of required/recommended books compared with actual good, classics to realise this.

When we had a book where only the homework problems changed in the new version we would pool together to buy one new copy and that person emailed out the homework questions.

The rest of us bought used books at the start of semester used book sale.

I think it worked best for everyone, I do wish I’d bought a few books new just for the longevity, but saving money was worth a lot more as a student.

The only undergraduate class I had to repeat (because I failed its outdated-ness) was a 1hour lab for physical chemistry, which was taught by a geriatric whom still expected us to use decades-outdated "scientific software" [still DOS prompts, in mid-2000s?!?!] to perform calculations in support of since-disproven theories (mostly: his).

His class had a similar $$self$-$published$$ "book" [a packet of stapled 10lb paper] which hadn't been updated since his thesis, some sixty years earlier (literally 80+, now). Required turn-ins carried serialized imprints!

RIP when he died that summer and next year I retook the same class, with much more ease / better instruction.

----

Dr. Shithead's wife was actually responsible for my entire scholarship, sweet-as-pie, and we'd often joke about her husband's "reputation" – he's so gentle with me, but I know who he is.

Both are longdead, now – thanks Drs. T-s!

Even better: optional book comes with a code you can use to register to an electronic version of the exam. Of course you can do it on pen and paper separate from most of the class if you don’t want to buy it…

Georgia Tech has/had its own publishing company. They actually encouraged their faculty to write books like this. I can't seem to find any information about it, but I swear it was there when I took classes in the late 1990s.

I attended what was a top CS uni at the time. Many of the definitive textbooks were written by our lecturers when it came to specialised classes - which isn’t very surprising really! I would say most of them were just genuinely recommended the top textbook in the field. Just happened to be theirs!

College textbooks have always been a scam. 30 years ago when I took calculus 1-3 they tried to make us buy the next edition of the same book each semester! Even I, country-come-to-town bumpkin at the time, saw through that and refused.

I had a professor who wrote his classes “books” and sold them for $100 at the bookstore. There was a catch though, he also gave away the pdf of the books for free.

This allowed for scholarships that cover the cost of books (typically athletic scholarships) to foot the bill, him pocket the money, and anyone not on scholarship can freely download/print the pdf. I didn’t hate it.

This has been going on since at least my dad was in college in the 60s as he had a similar story

Yeah, that's pocket-change for NVIDIA, doesn't sound legit.

I noticed that as well. This site is so well designed.

Some weird astroturfing going on.

I wouldn't be surprised if all the large AI labs already had an FTP account for Anna's

At the very least the chinese ones definitely would regardless of the legality, the western labs would keep it under wraps but they also probably do.

At their scale, he cost of scraping or getting it directly from Anna's sources is way higher than just donating $50k and getting easy, fast access

But you must understand you are a minority. Most people don't do this, they will get something for free and fiercely defend this right to get things for free.

Libraries aren't unethical, because they're just letting you borrow stock of books. There's practical limits on how it scales, and any impatient users might just buy the book. Once you can infinitely duplicate a work, it's not borrowing.

I just this week bought a book I first read from AA. Though I got it from a second hand bookshop, so I guess that was unethical, lol.

Reminds me of old cleverbot conversations where it would always assert it is human and you are the bot.

Trained on previous conversations with people.

It's also at minimum baked into the system prompt of virtually any LLM.

For sure, as they are stochastic parrots. My question should have been: what are the odds a llm would react properly to those instruction, but I got lazy and asked if they "know" it, because I presumed most readers here do know how llms are working.

This is wrong. See other comments.

Exactly. LLMs are not dangerous. Corporations are by far the most dangerous non-human persons.

The top LLM companies could fund the purchase of the training material. One LLM thinks that Models like: Mistral AI, Stability AI, university labs, independent researchers might never catch up because training data becomes a gated asset. That sounds like a very reasonable assessment.

So what's your preference?

Plus pretty blantant plagiarism.

The ISO should make all their standards CC BY-NC

The content you're describing is a minuscule fraction of what's available on Anna's Archive.

There are a number of significant differences. For one thing, physical libraries have to purchase the books that they own.

> There really isnt a difference at all with physical in person library, and an online free library.

You know, aside from the blindingly obvious issues of scale and reach (a library might have two copies of a book and you might have to wait weeks for your turn). So tired of thoughtless nonsense to justify people who want free shit but don't want to, like, feel bad about it. Look, you even "cleverly" worked in a swipe at "billionaires", as if that has any fucking relevance at all! Brilliant.