AI companies are shredding rare books
AI companies are reportedly purchasing and destroying rare books to use as training data for large language models. Critics argue this practice is an irreversible loss of cultural heritage, while legal rulings have deemed the process fair use.
Why it matters
The destruction of physical archives for digital training data raises significant ethical and legal questions regarding intellectual property and cultural preservation.
Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets): "🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
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