this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books (www.news.com.au)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.”

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[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Keep in mind that books often become culturally important decades after their print run, sometimes when the copyright is ambiguous.

And also keep in mind there are technically, an insane number of "rare" books out there, but important rare books might only be important to people without the money to pay for another printing.

I could almost forgive this prrocess if they were /also/ archiving these books (leven if limited ike Google books does), but they won't, because they are so focussed on staying ahead of compeditors based on the "knowledge" in their training data.

[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago

Well, I'd be surprised if they're throwing away the digitized versions, they will want to use them in training all of their future models. If they go bankrupt maybe someone more willing to share will get the data