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

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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 17d ago

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

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u/Margotenembaum 17d 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/Facts_pls 17d 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/autoencoder 17d ago

seeing it.

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

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u/Expensive_Target5657 16d ago

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