BookAngel Idea

[Experience he/him]

So what if

vid angel

but for books?

I don't know if it would even be possible to make cuz all the yucky legal stuff but maybe we could do it?

@Lego Mistborn (I made it. yay)

[Edema Rue she/her]

Ok I’ve literally wanted that forever. Please. Yes. Absolutely. I will give you all the money I don’t have to make this happen.

[NameIess]

Yeah, this would be nice. Even just a guide of what content books have would be nice.

[Experience he/him]

So basically, few problems.

Don't want to read the stuff I want to take out, so... an ai or smth would be necessary. Or I guess people that are fine with reading whatever.

And yeah all the problems that vidangel has would become problems but from brothers

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

48 minutes ago, Experience said:

So what if

vid angel

but for books?

I don't know if it would even be possible to make cuz all the yucky legal stuff but maybe we could do it?

@Lego Mistborn (I made it. yay)

You're right, there is quite a can of worms there. We'd better get some legal stuff figured out before I get going on making an application.

 

20 minutes ago, Experience said:

So basically, few problems.

Don't want to read the stuff I want to take out, so... an ai or smth would be necessary. Or I guess people that are fine with reading whatever.

And yeah all the problems that vidangel has would become problems but from brothers

Yes, my plan was to utilize an API key to AI (Ideally free, but who knows) to scan and then simply funtional programming to replace the things.

[Experience he/him]

The only way it would work is getting permission from each author I think

[ʟɪɢʜʈ]

But i bet some people would do it if they are paid just to edit or take out stuff from an already established book.

 

[Experience he/him]

2 minutes ago, ΨιτιsτηεΒέsτ said:

But i bet some people would do it if they are paid just to edit or take out stuff from an already established book.

 

Yeah, the problem is the authors saying no

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

We need to find all the lawyers of the shard.

I just don't know how to do that. Surely someone does though.

Quote

But i bet some people would do it if they are paid just to edit or take out stuff from an already established book.

I would hesitate to pay someone to do something like this, when I consider(as I expect everyone who is frequenting this thread does) the content to be immoral. I'd much rather use an entity I believe is highly unlikely to have a soul that would be damaged.

P.S. Everyone reading this thread that likes the concept: follow it to get updates if/when I write this program, and drop a like on exp's original post.

Edited August 15, 2023 by Lego Mistborn

[Experience he/him]

Would there be a way to hook it up to ebook purchases? So the authors would get paid, and it's just something that is usable for books that the person has already purchased. Is that even possible?

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

That is what I'd like to see, but I know that DRM does make it difficult.

I think ebooks would actually be the only format to do this in. Unless you want to build a robot that whites out cuss words and explicit scenes.

If we can verify the legality, we can move forward with design, and after that I can actually get to writing code.

[Experience he/him]

If we just did it, is there a chance we get in trouble with the law or would we just have to drop it?

Would you be able to make like a webpage as well, or should we just use a custom thingy like wix?

[Edema Rue she/her]

44 minutes ago, Lego Mistborn said:

We need to find all the lawyers of the shard.

I do debate does that qualify me? 

I feel like there would be a lot of legal complications for doing anything more than ripping certain pages out of books and lending them to friends.

And with me, I don’t like reading a lot of the stuff but I have enough mental stability that I can get through it without being too affected, especially if I know it’s to get rid of that stuff.

Edited August 15, 2023 by Edema Ruh

[Experience he/him]

1 minute ago, Edema Ruh said:

I do debate does that qualify me? 

I feel like there would be a lot of legal complications for doing anything more than ripping certain pages out of books and lending them to friends.

Perfect. We have ourselves a lawyer

Anyone know any authors who we could test this with? Who would be willing to give permission as long as they're payed?

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

1 minute ago, Edema Ruh said:

I do debate does that qualify me? 

You probably have the research skills, and that's what we really need.

If you want to help, see what you can find (regarding U.S. law specifically).

[Edema Rue she/her]

Here’s a question, what do you do if the author is dead?

[Experience he/him]

1 minute ago, Edema Ruh said:

Here’s a question, what do you do if the author is dead?

Pretty sure the copyright is passed onto someone when they die

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

Oftentime it is passed to the publisher though

[Experience he/him]

Hmm. So what if we started with like Shakespeare, cuz that won't have copyright problems?

Does he even have anything that would need to be censored?

[Edema Rue she/her]

I mean, the whole of Titus Andronicus…but I think anyone who’s reading Shakespeare is ok with a little violence, and there are so many twists of a lot of his work already.

[Experience he/him]

4 minutes ago, Edema Ruh said:

I mean, the whole of Titus Andronicus…but I think anyone who’s reading Shakespeare is ok with a little violence, and there are so many twists of a lot of his work already.

Okay, but we could use it to figure out the coding and everything. Plus there's always that one person that never wants to read any violence whatsoever so *shrug*

[Edema Rue she/her]

Oh, that’s a very good idea! Coding is incredibly hard.

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

On 8/15/2023 at 9:36 AM, Experience said:

Hmm. So what if we started with like Shakespeare, cuz that won't have copyright problems?

Does he even have anything that would need to be censored?

I would censor Shakespeare myself.

[dannnex male]

i do want to say that i kinda think this idea is dumb
like if you can tell the book is getting to a part you think you'd wanna skip
just skip it
skim read until it looks safe

BUT
the idea of making something like this is rather interesting. 

i think you could get a passable program by just looking at word frequency.
like i could totally make this in python in like, an afternoon.

you'd have to already know a little bit about the book, and about the parts you'd want to skip, so you know what words to target.

but then its just a matter of tallying up the number of instances of each word per page (or per paragraph or chapter or anything), and if the frequency of a blacklisted word is too high in a given selection, remove that selection from the text.

also you'd need the entire book in some sort of scannable file format. preferably something simple like a .txt, and that gets questionably legal pretty quickly.

 

Implementing AI is definitely possible and would make something like this far more useful, you could have the AI give a non-descriptive summary of what it's censoring and stuff like that, but that's far out of my wheelhouse. i just know what AI is capable of, no clue how to actually use the APIs or anything. 

the simplest way to implement AI would probably be in tandem with the word frequency model actually. take the clipped section, give it to an AI with a prompt like "summarize this selection of text: [clipped text]. this text is from [book]. Be brief in your summary and remove any explicit material" and take the result and paste it back into the censored book, along with indicators that its not original text. that would actually be really easy to figure out, would just need to figure out how to use gpt plugins n stuff.

Edited August 17, 2023 by dannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnex

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

I would disagree. Sure if an explicit scene is coming you might be able to notice and skip, but how do you know how far to skip? And what if it comes up on you and you didn't notice? Or cuss words that pop up randomly? I think those make this project a valid idea.

Using AI is pretty simple. My plan is to give the AI a text, alongside a prompt like "find all occasions withing this text that are xyz undesirable things" then, with whatever response it returns, remove the offending text.

I should be able to find a way to scan through an EPUB file, as it does contain all the text from the book.

Perhaps a way to do this legally would be to create an ebook reader that works with EPUB and just blurs the location of offensive text. This wouldn't involve actually editing the contents. Lawyer! @Edema Ruh Can you use your debate research skills to find out whether blurring text would be a copyright infringement. We'll want to look at U.S. law, don't worry about the states or other nations' laws yet.

P.S. @dannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnex are you studying CS or do you just a have a working understanding of programming, and what does that knowledge amount to?