genAI companies are now buying up rare and antique books so they can scan them and use them to train their AI. then they're destroying the books afterward.
AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.
they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.
they're taking water, power, natural resources for their data centers. they steal. they're book burning, essentially. i'm just so angry, i'm at a loss right now.
From the article:
"One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and heâs almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.
âI personally have mixed feelings about all of this,â the bookseller told 404. âIt benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. Iâve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books.
From a Google search:
PISBN allows publishers, retailers, and libraries to track and manage books more efficiently. Each ISBN corresponds to one specific edition of a publication, making it essential for smooth global circulation.
Oh god. Oh god. This physically hurts. It's nauseating.
But also.
Scanning out-of-date science books is going to make your AI worse. Scanning out-of-date geography books is outright stupidity. Plate tectonics wasn't even accepted science until 1967. Two years before we landed on the moon.
Also also: language evolves. Do you really want your LLM digesting text written in a style nobody writes or speaks anymore? Try reading a newspaper from the 1970s and you'll occasionally stumble over phrasing. Now try the 1930s. And that's less than a century ago.
What the fuck is WRONG with these people?
