AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical books
The article reports on the AI industry's practice of purchasing rare, physical books in bulk to use as training data, which involves destroying the books through 'destructive scanning.' It highlights the tension between digital preservation and the loss of historical artifacts.
Why it matters
This raises ethical concerns about the environmental and cultural impact of AI development and the commodification of knowledge.
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The artificial intelligence industry, having already stripped the open web of its bark and devoured every morsel of its illegally acquired libraries, has developed a new appetite. Millions of physical books are now being bought in bulk and fed into a process that the industry nervously calls “destructive scanning”.
Data acquisition increasingly involves cutting the spines from millions of books, scanning them and then shredding and discarding them afterward.
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