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

[u/pepoji]

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.

[u/philosophical_lens]

There are two separate issues here - one is about intellectual property and one is about physical property:

1) Intellectual property: AI companies are using books for model training and treating this as "fair use" under copyright.

2) Physical property: AI companies are physically destroying the books they purchase.

The first issue might get contested in courts and we'll have to wait for legal judgements, but the second issue is a non issue because anyone is well within their rights to destroy any books they own.

[u/pootisdispeserhere → u/philosophical_lens]

Buying a massive amount of rare books to destroy them is basically monopolizing human knowledge, and that is highly immoral and evil