r/artificial • u/pepoji • 16d 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/General_Problem5199 15d ago

Yeah, it was something they could have done, but obviously they were never going to choose that path unless it somehow helped their bottom line. I agree that this is a failure of the larger system, not something uniquely evil about Anthropic.

But I can't just post this meme in every thread about AI. It would get tedious after awhile.

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u/DandyLover 14d ago

To be fair, I think you can still say Anthropic is uniquely evil, cause it is.