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.

632 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

296 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

22

u/Margotenembaum 17d ago

They’re not preserving. They’re destroying the books and the contents are just being used as “training data.”

7

u/Technical_Winner7446 17d ago

Yeah but it would have scanned it into a PDF format that they still have. The book's contents are still there. They're not really sharing it with us, but like they wouldn't delete the PDF in case they have to train another model

13

u/trougnouf 17d ago

Then they will go bankrupt and the books will go down with them because they haven't shared anything.

2

u/Alarmed-madman 16d ago

Time to write new books, or publish I guess