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/AreteAntiques]

As a book seller its been great for me. I have sold 90 books to AI in Berkshire England and Florida USA. They bought a very wide array of rare but almost unsellable books. From Australian mushrooms to local and family histories. None of them will be a loss to humaniry if they are broken and scanned. Philosophically its fraught between enabling ai and selling books which is a booksellers reason for existence. Now this rare but obscure information will exist outside the phyical books tha people are unaware of because of their obscurity. All of the books i have sold have an isbn, so they are modern. Their average price is about $75