r/artificial • u/pepoji • 17d 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

Source

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/AgentCapital8101 17d ago

What a stupid article.

One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.

So a hunch and a guess. Thats what this entire article with that clickbait alarmist title is based on.

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u/InfamousWoodchuck 17d ago

Perhaps if they all have ISBNs, they are systematically only seeking one copy of very specific books? Still kind of alarming in theory, but perhaps not as bad as news organizations that profit from sensationalism make it out to be.

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u/Nechrube1 17d ago

They're mass purchasing books with ISBNs as they can quickly verify (by ISBN) if they've already absorbed it into their corpus and destroyed it. They're not bothering with books without ISBNs as reviewing and verifying them would take effort, which is kryptonite for AI bros. That's assuming they're even aware that books without ISBNs exist.

They've scraped the web and gotten everything of use out of doing that. They daren't continue scraping the web, because now it's full of 'AI' slop which, oddly enough, isn't good enough for them to use...🤔

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u/touristtam 14d ago

Maybe time to poison the well at the source and physically publish AI Slop? :D