Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” one small bookseller told tech news website 404 Media last week.
The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.
“It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said. “I’ve been well suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”
Then stop selling rare and out of print books to an AI company, you fucking doorknob.
Greed knows no bounds.
How would a book seller know? Orders increase and you find out afterwards why. Bit hard to know ahead of time
right, but once you find out, cut it off
💯%
I mean I quoted the part where they made it clear that they know exactly who they’re selling to…
You did. I was thinking of a seller that sells books thinking of a normal sale only to find out afterwards
Gotcha.
“We must destroy this precious archive of humanity so our competitors can’t also scan it”
So it can’t be traced that they’ve used said books for training data.
Yes, destroy all evidence so there will be no news story or any trace at all about what they’ve done.
😏
I really hope the AI bubble pops soon and takes at least some of these stupid companies with it. They’ve been operating at a GIANT loss for years at this point, how much longer will this go on?
The way I see the situation is that every single AI company can clearly see the massive wall they are speeding ever faster towards, they see it and can also see that it is a massive wall, thick and sturdy.
There is however one thing that keeps them pushing the accelerator down hard against the floor, the delusion that they alone are smart enough to find the prefect weakpoint where they can smash through to the promised land of massive promises, while everyone else is just flattened against the wall.
It is extreme narcissism combined with yes men powering this shit.
Nevermind that when this bubble pops, the US govt will give them all the money they need from our taxes.
Nah, just Musk. The US Government will bail out Grok and let the others fail.
i think they are just making sure they arnt holding the bag. thats why i keep seing new AI startups popping up.
“the delusion that they alone is smart enough”
are*
It very weird when an otherwise logical comment has such a dumb error.
Thank you, you are quite correct, I will update the post, I remember being rather tired when typing that (:
Investors are starting to notice that it’s all smoke and mirrors in terms of the profits. I am reasonably sure it will pop this year. I will be utterly shocked if it doesn’t pop by the end of next year. It’s just so comically and obviously unsustainable.
This is gonna go down as the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, I swear.
Biggest Ponzi Scheme so far
I dunno, the GameStop Bros are still waiting for MOASS. So I’d say the wealthy have more ways to keep the plates spinning than we wish they did.
At least GameStop is profitable though.
I like the plate spinning analogy. I think these guys have SO much money that they do have a few tricks up their sleeve to keep investors going.
I think once they land a few enterprise level fish hard, it will keep the plates spinning a good bit longer.
Corps don’t have to register to people anymore. Just as an example of how corrupt and well stocked these plate spinning rich bastards are
Be careful, because we will all pay the price when the bubble pops. It won’t be just the CEOs paying the bill, it will be governments and people.
The longer it goes on for the higher the price will be. The sooner it pops the better.
It has to get worse before it gets better I guess
Depends on how much power the financiers have to fabricate capital from debt. In modern economics that’s not necessarily a limitation. I do hope it will be tho.
Because when you destroy the publicly available source you become the only available source. Paid, of course.
The final nail in the coffin for humanity, locking knowledge behind digital sources that are inaccessible in event of catastrophe.
Crazy how we had all this information available and all we did was lock it up and make it for sale. The internet was an awesome place we shared ideas easily and without massive corporate “sponsors” now the owners of the internet are the corporations and they are just riding t till the wheels fall off.
Literally
1984Fahrenheit 451Looking at the temperature outside today, it’s a pleasure to burn
Yup, and we all have our tv feeds at home. I should reread that. I just remember that Montague was named after the pencil he used.
Does anyone remember circa 2014 that radical jihadists in the middle east were destroying ancient and medieval artifacts, including stone heads? And I remember here in the liberal west we thought that was awful.
This is not the only thing that makes me think of that. Also Trump’s recent calls to reduce the size of US national parks and open them up to oil and uranium mining exploitation.
Yeah we remember. Because that’s a literal fucking warcrime. You’re not allowed to destroy historical sites.
While I agree that destroying books is bad - even common ones - it’s also not technically illegal. If I want to burn a first edition of whatever book worth thousands of dollars… I’m legally allowed to do that.
I can also see the benefit of having a digital version of a rare book that can be enjoyed by thousands as opposed to sitting on a shelf. But yeah, definitely hold companies accountable for destroying them. There has to be a better way to do that work and still have a useable book afterwards.
I don’t trust AI companies to not alter the texts of those books if there’s something in them that does not align with their worldview.
So any book added to the online archive(s) by these companies is suspect.The point of bookburning is that it would only be accessible to AI, bringing forth it’s monopoly on said first edition. No one would upload it to IA in the process. It is deleting one source of knowledge out of existence.
If they were archiving digital versions so they could be read by thousands in the future, this would be a totally different conversation.
They don’t even need to be as selfless as the internet archive - just follow Googles lead and allow people to search and view selections the archive, with automatic opening of the archive when you are confident copyright is expired. Even a closed archive owned by a third party with a dead mans switch to open it in the future when the business model is done would be something.
If they were archiving digital versions so they could be read by thousands in the future, this would be a totally different conversation.
Unfortunately that would be illegal.
Theyre actually destroying the book to be legal according to the article.
That is the justification and not the reason. Its faster and cheaper to cut the bindings, and they would have to store the books while they are using the digital copies to comply with copyright.
Random bulk rate books aren’t artifacts. The vast majority of them probably have a copy in Anna’s Archive.
If they did have a copy in Anna’s Archive, why the fuck would AI companies find physical copies, buy them, rip them apart, scan them, and then digitize them before destroying them?
Remember, you don’t get the digital copy. It’s only used to train their models.
Absolutely. Every AI company has Anna’s Archive in their training data already. They want to differentiate their models by having more training data than their competitors. There are way more books out there that have never been scanned than those that have.
OpenAI just settled out of court for $1.5 Billion perhaps some see this as a way to avoid that legal exposure. But IDK.
Then they aren’t rare books necessarily.
The use of the word “rare” implies that they are not bought in bulk…
Rare doesn’t necessarily mean culturally valuable. How many of these rare books are actually just old instruction manuals, travel guides, training materials, phone books, and dictionaries?
The issue with that is that we don’t yet know what is culturally valuable or not.
Just because we don’t see a need for the specific book now, doesn’t mean it won’t change tomorrow.
Which appears to be backed up by nothing.
Why are you so intent on riding big corpo cock? Do you think daddy Altman is going to praise you, call you his good girl?
You don’t actually need to play devil’s advocate, you know.
You have got to be fucking kidding me
You people have no idea how much I want AI banned all across everything. I don’t care about anything at this point. These people are EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL. Pure breed CRIMINALS
Fucking 90% of the books I read are “rare”
“Oh, but there’s SOME benefits to having AI”, says some person on the internet that had it shoved down their throat by their boss. No. Fuck you. Fuuuuuuck you all the way.
I agree! I’m sick of Ai!
Fucking 90% of the books I read are “rare”
That’s sort of the joke. These aren’t treasured first editions. They’re not shredding the Guttenburg Bible. These are single prints sitting in warehouses and abandoned libraries or dumps that nobody has read or carried about in decades. They’re rare because they never got a second edition.
And the process of digitizing the book means disassembling it. So the copy (that nobody wanted) is destroyed as a result.
The article is pure clickbait. These books aren’t valuable, save that they were produced pre-AI. That’s why you can get them in bulk on the cheap.
They are buying up used books at rates that push up the cost of used books. That is enough to piss off people legitimately.
We also are fully aware they are not careful. Yes, they will occasionally shred the last few examples of a book that might have otherwise become useful in the future, and there’s no indication that they are archivists. They will eventually destroy or loose this training data and the book contents will be gone to future generations.
They are buying up used books at rates that push up the cost of used books.
Used books are practically free to begin with. Libraries will often give away whole storage containers of books that they don’t want anymore. Bookstores will sell books for pennies on the wholesale market.
Half-Price offers Books By The Yard to be used entirely for decorative purposes. $50 for 40-60 books, largely organized by color and binding style.
a book that might have otherwise become useful in the future
We have vastly overproduced the physical reading material relative to consumer reading habits. We have vastly overproduced certain genres and subject matter material. We have overproduced individual volumes. These books are not useful in any material sense. No more than the clothes we overproduce or the snacks we overproduce or the automobiles and electronics we overproduce.
We are swimming in trash. We produce mountains of it. We fill ravines with it. Stop treating hording as a virtue.
Used books are practically free to begin with
if you want any old used book, sure. if you want a specific used book, maybe you might have to spend ten to twenty to a thousand (i have needed some rare texts over the years).
you want a specific used book, maybe you might have to spend ten to twenty to a thousand
Show me the thousand dollar copy that an AI company destroyed and we can revisit this.
Nothing in the article identities an actual valuable work being destroyed. They’re just “rare”, which can be anything from unpublished manuscripts of failed writers to drafts of screenplays that never got produced to limited run publications that never sold a copy.
Show me the thousand dollar copy that an AI company destroyed and we can revisit this.
Now you’re just being argumentative. It’s destroyed. How can I do that?
As if the ai companies aren’t hoarding.
idk dude. i have a rare first edition that i absolutely treasure. single run, too. it’s a local therapist’s little comic book he drew. he gave a copy to my mother when her parents were divorcing. really effective at explaining masking, just uses different words.
if someone took my copy and pulped it, i’d [disproportionate response. very disproportionate response]
i have a rare first edition that i absolutely treasure. single run, too. it’s a local therapist’s little comic book he drew.
Cool, I guess. How many of these did the AI company destroy?
My niece wrote a ten page short story, had it bound, and added it to her school’s library - a project every kid in her grade level did. If she doesn’t claim it before she graduates, it goes into an archive. And eventually on to a dump.
if someone took my copy and pulped it
If they snuck into your room at night, sure. If they walked off with it from a yard sale, idk if you get to complain.
Okay, now consider my nonexistent idiot sister (my sisters are all cool as fuck) stole my copy, how family does. And I ran the first search in a decade for this book, and the rare bookshop that got pulped last week has (had) the only other extant copy. And then my nonexistent idiot sister died in a fire with my book. See why I might be mad at this straw man?
Presumably everyone who would have a personal connection to these destroyed books, already has one.
I dont think AI companies are stealing peoples personal collections while they sleep.
Just to be clear though, fuck AI and those involved.
Well now no one else can form any connection because they’re fucking gone.
That’s how life works, people come and go. We can’t remember every single person that’s ever lived forever, but people can have keepsakes of those important to them in their lives.
Its not sad that more people didnt get to make that specific connection, because there are countless opportunities to connect with people now.
Books aren’t people. They can last a lot longer if properly cared for and not burnt to feed a slop machine.
Books are important because of their human connection. If there is none left to have then its functionally worthless.
I think its a bit egocentric to think our thoughts will be important forever
Combine this mass burning of humanity’s canon with the onslaught of AI generated nonsense and think about what is doing to do our history and knowledge going forward.
Humanity is being dragged into a black hole by tech-fetishist demons.
It’s a second dark age approaching. It’s slow, maybe not in our lifetime but with the enormous pressure of climate and demographic crisis add the regression of human cognition and destruction of researchable truth and you will get a collapse of the global economy and a shift in priorities (survival first) that will bring a dark age.
If they are successful in destroying all print sources of knowledge, technically we are already in the dark age.
Good way to prepare for rewriting history to their liking. Shredding/destroying the books should be illegal in this regard.
The reason they are doing it this way is because it is illegal to not destroy the books if they ingest them. Skirting copyright laws.
Yeah, part of me thinks this is part of why they are desperate for these LLMs to take off.
Get everyone to trust it, then just manipulate it to saw whatever fascist lies they want as truth. Look at how Elon gets all pissy everytime Grok starts going to the left on its ideas.
To be fair, we don’t know what books those are, anyone can publish anything as a book these days. It doesn’t have to be good or even true. For example, Jordan Peterson shits out some books, and I personally would not mind if all copies were shredded and forgotten.
What’s the point of destroying books after scanning them instead of reselling them apart from *hurr durr we are evil*?
Cause to easily scan them they remove the binding and rebinding is more work %han destroyibg so the point is capitalism
Have you ever tried scanning a book? It’s a huge PITA.
They just cut the binding off so they can be run through a document feeder.
Easier to scan if you cut the binding off, and it costs money to re-bind a book you purchased for 10 cents as part of a lot.
To keep their competitors from buying them and scanning them.
That seems to be the most likely reason. Bastards.
Sorry, but I did an oopsie. I watched the video linked, they destroy the books to scan them. It’s really sad. Though I’m sure they would destroy them anyway.
They take apart the books to scan them. There’s no scanner in the world that deliberately destroys the paper it’s scanning. They pulp them because that’s more advantageous to them than reselling or archiving the disassembled pages.
I assumed the process destroyed the book but keeping the contents from the competitors would definitely be seen as a business goal.
Do make sure that knowledge is only available through their model and otherwise lost to humanity.
Same with bombarding small websites until they give up and pull the plug.
Everything is fucked
Copyright. They mustn’t make a copy. There is legal precedent that confirms it’s okay to transform the copy you bought into digital format. The Internet Archive relies a lot on that. I think they actually litigated it in the first place. So that’s why the copyright heads are going so absolutely apeshit. If no one’s charging you rent for using some data, then it’s “unethical”.
The Internet Archive absolutely does not destroy books. They scan them the hard way with the binding still intact.
I was misremembering. Google won the precedent, when they were suing over Google Books. IA had only 1 big lawsuit and were forced to settle. The non-destructive scanning is dicey.
Fair use loophole, they claim they convert one physical book into one digital with no illicit copies, while also supporting the delusion of AI being an equivalent to a human reader. It is weird on so many levels but no one of noticeable weight asked them wtf.
That is not required by law. It is just easier to cut the bindings off. The other way is slow: https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107
I mean have you tried donating books? They just dump them into a storage room with thousands of other books donated that nobody wants.
you snip off the book and scan the binding
They’re pissing in the well so their competitors can’t access the same information.
To avoid competitors also scanning the book to get some kind of edge.
To be honest, I’d be MUCH less against this practice if this shredding at the very least included saving the original scans at at least 300 dpi for everyone to access, freely.
Ideally, they wouldn’t cut them by the spine, but even giving the despined ones to an archive/library would be just above the unpermissible line.
Despining, scanning and public access archiving is borderline permissible.
Also, if every AI company does this, then it’s more books gone. If they cooperated they’d only need to do it once. Good scans of all books in the public domain would be so useful for us all as society.
While that would be nice, unfortunately it would almost certainly run into the very same legal issues that are also causing them to pulp the books after scanning them.
What issues specifically? Not disagreeing, trying to understand what you mean.
IIRC destruction of the physical copy to prevent resale while still possessing a copy is required for book scanning to be free use, or otherwise not encounter problems with copyright law. Proceeding to share/distribute those scans, or especially trying to charge money for them, would encounter those exact same copyright barriers.
Oh, maybe. Even then, for things in the public domain this shouldn’t matter. I know that’s probably not the majority of what they’re scanning though.
I would assume they aren’t bothering to scan it if it’s in the public domain. Much easier to just grab a copy off archive.org or any other website hosting such things, and that’s assuming the entirety of the public domain isn’t already in the training set.
Destroying the an endangered book feels like it should be criminal no?
As much as I think this behaviour is fucked up, once they buy the books it’s legally property of the company. And it can be destroyed without consequence since it’s legally property of the company.
I agree there is no current law for it. It just feels like there should be some kind of obligation to ensure records are preserved. With heavy enforcement for mass operations of record destruction.
That’s fucking evil.
Why cant they rebind them in some sort of ring binder? I guess the answer is money, but that should be possible no?
They want to be the sole arbiter of all knowledge. Kind of hard to do that when the books they stole from still exist.
Library of Alexandria II
