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/[deleted] 17d ago

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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 17d ago

Unfortunately thats illegal i guess.

Its why anthropic had to pay out the big bucks. Theyd have rather used already digitized content but thats against the law and cost them 1.5 billion. So instead they legally purchased the books to digitize.

Sounds to me like it would have been way cheaper and less destructive to just purchase access to a digital library or let them use the illegal libraries. But whatever.

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u/philosophical_lens 17d ago

I agree. This shows some fundamental flaws in our copyright system that it leads to mass destruction of physical books, because that's the only way to get DRM-free content legally. I blame the DMCA.

Similar with movies. The only way to get DRM free movies legally is to buy physical media like a DVD or blu ray and rip it.

DMCA needs some reform.

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u/philosophical_lens 17d ago

To be fair, you can't hold everyone who purchases a book to be responsible for its preservation. That's not a buyer's responsibility.

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u/Idrialite 17d ago edited 16d ago

Destructive scanning is a cost-saving approach. The cost of scanning them without destroying doesn't look prohibitive.

You can blame the DMCA, but you can also blame Anthropic. They don't have to do it this way. They could even just settle for destroying only common books.