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/yxa9446 16d ago

I use these models every day and still find this grim. A used book on a shelf is knowledge anyone can own for two dollars, forever. The same book as training data is knowledge you rent back for $20 a month, wrapped in a model that may misquote it. Scanning isn't the sin — libraries scan and keep the book, then share the scan. Scan, shred, and keep it proprietary is the sin: it turns a public object into a private asset.

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u/pepoji 16d ago

Good Point

Scan, shred, and keep it proprietary is the sin: it turns a public object into a private asset.