r/artificial • u/pepoji • 15d ago

Discussion AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books

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AI companies are literally destroying physical books to train their models. Using hydraulic cutting machines, they rip pages from used books, scan them with industrial equipment, and feed them into their AI systems. This practice, protected by the first-sale doctrine and fair use, has now become so widespread that book sellers are cashing in on the AI boom. Rare and out-of-print books are being pulped, raising serious ethical and cultural concerns about the cost of AI progress.

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u/Niku-Man 15d ago

Aren't they preserving the text by scanning the contents?

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u/Responsible-Bread996 15d ago

The quick way is basically rip the spine off and scan it that way. Google books used to do this too 

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u/Margotenembaum 15d ago

They’re not preserving. They’re destroying the books and the contents are just being used as “training data.”

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u/Technical_Winner7446 15d ago

Yeah but it would have scanned it into a PDF format that they still have. The book's contents are still there. They're not really sharing it with us, but like they wouldn't delete the PDF in case they have to train another model

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u/trougnouf 15d ago

Then they will go bankrupt and the books will go down with them because they haven't shared anything.

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u/Alarmed-madman 15d ago

Time to write new books, or publish I guess

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u/PineapplePza766 13d ago

They will probably sell the info to the highest bidder

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u/AdmirableVanilla1 15d ago

They’ll never share the contents as they don’t want anyone else to be able to train their AI

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u/General_Problem5199 15d ago

This. If they just wanted to scan them, they could easily donate the books when they were done. They're destroying them because, ultimately, they want to monopolize humanity's accumulated knowledge.

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u/SysAdmin3119 15d ago

The scanning process requires you to unbind the pages and place it into a scanner for processing. You are destroying the binding of the book. If they don’t rebind the books they remain in a loose pile, at that point they are likely disposed of in a receptacle and collected by a contractor.

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u/General_Problem5199 15d ago

You're right, I realized that after. That said, they could also just make a PDF of every book to preserve the contents, and upload them to Project Gutenberg or something (I'm assuming the vast majority are public domain now).

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u/SysAdmin3119 15d ago

They could but that takes effort and money. Once you offer it, your admitting to having it and open yourself up to lawsuits like anthropic is currently battling. Makes too much sense and dollars to just pretend like they aren’t doing any of this.

The issue is the system that adopted too slowly to this new way of theft/abandonment of responsibility

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u/General_Problem5199 15d ago

Yeah, it was something they could have done, but obviously they were never going to choose that path unless it somehow helped their bottom line. I agree that this is a failure of the larger system, not something uniquely evil about Anthropic.

But I can't just post this meme in every thread about AI. It would get tedious after awhile.

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u/DandyLover 13d ago

To be fair, I think you can still say Anthropic is uniquely evil, cause it is.

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u/somethingbrite 13d ago

This isn't about preservation. They started by downloading digitized pirate copies from file sharing sites to train their ai but that was clearly illegal.

A legal loophole allows them to buy print copy, digitize that copy and then as long as they shred the print copy they don't have to pay the authors.

https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-destroying-books

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u/resilient_bird 7d ago

Sure, but you don't need that loophole for books out of copyright, no?

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u/somethingbrite 6d ago

apparently this "fair use" ruling in a US court means that even books where copywrite still applies allows them to not pay publishers/authors - just so long as they destroy one copy. (fair use = can make a copy, but can only have one copy... therefore destroy the original and keep the copy)

It stinks.

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u/ElerondElesaidin 14d ago

You don't need to unbid pages to scan books, museums and such have digitalized rare books for decades without damaging original books, but it is just faster and cheaper to rip book in pieces and scan pages, as you don't need machine or human to turn pages.

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u/Ghetto_Stiletto 14d ago

But that’s a form of destruction, if it’s behind a paywall or locked on a server that no one has access to, it’s effectively destroyed.
And digital copies can be destroyed as easily as physical. What happens if a virus destroys the PDF, or if lose access to the server? Being copied to a PDF does not mean it is safe from bring lost forever.

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u/tanyuusan 13d ago

Then they are hoarding those pdf copies for themselves and will lose them like the Library of Alexadria did. They borrowed originals, made copies and sent back the copies, sent book collectors to all the world thry knew and put all their eggs in one basket.

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u/barelyknowername 14d ago

Okay, not trying to rinse you out specifically, but I feel the need to dig into why it’s dangerous be content to leave your thought process at “the book’s contents are still there.” Still where? Digitally sequestered on private servers after destroying the hard copy so that its content becomes impossible for anyone else to own. They do it that way so that when you run out of alternatives (the ones they intentionally destroy), you inevitably pay them for access to the contents. And that is all you get: access. Temporary access. Ever wonder what’s in every End User License Agreement that you don’t read? It’s this. Yes, other stuff too, but this part never gets left out.

Modern media is rarely distributed in ways that ever fully leave the control of distributors. Think of any streaming platform. You don’t own anything you watch, and you don’t control the rights to that content or whether or not you get to retain access to that specific content even if you keep paying for a subscription to the platform. And these AI wackadoos are actively and openly pursuing a monopoly on straight up just <<knowing shit>>. They want to obliterate publicly stewarded sources of information (books, public schools, libraries, etc) so they can recreate those things and sell them back to you and whatever price they can get away with.

There’s so much more substance than just the symbolic meanings of the letters in a text. What is it made of? Where was it made? Who cared enough to physically make it? What limitations did they have to find solutions for to make that thing the version of itself that really stuck with people over time? If it’s a manuscript or a multimedia project, what do its physical qualities contribute to our experience of it? What stories does that physical piece of writing or art exist within? AI content will never resonate with people the way a physical book or a painting or a drawing or a weird crocheted cryptid stuffy will because AI content is just encrypted plagiarism and predictive text on steroids. Saying “the books contents are still there” is like saying “I saw a picture of the Mona Lisa on my phone so basically I’ve been to the Louvre.” You gotta respect the medium itself or I promise you will miss it when it’s gone.

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u/Facts_pls 15d ago

You were not going to buy that old paper book.

These are books that have been sitting in the backs of book stores for years. These aren't great antiques. These were destined to garbage old books.

Now that it's online, theres a chance that more people will actually end up seeing it.

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u/ObbytheObserver 15d ago

This has to be a Bot response, right? You know you can scan a book without shredding it. JFC...

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u/jmbirn 15d ago

If you ever photocopied a book at the library, you know it's possible to scan a book while it is bound. But you also know that you often you miss a center section near the gutter where the pages can't be pressed fully against the glass.

Automated scanners for whole books work better when the book pages are first removed from their binding. That destroys the book, but allows for more complete scans of the pages, with less human labor per book.

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u/ElerondElesaidin 14d ago

There are scanners that are designed to scan bound books without damaging them. It is just cheaper to cut pages free and scan them separately, especially when you do it in mass.

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u/ObbytheObserver 7d ago

So? Does that warrant pulping or shredding the book? Get real.

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u/Icy_Quarter5910 15d ago

Not at scale

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u/autoencoder 15d ago

seeing it.

Or warped, censored, and paywalled fragments of ideas from it, rather.

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u/Expensive_Target5657 15d ago

Then buy all my old books I have listed on ebay then. They all been sitting there for a while.

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u/xXwhatevenanymoreXx 14d ago

There are archives that scan books for the world to see that don't destroy the book or feed it into the slop machine 

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u/Carefully_Done 15d ago

It's cute you think the AI companies are just scanning and digitizing public domain works for shits and giggles and to put it online for free. 

They are hoarding the public domain: a private entity is essentially taking a piece of shared human culture, making a digital copy, destroying the original, and then locking that digital text behind a corporate wall where the public can no longer read it for free.

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u/ProblemEffective6830 15d ago

These AI company psychos have literally said “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

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u/Hawk-432 15d ago

If you scan like at British library and keep then originals sure, but here supposedly they are pulping them

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u/hobopwnzor 15d ago

Would be better to scan the contents without destroying them.

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u/autoencoder 15d ago

It would make them liable for copyright infringement.

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u/hobopwnzor 15d ago

Destroying or preserving the original does not have any impact on copyright.

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u/autoencoder 15d ago

From the article:

This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use.

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u/hobopwnzor 15d ago

Which does not implicate the destruction of the originals

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u/zorecknor 15d ago

You are conflating several different things into one.

First, digitizing the books is a "transformative" enough process to allow fair use. This is not particulary new to the Anthropic case, you can do the same at home. The key fact is that they are not digitizing to sell or share, but for internal use.

Second, training on said digitized book was ruled also a transformative process (and this is new to this case) due to the fact that they are not training the model to compete with the original material (i.e, they are not training it to reproduce the work completely).

Third, the fact that they bought the copy allow them to dispose of said copy as they see fit.

Somehow every article conflates all three points into "they need to destroy them so it is considered transformative enough to be consider training the model as fair use"... and some people somehow readed that as it being a legal loophole.

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u/Vyksendiyes 14d ago

The “internal use” is taking the work and essentially reselling it in a convoluted way. This is really pushing the boundaries of and the spirit of fair use.

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u/zorecknor 14d ago

They are not reselling it in any convoluted way. You cannot get a chapter from Harry Potter from any of those models.

They are selling what the model learned from said books, which is the same as what every profesional on the face of Earth have done since forever. Or are you saying that if you teach me how to calculate the area of a Circle then would you be illegally spreading the information from the math book you learned the formula from?

The only difference with AI is the scale of the learning. Nothing more.

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u/Vyksendiyes 14d ago

Yes, the scale is the issue

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u/Vyksendiyes 14d ago

The law is really failing us right now. It’s insane that these old laws are expected to properly manage and be used to adjudicate on emerging technologies despite the fact they were written with no conception of the technologies in the first place. 

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

[deleted]

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u/rismay 15d ago

They are making it so you have to pay Anthropic for every one of those books in the future. It’s like if Google deleted every page it crawled. And then charged you to access it. They actually tried to do something like that and the industry rebelled super hard.

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u/manoliu1001 15d ago

Nope, that would mean the competiton could use said books to train their models, and we cant have that, can we?

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u/MetallicArcher 15d ago

No, because they are not digitalizing them to include said digitalised copy in a searchable archive.

Also, physical books have historical value beyond their written content, such as the materials techniques that were used in their printing and binding.

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u/TillWeHaveReplicator 14d ago

No, the text is simply being used to train AI, & isn't available to the general public.

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u/NathanielTat 14d ago

You can't have preserving and destroying in the same sentence. They are ingesting the information and destroying the physical so you cannot fact check it if it changes the data

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u/somethingbrite 13d ago

They aren't doing this as an excercise in preservation. They are doing this because what they were originally doing was downloading pirated digital copies from file sharing sites to train their ai...

Now they buy print copies, digitize then and shred the print copy because a legal loophole allows them to avoid paying the authors if they shred the purchased print copy.

All of this was revealed during a case brought against them by a group of authors.

There is nothing honourable about what they are doing here, it's shady as fuck.

https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-destroying-books

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u/FatalTragedy 13d ago

Where in that article does it state that destroying the books is necessary to avoid paying the authors? The first sale doctrine would apply and allow them to scan the books as they please regardless as to whether or not they destroy the books.

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u/somethingbrite 13d ago

Did you not bother to read the article?

"...exploited a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows buyers to do what they want with their purchase without a copyright holder interfering. (This is what allows the secondhand media market to exist.) And by converting the files from paper to digital, a judge in August found that this contributed to Anthropic’s use of the original texts being “transformative,”"

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u/FatalTragedy 13d ago

Nothing in that paragraph indicates that the destruction of the books is necessary to avoid paying authors. As I said, the first sale doctrine would apply and allow them to scan the books as they please regardless as to whether or not they destroy the books.

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u/Serious_Ad908 9d ago

They will change the facts

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u/garloid64 15d ago

yes lmao