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AI companies are shredding rare books
https://xcancel.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2081534588485296565 https://xcancel.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2081534588485296565
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sherr 3mo agoI see mentions of Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" in that thread but what this really seems to be mostly like is Vernor Vinge's "shred and scan" factory in his novel "Rainbows End".
- vessenes 3mo agoPerhaps the last great near-term predictor. I often wish he'd written more. To remind us all, he predicted shred and scan would be a short stop over done by villains on the way to nondestructive scanning. That said, supporting Anna's archive is one of the best things you could do for humanity long term in my opinion.
- orthoxerox 3mo agoWere they the villains? I remember the rogue three-letter-agency executive being the BBEG.
- vessenes 3mo agoI think some villainy is implied by "billionaire-backed-woodchipping of a library," but it's just my interpretation, no actual knowledge of Vinge's perspective.
- 59percentmore 3mo agoPart of the (relatively) happy denouement included the Chinese coming in with the nondestructive process and everyone being quite happy with that. So yes, the Shredders were the villains.
- clickety_clack 3mo agoThat’s digital though, so it requires the continued survival of readers for the data that is stored. The best thing you could for the long term is probably to buy a few hundred physical books to keep in a bookcase in your home.
- trollbridge 3mo agoSpeaking as someone with dozens of bookshelves and tens of thousands of books... I kind of prefer the idea that continued survival means getting a bunch of 14TB drives and, you know, hosting certain files obtained from certain places. The reality is that most people's book collections are simply going into dumpsters, speaking as one of the people who go and try to buy these book collections at estate sales. (We can't do anything with the sheer volume of these books so most of them go into the dumpster. I cannot store hundreds of thousands of books, or millions, and no libraries want them.) Also, holy cow, hard disks (as in the magnetic oxide kind) got a lot more expensive.
- vessenes 3mo agoYeah agreed. I have on my long-term project list a hardware 'oracle' that would have everything and a local good model as a librarian/assistant and be solar powered in a pinch.
- dwohnitmok 3mo agoVinge also coined the term "the Singularity" (https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity) what he describes as "an opaque wall across the future" once superhuman artificial intelligence comes on the scene.
- awinter-py 3mo agohe didn't? stan ulam credits 'singularity' to von neumann vinge wrote his singularity piece in the 80s I believe
- dwohnitmok 3mo agoVinge addresses this in the linked article. > Stan Ulam [28] paraphrased John von Neumann as saying: >> One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. > Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see [25]).) which hews much closer to how people who are fans of the term use it (the Singularity explicitly refers to the rise of superhumanly intelligent systems, not just the progress of technology overall).
- cyberrock 3mo agoWell it's close to the author's intention for Fahrenheit 451, but just not what everyone wants it to mean.
- thechao 3mo agoWhich book that was rare was destroyed? I'm interested to know a few titles.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Cynddl 3mo agoThe 404media article mentions notably https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-firms-destroying-obscure-editions-train-ai-models https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi... which says: > The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).
- infinite_spin 3mo ago> Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021) How is a book from 2021 considered rare in this context? There's almost certainly a digital copy of it in existence prior to Anthropic purchasing a print edition.
- ACCount37 3mo agoNiche text. It's not impossible that there was only ever under a thousand of them printed and released into circulation. A digital copy would exist somewhere, of course. But for us, that only matters if we can buy or download it. And for AI companies, that only matters if they can get a digital copy DRM-free and licensed permissively enough.
- sidewndr46 3mo agoThis argument doesn't make any sense. All manner of AI companies just ingest whatever random text they can find on the internet to train their data, including copyrighted publications. Why would DRM on a digital copy of a book matter?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- est31 3mo ago> You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright? IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright law than AI companies. Scanning books you own should be legal from a copyright point of view, and not require shredding. Second, one should think about abandoned property provisions for copyright works published more than 50 years ago and in danger of being forgotten: once challenged, either you as the owner have to prove that the work is preserved for future generations (e.g. in various libraries around the world), or you have to authorize further copies, or you give up copyright on the work.
- croes 3mo agoBooks that are shredded can’t be scanned by competitors.
- jfyi 3mo agoYeah, this is the point. I don't understand the bulk of this conversation. Copyright doesn't matter, the books themselves don't matter. All that matters is that their corpus of training data grows faster than their competitors.
- sethops1 3mo ago> Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright? It's cheaper to scan the books if you do it destructively. Cost. That's why they're shredding irreplaceable texts. Nothing to do with copyright. https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/ https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-...
- cestith 3mo agoOne doesn’t need to pulp the pages after scanning though. After scanning, they could be rebound and put into a library.
- stuartjohnson12 3mo agoI think people are, on the whole, too precious about old things. In the case of books produced after major commercial printing began, I don't believe it is the paper that imbues the book with historical value. Indeed, I think there's a high chance that this process increases preservation of the most relevant part of the media - the actual content! There are tons of old rolls of film slowly rotting away in warehouses that were never digitised. Even for beloved media, the BBC occasionally tracks down an old lost episode of Dr Who. For now these books are in corpuses of training data, but eventually I trust they will make their way to the rest of us.
- Cynddl 3mo ago> For now these books are in corpuses of training data, but eventually I trust they will make their way to the rest of us. What makes you think they will? What would be the incentives for these companies to do so?
- stuartjohnson12 3mo agoWell, you probably weren't going to go and find any rare, non-digitised books to physically go and read (unless you were going to, in which case, rock on), so we can start by benchmarking relative probability there. 1. At some level of critical information-withholding mass, a leak or disclosure similar to SciHub is inevitable because of the commonly held opposition to hiding knowledge. 2. Availability via Google Books or similar. 3. Availability via AI model reference. 4. Failing any of the above, better AI models that are more capable of doing more things, at the expense of books that were likely to go unread (revealed preference, rare books are often rare for a reason). This will obviously be a nonstarter if you don't want this to happen, but I think it would be good for the world if it did. I think category of old books that were going to be read or otherwise become important parts of human knowledge that have not yet been digitised and now will never become so because they are instead being shredded and will never make their way into the light because of AI company data hoarding is a small category.
- croes 3mo agoSo if the Mona Lisa is part of a model we can burn it?
- ACCount37 3mo agoThe publishers sued AI companies for training on shadow library data, hoping to negotiate content deals for big $$$ down the line. Instead, they got analog hole'd. Turns out that buying an old book for $5 and destructively scanning it for $25 is way cheaper than paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers. What I don't buy is it being "rare, precious books". First, they're not after ancient texts - they're after the books that there's still copyright on. Second, when it comes to books, "old" doesn't mean "valuable" - plenty of libraries destroy old books because there's no demand for them, and storage costs you. This is how those scanning companies get books for so cheap.
- SirFatty 3mo agoI see.. so the various AI companies are in the right on this?
- master_crab 3mo agoIt can be the case that everyone in “a fight” is wrong.
- infinite_spin 3mo agoI think they are in the legal sense of right, and I think they only discarded the remains of these dissected books because previous rulings (e.g. archive.org's lending practices of digital copies of books they physically owned) gave rise to a situation where destruction bore less legal risk. As for the moral case, I don't have much to say on that, we all have our own lines in that sand.
- jerf 3mo agoI would say that especially for books out of copyright, they are unquestionably legally in the right. There is no legal standing for "I like books and it makes me feel squicky when someone disrespects them". Nothing stops you from buying old books and using them as decoupage[1] fodder, using them to start a campfire, or making paper airplanes out of their paper. Moreover, while it is emotionally appealing to some people to want to add some sort of "responsibility to society" to people who own the old books, it's a very emotional plea that can't really be manifested in the real world. As already pointed out in other places, "an old book" itself doesn't really mean much in terms of what its value is in any particular dimension. Plus, I am always deeply suspicious of anything that expands to "Other people, who are not me, should expend vast quantities of resources so that in the next five or ten times I think about this issue for the rest of my life I feel slightly better about this issue" which is what this really amounts to. I think that as superficially appealing as that may be, it's really a very hostile and demanding position to take. Personally, to the extent that I would want to lay a "social responsibility" on the AI companies, I'd like to see something like they are either obligated, or ideally, just do it of their own free will, to make the scans of the books that are out of copyright available for some reasonable fee (ideally, "free because we like the PR", but given the scope demanding it be free is not reasonable), and without them trying to lay any further claims on the public-domain results. Trading "one old book somewhere, inaccessible to the world" for "a scan of the book and an OCR of it" I would judge a net win for society for rather a lot of these old books, which are by no means "worthless" sitting in some old collection somewhere but would be a lot more useful for being available. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupage , since I imagine a number of people won't know what that is.
- vessenes 3mo agoI don't see any proof of shredding here. Most book scanners I'm aware of are from Google's scanning days, and those had cameras plus page turning. If we use 'shredding' to mean A book is laid flat, its cover is removed, and then a paper cutter cuts through the binding to create a flat stack of sheets, which are then fed to a sheet feeder, then I could maybe imagine this is better than a page-turning scanner. But, sheet feeding old paper sucks shit, bro. It's not fun. Upshot, I think we'd like to hear from an anonymous frontier lab employee here to see what's going on -- there are a lot of books in Anna's archive available at considerably less difficulty.
- Jolter 3mo agoThe idea here is that the frontier labs are no longer willing to risk using the likes of Anna’s Archive, because they have already been held legally liable for that in the past.
- vessenes 3mo agoAre you referring to the META lawsuit? I think the current landscape is not bad for the frontier labs -- it's settled law that it's legal to 'read' and ingest this data. Anthropic went ahead and just settled a licensing deal for content. The open issue in that META suit is whether or not any distribution happened, as I understand it. I'm certain they all have full backups of the archive somewhere in the org.
- Jolter 3mo agoYes, that’s the case I’m on about. Training notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure downloading the torrent was a crime to begin with.
- lousken 3mo agoThat's why archive.org should have never been sued for lending books they had physical copy of. This is the result. Publishers should be more careful what they wish for.
- Incipient 3mo agoPublishers don't care if rare books get shredded?
- azan_ 3mo agoYeah, why would it be bad for publishers? If anything they'd most likely encourage more book shredding!
- the-grump 3mo agoAnd, regrettably, The Archive lent books regardless of physical possession. Publishers had accepted the prior arrangement before The Archive decided to push it, if not explicitly then implicitly by not suing. I'm a believer in The Archive's mission, and I wish they had treated the goodwill they'd accumulated as something worth preserving and not a currency to be spent. It has been stated by many before me: lending books should have been handled by a separate entity, especially when they removed the physical backing requirement.
- kmeisthax 3mo agoJust to be clear, publishers hadn't accepted the "controlled digital lending" (CDL) premise, not even with the one-to-one ratio. Their position was always "first sale ends when the atoms do". There was even controlling precedent: a few years before IA tried their online lending library thing, there was an "MP3 resale" company called ReDigi that had lost on very similar grounds. The publishers suing IA even made sure to sue in the same venue that had decided the ReDigi case so it'd be controlling precedent. Furthermore, in the discovery for the Internet Archive case, publishers had already found a case where IA had lent out books despite knowing their partner libraries wasn't actually withdrawing loaned-out copies from circulation. The CDL premise was always just a suggestion, and IA would have still lost their case if they hadn't done the National Emergency Library (NEL) stunt or if they'd been sued in another venue that hadn't had the ReDigi case as precedent. It's important to note that whenever a company decides to sue for copyright, it is often late, because the company is banking infringements up to the 3-year statute of limitations and because building a meritorious case takes time. The lack of a timely lawsuit proves almost nothing about the intent of a publisher with a valid case against you. The thing is, I don't even think the whole stunt damaged much of the IA's goodwill? I know of a few people who withheld donations to IA, but that was mainly under the assumption that publishers would be getting a billion-dollar damage award that would immediately bankrupt IA and result in it's archives being sold off to Lexis-Nexis or something. The funny thing is, IA wound up settling for a sum so small they had to promise never to reveal it, and the danger is gone, so the only thing people complain about now is just that the NEL stunt maybe pushed them "above the radar" or something. It's still insane that shredding books for AI training is legal, but this isn't.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Good4boothee 3mo ago> A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Really? That sure wasn't a thing when one startup got sued for streaming from its wall od dvd-players, and they adhered to 1 disc = maximum 1 stream at same time.
- fmaccomber 3mo agoThat's not an accurate characterization of the ruling
- retinaros 3mo agoif they do this you can foresee what else they can do
- azan_ 3mo agoWhat else they can do based on this?
- qsera 3mo agoIf they are destroying old books, then it shows where their values lie...
- azan_ 3mo agoWhere? Could you stop with the vague posting?
- qsera 3mo ago[flagged]
- azan_ 3mo agoI genuinely want to know what exact point you are trying to make, I'm not a mind reader.
- qsera 3mo agoThis entity is destroying books and make them only accessible via the "intelligence" exposed by their LLMs. So I ll give you two options... * their values are aligned with the best interests of humanity * their values are not aligned with the best interests of humanity. Now go ahead and read my mind!
- pfdietz 3mo ago> make them only accessible But that's a lie. They're not destroying the last copy of books.
- timcobb 3mo agoThis kind of reads like a blood libel. My guess is they're buying all those books that University libraries are throwing away these days (to see other HM threads for that), kinda sad but probably aren't "rare books" in the way people are thinking
- azan_ 3mo agoThe comments there are absolutely unhinged. There are some good reasons for being anti-AI, but why dilute it with this kind of bullshit: > It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control
- swed420 3mo ago> why dilute it with this kind of bullshit: > > It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control That's only bullshit if you trust AI companies to serve the book contents without alteration.
- dpark 3mo agoI don’t trust or expect AI companies to serve books at all. That’s not what they are scanning them for.
- swed420 3mo agoNot in a traditional sense, but obviously on the surface, they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back. The point is that even under the best intentions, hallucinations occur. Then there's the fact that most models have an ideological bias programmed into them. The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order?
- dpark 3mo ago> they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back. Sure, in the same sense that they regurgitate any other text they consume. LLMs by definition do not have the full training dataset available, though. It’s far larger than the resulting model. So they can’t reliably reproduce full text without an external source (or if it’s in the training data repeatedly). ChatGPT actually refused to give me a bible quote the other day, presumably because I ran into some general “book regurgitation” safety net. > The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order? Honestly, yeah. The idea that people or corporations should hold onto books forever because of a cultural “ick” about throwing out books is a bit ridiculous. Most books end up in landfills. They aren’t feeding Da Vinci manuscripts into this pipeline. They are feeding still-in-copyright books.
- johnxianren 3mo agoI have zero proof for this, but just a what if: what if Anthropic's strict anti-China stance actually means the Chinese training corpus is way more valuable than people realize?
- fibobrain 3mo ago[dead]
- skybrian 3mo agoIt’s unclear whether ISBNdb will scan books without ISBN’s, which were invented in the late 1960’s. Customers appear to be ordering books to be scanned by ISBN? Here is one book seller’s experience: > Bulk purchases also usually reflect interest in a specific topic, whereas the recent, very large purchases were of books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases. Article is paywalled, but I saved a few quotes here: https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/post/1026 https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/post/1026
- hackernudes 3mo agoAlso discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381838 from June 2025.
- enaaem 3mo agoThis is the destruction of Western civilisation.
- Springtime 3mo agoIt seems a key contention of theirs is the possibility that rare books are being destroyed this way, yet the things they cite don't seem to suggest this (based on their paraphrasing), they just throw the following at the end to make it seem like it's occurring to irreplaceable books: > You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. Is there evidence of this? Since otherwise they could very well be describing what is only occurring to in-print or non-rare books. (This is a genuine question since their post doesn't shed any light on it.)
- D13Fd 3mo agoThere is zero reason to shred 18th century books. Any such books are out of copyright.
- samastur 3mo agoThey are, but using the same process for all books is simpler and cheaper.
- RIMR 3mo agoYes, that is what the person you are responding to is saying. That's why they are questioning the assumption that this practice extends to 18th-century books that are solidly in the public domain. If it is happening, it is an outrage. However, the 404 article doesn't actually provide any evidence of this; it just connects the shredding of digitized books and the digitizing of rare books to the assumed shredding of rare books, which isn't necessarily happening.
- 4ndrewl 3mo agoJust sociopaths doing sociopath things. Bugger civilization.
- qingcharles 3mo agoThough they're not shredded simply due to copyright, they're also shredded due to cost, speed and the quality of the scans.
- pu_pe 3mo agoFrom what I understand, the rare books in question are not some historically relevant medieval manuscripts, but rather some relatively recent books (still under copyright) for which there are few print copies available for purchase. I am not sure that physically destructing one copy of this type of book to preserve its contents digitally is so bad. Pretty much anything that is still under copyright should be valuable only for its content, not for the physical medium it's printed on.
- lejalv 3mo ago"To preserve them digitally" For whom? is the relevant question
- flipped 3mo ago[dead]
- eru 3mo ago> Pretty much anything that is still under copyright should be valuable only for its content, not for the physical medium it's printed on. Well, there are special collectors editions with the signature of the author and gold pages or whatnot. But the AI companies are probably not using those.
- godshatter 3mo agoIs slightly modifying some weights in a markov chain somewhere really preserving it's contents?
- storus 3mo agoIt's not really Markov chain as you need full P(x_t|x_{t-1}, x_{t-2}... x_1) instead of just P(x_t|x_{t-1}).
- pessimizer 3mo agoThey used to put them all up on books.google.com until they were ordered not to if they were less that 100 years old. Most of the stuff that was accessible was copied to archive.org, and almost all of that stuff ended up on annas-archive and library genesis. Consequently, many/most books are more available now than they've ever been. This is mostly a copyright question, not a question of preservation. I say mostly, because those scans, without redundancy and fingerprinting, can be changed and bowdlerized in the future without remaining physical copies as a reference. I own about 3500 print books, and started a project to find scans for all of them (that I need to get back to.) Average publication year is probably around 1975, and the bulk ranging from the 1940s to the 2000s. I made it through about 1500, and couldn't find maybe 40, most of them bad. e.g. self-published stuff like "My God Heals, Does Yours?" This was a few years ago, if I went through those 40 now, I bet I'd find half of them. I hate what the AI companies are getting away with, but only because they get to violate copyright while being aggressive enforcers of copyright and DRM circumvention laws. Destructive scanning, however, is a cheap way to get a good copy of a book online. If that book were then put in a place where teveryone interested in its contents (or who are just hoarders) can get a hold of it, you'll be able to find a verifiable copy of it 1000 years from now. As of now, Russia and annas-archive are just a few points of failure that can erase those words forever. It will be done with armed, uniformed men, and people will claim it is not dystopia, but justice. I don't want the only copy of the text of a book to lie in the interpretation of some privately trained LLM.
- musha68k 3mo agoAt the very least why not upload the scanned books to the internet archive while already at it? This is highly disturbing news; is this standard practice? What did Google Books do before?
- qsera 3mo agoYes, this is very disturbing to me. I recently discovered how great old, out of circulation/print can be. Now old abandoned libraries are like a treasure trove to me. If these books are not digitaly preserved, that sounds very sad to me.
- qsera 3mo agoI will make a robot scanner for books. I will then scan all the books in my state libraries and make a digital copy of them (without destroying them) before these things come for them. I wish...
- D13Fd 3mo agoThis is the result of our copyright law in the United States, which is extremely tilted to favor authors and publishers. The judge made exactly the right call and the companies are following the law. The fix here is to change the law to permit training AI without destroying the original materials. But that is going to be a heavy lift.
- flipped 3mo ago[dead]
- DarkIye 3mo agoThis is the opposite of a book burning. These books which only a few would ever know the names of, let alone find, let alone read, are being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches.
- swed420 3mo ago> are being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches What guarantee do we have that the book contents will be served unfiltered and unaltered?
- dpark 3mo ago> being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches You make it sound like they are running a second Project Gutenberg. They most definitely are not making these available for electronic searches. At least not searches the public can participate in.
- coffeefirst 3mo agoCorrect. If they were doing this with Gutenberg/Smithsonian/some library so there's both a public archive and training the language model, it wouldn't have the ick factor.
- left-struck 3mo agoAre they being digitised? That word implies that the book would have a digital representation of the original, which is not what an LLM is. Can they be found in electronic searches? I mean I kinda get what you mean, the knowledge was potentially forgotten and now it might not be, but also the authors who created that knowledge get no credit, no reward.
- imhoguy 3mo agoAnd knowledge from these books can be "imprinted" into a model to be used by much more people or even survive this planet once sent into space in a probe.
- 3mo ago
- altcognito 3mo agoIs there any proof of this at all beyond this random message?
- Ratelman 3mo agoYeah - it does feel a bit overly dramatic, books mentioned from a potentially related article are from like 2018 (https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-firms-destroying-obscure-editions-train-ai-models https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi...). Let's not pump the drama more than we need to, Sam Altman made another mention of the singularity over the weekend so enough of that going around.
- bebe8393jrir 3mo ago[flagged]
- trollbridge 3mo agoWe reprint old books after checking out copyrights (for all books, this means pre-1930, but for some (I'd actually say most) it also means ones published up to 1964 and 1973, depending on how the rightsholders did (or didn't) do the renewals). We use a special guillotine type cutter to cut off the binding and then store the pages in a sealed plastic bag which goes in the archives; they're stored there indefinitely in case the book needs rescanned for some reason. We also keep the original, uncompressed copies of the books on magnetic disks. We also go out of our way to try to find rare books published in 1931, 1932, etc. so they are ready to go once the copyright expires. And no, no AI company has ever come to us and asked to run training on all of our scanned copies.
- palmotea 3mo ago> We reprint old books after checking out copyrights Who is we? > then store the pages in a sealed plastic bag which goes in the archives; they're stored there indefinitely Is that the best thing for archival storage? Like could things like chemical breakdown increase the humidity in the sealed bag or concentrate corrosive chemical vapors? I was under the impression the best environment was an actively climate-controlled environment.
- ComputerPerson 3mo agoThe issue is mold. Sealed plastic bags for old books is a recipe for mold. At least they're individually stored, so they would develop mold at independent rates. (And maybe the seal allows airflow.) Most books have some mold by the time they're ~100 years old, it's just not enough to cause a serious problem. Sealed enclosures (wrappings, bags, tubs) are a nightmare situation. Even packing books too tighly on shelves accelerates mold growth to problematic levels.
- starkparker 3mo agoDealing with mold in an archival environment is a nightmare, and yeah, the only thing sealing the books in plastic does is make it easier to either throw them away, or to freeze them to try to kill and then manually clean out the mold. https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/3.-emergency-management/3.8-emergency-salvage-of-moldy-books-and-paper https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/3...
- _m_p 3mo agoLibrarians were already doing this at scale in a process euphemistically called "weeding": https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit/weeding https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...
- malfist 3mo agoThis is really dishonest framing, unless you really, honestly can't tell a difference between pulping a mass market paperback romance novel that there's 3 million of in circulation, and shredding an 18th century botanical text that there's only 2 copies of in existence.
- dwedge 3mo agoYou call of dishonest framing, but you're begging the question twice. Once that AI companies are really shredding 200 year old rare books, and once that libraries are only weeding mass market pulp fiction.
- malfist 3mo agoThat is literally what this article is about.
- streetfighter64 3mo agoThe "article" in question is a tweet. The "rare botanical text" is just an example the author of the tweet made up in order to generate sympathy.
- qsera 3mo agoAll those AI powers, and they cannot find a way to do it without destroying the books? Pathetic.
- freejazz 3mo agoWhy would you need to shred a book from the 1800s when it is in the public domain? Something is fishy here.
- petesergeant 3mo agoSo the premise here is that the books are valueless enough that they're being sold by weight, but they're also rare enough that someone will one day wonder where they went, and also that the AI companies aren't also saving the text somewhere much safer than physical media in a warehouse. k.
- simonw 3mo agoHere's the original story from 404 Media that this tweet is paraphrasing (without linking to, of course, because X disincentivizes links): https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/ https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-... The segment that talks about rare books: > One professional bookseller who specializes in selling foreign language books on these marketplaces told me that, starting in April, he and other booksellers noticed a historic spike in sales. [...] > This bookseller said his inventory is full of rare, foreign language, and low circulation books, meaning that if they are destroyed in the process of becoming training data, they’ll be even harder to obtain.
- api 3mo agoPeople would have at least somewhat less of a problem with this if they also put up an archive of PDFs of all these rare books if they are out of copyright. But that would help competitors with training data, which I assume is why they don’t do this.
- squidbeak 3mo agoI've limited sympathy for the publishers. It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright. And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick. It's ridiculous that in the 21st century, publication standards have fallen to the point where for most works a disposable format is the only type available - where no amount of money could buy a truly decent hardback copy. If we have to have copyright laws, I'd like to see two changes to them. When a publisher has no incentive to keep an edition in print, it should be available to any other publisher to print, without compensation to the original publisher, and with renegotiated royalties for the author. And if the publisher keeps a book in print - but only in bestseller-grade materials, bogroll paper that furrows in any humidity and perfect binding that molts its pages a couple of dry seasons later - and if it refuses to print a durable hardback copy with signatures, good paper and decent print - something that will still be readable in several generations' time - any other publisher keen to have a crack at it should be able to, again without any compensation for the original publisher, though perhaps in this case, with matching royalties for the author.
- nobodyandproud 3mo agoI agree. However, AI companies have managed to make publishers and copyright owners saints by comparison.
- kasey_junk 3mo agoBooks in the 17th and 18th century often didnt get bound by the publisher. They were done by independent binders for _custom_ orders. You’d see whole libraries with the owners binding/cover standards rather than per book. Books in that time were _luxury_ goods. Most people could not afford them. One of the ways that was changed was to introduce cheap, mass produced bindings that were lower quality than the bespoke artisianal bindings done by specialist craftsmen. You can still get custom bindings done. There exists whole niches on the internet of crafters that will take a production run book and strip its binding and make you extremely high quality and custom bindings and covers.
- 1234letshaveatw 3mo agoyou wouldn't believe how much shredding your local library does in the name of space conservation and to address changing borrower preferences and demographics. I doubt any AI company comes close to the annual combined library turnover
- pfdietz 3mo agoWhere I live there's a large library-associated biannual book sale where books are (effectively) reverse auctioned over a period of a few weeks. At the end, anything (with a few exceptions, like the Collector's Corner) that isn't sold is disposed of, with a large 18-wheel truck sized dumpster filled with items to be sent for pulping and recycling. The price at the end is $1 for a grocery bag full of books, so things that don't sell truly are perceived as worthless. https://booksale.org/ https://booksale.org/ Books are information delivery vehicles. We mostly shouldn't care about them any more than we care about a particular set of bits on a disk. Publishers also pulp large numbers of books themselves. This is a consequence of the Supreme Court's Thor Power Tools ruling, which clarified tax rules in the US so that keeping large inventories of unsold books was less economical.
- graemep 3mo agoIs this true? Rare books would very often be out of copyright for a start. What the the actual ruling that says you can scan if you destroy the original? ISBNdb is a database of book information, as you would guess from the name.
- roywiggins 3mo agoIt's cheaper to destructively scan.
- z0ltan 3mo ago[dead]
- paxys 3mo agoPeople keep bringing up these rare books but never share what they actually are. What are their names? When were they written? How many copies were in existence? Were they in libraries, or locked up in vaults? Did people have access to them prior to being scanned for AI? How many such books have actually been destroyed? Weird to see so many of these "trust me bro" twitter stories make it to the front page and cause outrage when no one has any real information.
- tasuki 3mo agoMaybe we should not have forced AI companies to shred rare books so they can use them for training?
- dandelioness 3mo agoThey change the info then destroy the source. Now the lie is in the LLM.
- tokai 3mo agoI don't buy this at all. Looking up some of the mentioned rare books, in other sources, on worldcat shows every single book available somewhere. Most of them in dozen or even hundreds of libraries.
- impsunrise 3mo agoironically, this tweet and account appear to be complete AI slop
- extra-AI 3mo agoAnd this is the beginning of the end for content creators. Why would I spend hours creating original content if Google can extract it and present the answer directly in an AI Overview? What is the incentive to keep doing the work? If creators stop producing high-quality original material, the information we get over the next few years will increasingly be based on recycled, low-quality garbage.
- Traster 3mo agoTake a look at most successful journalism today. It's behind a paywall. You get paid by the people who are interested and value your work. Can Google steal it and present it in an AI overview? Well kinda. Today Google is doing a trick - they're saying "You can refuse to consent to being fed into the slop machine, but if you do we won't crawl you for Google so you'll get no search traffic. But you're not going to get search traffic anyway! So you might as well opt out of being fed into the slop machine. And companies are starting to do that [1] It's really interesting, because essentially what it means is Google is turning into a walled garden, but there's nothing growing inside it so they have to continually import new plants to live in their walled garden and they're going to have to pay to do that. So soon Google will be paying news sites for the right to plumb their feed into the slop machine. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/business/media/google-search-publishers-ai-content-0fb06e41 https://www.wsj.com/business/media/google-search-publishers-...
- secretsatan 3mo agoIt’s even noted they’re looking for text pre 2022 as afterward, it’s tainted by their own shit, they don’t believe in the crap they’re making.
- Gander5739 3mo ago> they don’t believe in the crap they’re making A spurious claim; they simply want to avoid model collapse.
- secretsatan 3mo ago
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoMaybe we can kill two birds with one stone: digitize rare books and reverse the damage from Authors Guild v. Google [1]. Let AI companies do this. But require them to make the digital copies public. Maybe with a multi-year delay, to give the original scanner advantage to doing it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
- sixdimensional 3mo agoYeah, I was thinking along these lines... Let's say one of the books to be digitized and destroyed is the sole remaining copy of a book from 1850, which is now considered public domain. On one hand, hoarding such a book, stealing its content from the public domain, locking its content behind a for-profit machine, and destroying the only remaining copy is clearly wrong. It's equivalent to stealing a public resource, just like mining minerals or oil on public lands without a permit or mineral rights. Pure extraction. On the other hand, taking care to digitize the copy and making it available for free in perpetuity, as well as being required through regulation to provide access to that content through, let's say a public utility LLM/AI available for free through libraries and online... and perhaps after fair due diligence being required to preserve physical copies in a public archive of rare books of which there are no known remaining physical copies... That seems much more reasonable to me at least. I can imagine there are many who would not see it that way though. Do we see it happening or gaining regulatory, moral and/or public support?
- s1artibartfast 3mo agoI think this misconstrus what public domain is. It provides a freedom to circulate, but not access to the material. It is not a public owned resource. Turning a copy over to the public or state might be an interesting requirement for obtaining a copyright, but instituting that fix for new works now would have a 70 year lag time. Think of it this way, if I copyright a book and put it in my dresser for 70 years, that doesn't give the public the right to access it or come into my house and scan it after expiry
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoSource: https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/ https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-...
- regnull 3mo agoThe source for this is "I've heard it from some guy". Before we freak out, perhaps make sure it's actually happening?
- bryan_w 3mo agoThis is quite a reasonable take.
- aerodexis 3mo agoReminds me of Blood Meridian where The Judge meticulously sketches the rock glyphs that he comes across, and then destroys the original. Now that I think about it, The Judge is an apt metaphor for AI : "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
- karahime 3mo agoNo, it isn't. Nothing about training a model requires this. You're thinking of copyright, which does treat information this way.
- aerodexis 3mo agoSure, I'm conflating the tool w/ the people building the tool - but imo muddling the distinction is good, because the hard distinction is what tricks people into an unthinking mode.
- karahime 3mo agoNo. Again, it's copyright that says "create a symbolic version and destroy the source, so that the thing may enter a controlled regime". Copyright is, in literal terms, a restriction on your right to copy.
- TeMPOraL 3mo agoOn the contrary. The problem exists solely in copyright; AI companies are just users that happen to be popular to hate on, but this same legal situation applies to everyone else, including individuals. The issue under discussion is older than LLMs.
- RIMR 3mo agoWell, AI and Copyright are both related things that people created, so it's certainly relevant. I don't think the person you're responding to misspoke.
- Arshad-Talpur 3mo agoMay be I am old schools but rare books must remain rare and LLMs shouldnt have access to those books
- writtenone 3mo agoFrom 1984: "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
- Cider9986 3mo agoSupport your local shadow library: https://annas-archive.pk/donate https://annas-archive.pk/donate
- 999900000999 3mo agoThey should be forced to publicly release the books as an Ebook. Leave it up for anyone to download and then compensate the copyright holders later. In fact if ingesting these books for LLMs is fair use, us commoners should be able to read them for free. Maybe restrict commercial redistribution though.
- streetfighter64 3mo agoThere's a bunch of details regarding LLMs and copyright, but I don't see how > They should be forced to publicly release the books as an Ebook. would be reasonable in any way? The books aren't theirs to release publicly. If I brought a copy of any given movie on DVD, ripped it and used it to train my own "LLM" located at /dev/null, should I then be allowed (or even forced) to release the movie publicly for anyone to watch for free?
- cj 3mo agoThe alternative (throwing books away for no good reason) isn't much more reasonable.
- pfdietz 3mo agoIt happens on a massive scale, so it's completely reasonable. Books are disposable information delivery vehicles now. Publishers pulp great quantities of unsold books too.
- streetfighter64 3mo agoWell, destroying them once they already exist is reasonable, but producing garbage (e.g. great quantities of unsold books) on a "massive scale" is completely unreasonable though. But that's a larger problem that encompasses single use packaging and all the other plastic garbage we're producing all the time.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- coffepot77 3mo agoThis was known a long time ago? https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
- iandanforth 3mo agoIf true this is basically unforgivable. The wanton destruction of history is the stuff of the Third Reich and the Taliban. You simply cannot profess to care about knowledge, culture, or civilization while destroying the physical manifestations of the same.
- pfdietz 3mo agoYes, actually you can. The fetish of physical book worship is a fossil of an age when information storage and retrieval was much harder.
- BoxOfRain 3mo agoI strongly disagree with this take, a book might remain readable thousands of years from now but very few if not zero of our digital data formats likely will. We shouldn't be so quick to throw away diversity in the way information which may be useful for future generations is stored for the long term.
- pfdietz 3mo agoPaper doesn't easily survive for thousands of years. You know that pleasant used bookstore smell? It's paper slowly decomposing.
- BoxOfRain 3mo agoI'd be willing to bet that there's a lot more readable paper from thousands of years ago than there will be readable digital data from today in thousands of years. Digital information has to be actively preserved in every case, whereas paper can be passively preserved in some cases.
- pfdietz 3mo agoTexts from thousands of years ago survive only because they were repeatedly copied. There are some extreme examples like the Dead Sea Scrolls but they are the exception. Modern acid-free paper might last 1000 years; 500 is more typical. Acid paper breaks down in less than a century. Parchment was so expensive it was often scraped and reused; old texts can sometimes be recovered after being overwritten (palimpsests).
- mindslight 3mo agoThe design of copyright has always been to restrict the dissemination of knowledge so that somebody can turn a profit. The handwaved justification is that the profit encourages the creation of new knowledge whose dissemination can be restricted, but that still doesn't erase the fundamental dynamic. This is merely the latest incarnation. We can imagine a slightly different process on a few fronts - AI companies pay to digitize books (still for their own purposes), but are prevented from destroying the physical copies and they have to openly shared the digitized results. We would view that situation much more favorably - perhaps even as ideal, right? Those two dynamics could be backed up by court decisions or laws iff they weren't so plainly at odds with how copyright has been and is generally implemented and interpreted. For example, imagine them having to do this through some nonprofit library whose goals was preservation and dissemination. Instead, libraries have been sidelined as things that operate at the edge of the law rather than vital public institutions, whereas shredding books in secret is fully legally condoned.
- Cider9986 3mo agoThis is the correct take. Copyright has done more than anything else to prevent preservation and dissemination of knowledge. And it's forcing Anthropic's hand now. Although they could take more effort to preserve the books.
- mindslight 3mo agoI'm not going to absolve Anthropic here (even though I am a satisfied customer). They could probably get a court decision that it's fair use to non-destructively scan books and keep the physical books, legal inability to directly distribute the results notwithstanding. And they certainly have enough money to pay for some old salt mines or whatever, or fund a library-type institution to do so. What I'm indicting is the copyright regime being primarily focused on control and the prevention of dissemination. We can imagine a different world in which the publishers' suit against the Internet Archive went the other way (or was not even brought), and a public interest group sues Anthropic (et al) for destroying cultural commons, and gets a judgement saying all scanning must be done non-destructively and made available through institutions like the Internet Archive.
- hagen8 3mo agoWhere are the sources for that?
- goldlimetea 3mo ago[dead]
- cluckindan 3mo agoThis is not that different from having a book burning march. The fervent neocon tech overlords and their funding circles want a monopoly; not only on truth, but on ideas and thought in general.
- nailer 3mo agoDirect link: https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2081534588485296565 https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2081534588485296565
- iamsaitam 3mo agoIf you consider that AI companies should pay the same for a book, as a person does, you should read about royalties.
- HelloUsername 3mo agoAre the AI companies also destroying the digital scans they made?
- gowld 3mo agoAlmost certainly not, because they need that data for model-building and rebuilding., and the storage cost is completely trivial.
- HelloUsername 3mo agoSo the X post is not entirely true; there still exist copies of the original
- tannerr_dev 3mo agoabsolutely diabolical
- krunck 3mo agoIn a society that values science and knowledge, preservation of knowledge - and no, slurping text up into an LLM is not preservation - is more important than profits. These companies are regressive book burners.
- tekne 3mo agoYou know, I'm pretty sure post-slurping the text is still there...
- genxy 3mo agoI love it. Literally burning down civilization to generate losses from slop. This reminds me of the Simpsons Halloween episode where Homer gets a taste for his own flesh and eats himself to death. Maybe the Library of Alexandria didn't burn, it was digested. The market has solved the what do with excess knowledge problem.
- 03284782470 3mo ago[dead]
- storus 3mo agoThat's one way to pull the ladder if regulatory capture fails...
- Cider9986 3mo agoCan only blame AI companies to a limited extent. This is apparently the legal way to do things because of stupid copyright laws. Support your local shadow library: https://annas-archive.pk/donate https://annas-archive.pk/donate
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Cider9986 3mo agoIt's not like these books were available to everyone before. If they are destroying one physical copy that's not accessible to the public and replacing it with a scanned copy that isn't accessible to the public, that's not a huge change. Except that will probably last longer digitized. Ideally they wouldn't destroy the physical copies, but this isn't anywhere as bad as book burning in Nazi Germany. I find going after shadow libraries to be much worse because law enforcement is trying to prevent discrimination of knowledge to the public. The real blame here should be going onto copyright laws. Anthropic could take more care by figuring out if the books are still affected by copyright. But this is just a company trying its best in an unfortunate regulatory environment. Support your local shadow library: https://annas-archive.pk/donate https://annas-archive.pk/donate
- pyrophane 3mo agoEdging a little closer to the Krazam video "rare data hunters."
- bwfan123 3mo agoThere needs to be wider reporting of this if it is true. Where are the journalists ? If this is true, it is scorched earth on the world's knowledge base. And the business models are not proven yet. I can now see why some ai companies paints a dire picture of the future - they are basically annihilating all knowledge sources at the altar of their ai gods. I can also see why there is growing ai-skepticism.
- frozenseven 3mo agoBecause there's nothing to report. Books like this are routinely thrown out. By publishers, libraries, and regular people alike.
- pmkary 3mo agoHorribly horrible horrific horrible insane psychopaths
- gowld 3mo agoEveryone who refused to buy these books in the past was voting for the books' destruction by default. Authors don't owe you a copy of their work. Bookstores don't you real estate to hold a book you don't want and will never want.
- lagrange77 3mo agoCould someone explain to me, why rare books are so precious for them? Say i feed the largest LLM a book of an alien civilisation, that it definitely hasn't seen before. Then this tiny piece of text muds the vast ocean (latent space) of the model minimally. It will not be able to cite from that book reliably after that fine tuning. Especially for rare books, because them being rare implies, that there aren't 1000s of other books, that encode the same information. It's general language modelling capabilities might get an iota better, of course. But for putting factual information into it, wouldn't RAG be a much more solid approach?
- greenlimetea 3mo agoThis is potentially very bad. Like, Library of Alexandria or Council of Nicaea bad. We may never be able to recover the information if, say, one of these AI companies copied or translated it wrong then destroyed the source material. Maybe it's from bad OCR, or maybe from a bad actor - but there are a lot of ways history and information could change in this game-of-telephone like transfer of knowledge. What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing.
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoThey're destroyed for 3 reasons: It is the cheapest way to get them scanned. It is the fastest way to get them scanned. It doesn't need to be safely archived for another century until it is resold to someone that has not yet been born.
- rubyfruit 3mo agoOr they change info then destroy the source. Is that possible at all or nah?
- ianm218 3mo ago> What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing. The main reason is the machines they use to scan books at scale destroy the books in the process.
- rubyfruit 3mo agoHow convenient
- TeMPOraL 3mo ago> What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing. It is the copyright thing. Despite what people say about scanning, the fact is, non-destructive scanning machines have been built and perfected long time ago. This was preferred in the past, back before some major kerfuffle with the publishers during COVID, but that incidentally happened to be before LLMs became a thing, so AI companies never had that option available.
- 1970-01-01 3mo ago>And the judge said it's legal. Was was the alternative? Order them to stop quietly destroying their property, it is making someone else very upset?
- xboxnolifes 3mo agoIsn't this the legal requirement for digitizing books usually? I dont like that its being done, but I feel the direction of anger for this one is misplaced. Or at least partially misplaced.
- silverlimetea 3mo ago[flagged]
- mchusma 3mo agoYes part of the legal defense used to good effect is that they are copying one for one (not really making a copy but rather converting it). I agree with many in this thread that copyright reform is the best solution here. Shorter copyrights. Lose copyright if you stop using it (printing it), more clear digitization and preservation guidelines.
- emsign 3mo agoThat's exactly why I have been hoarding physical media for years now. I knew they would be buying them up, besides the usual dumpster fire they would end up in when people throw them away. CDs, DVDs, BluRays, books, vinyl, everything. And as they are physical they are not prone to retro-editing. Just like in 1984. Luckily I don't live in NYC where book hoarders are being evicted because of "fire hazard". Just like in Fahrenheit 451.
- bronlund 3mo agoYou can’t champion on the greed that is copyright and then be sour when Anthropic tries to work within this framework. There is a word for that kind of behavior.
- pfdietz 3mo ago> bulk-buying rare books Isn't that oxymoronic? If they can be bulk-bought they aren't rare.
- computerphage 3mo agoEach individual book is rare, the purchase includes many different rare books
- pfdietz 3mo agoIf they were rare, they'd be valuable, and would not be sold as part of a bulk purchase.
- ertucetin 3mo agoThey are playing dirty.
- SwtCyber 3mo ago[dead]
- dpedu 3mo agoDigitizing books, even if it means the destruction of the original, means more people end up having access to the knowledge within, and is a good thing. Full stop.
- xgulfie 3mo agoThey are digitized for private training and not for public use. Not a single human is reading these.
- TSiege 3mo agoHow much of this shredding them isn’t just copyright but rather they don’t want anyone else having this information in their datasets? Horrendous stewardship of humanities collective knowledge all for profit and the race to have the one god computer to rule them all. As more time passes it becomes clearer that America’s AI strategy should’ve been a public private partnership where the public owned the datasets and the underlying models and we’d leave the productionizing of LLMs to private businesses
- justthehuman 3mo agoHonestly, I think its just the fastest way to scan them (there are slower non destructive methods available too!) Also, they can then just recycle/dispose of the paper and don't have to worry about reselling/donating the books themselves. I suspect this is all about speed of data ingestion and anything else is a side effect they don't care about.
- justthehuman 3mo agoI had some old computer/unix/etc books for which I couldn't find digital copies. I was considering paying to have them scanned because lugging them around each time I moved was getting to be a pain in the butt. When I found out they destroyed the book in the process I could just never go through with it. I later found out there are non-destructive scanning machines (even open source ones!) but ended up selling the books before I ever went that route.
- 59percentmore 3mo agoLiterally Rainbows End. Vinge was an oracle. It's a real shame that no one ever got that book in front of Hayao Miyazaki's eyes.
- mwigdahl 3mo agoWell, an oracle except for that part in the same book where unlimited access to the internet made all children prodigies self-motivated by their love of learning.
- 59percentmore 3mo agoI don't know that that's an accurate description of the circumstances in the books. They were born into a world of ever-present and almost-ubiquitous connectivity, and heavily encouraged to string together modular black boxes to build new things. This didn't make them prodigies, it just kept them from falling behind. They lived in a world where even the physical shape of their schools wasn't stable and reliable. When you compare to kids learning from home during the pandemic, on Chromebooks and iPads, building TikTok videos with CapCut instead of an actual local NLE application... you can start to hear the echoes.
- mwigdahl 3mo agoThe book clearly and repeatedly makes the point that immersion in ubiquitous computing made the younger generation smarter and quicker than their forebears. Miri was 13 and Juan was, what, 9? Both were depicted as running rings around the older generation, even those who weren't taken out of action like Robert. The form and maybe even the content of electronics in school may echo, sure, but the results sure don't.
- 59percentmore 3mo agoNo, it doesn't, and no, they weren't. They were depicted as more comfortable and capable with the technology that they'd never known a world without. Some adults weren't able to keep up, but some (most) were. If children had really become fundamentally smarter, the hierarchy of authority would have been upended, and it clearly wasn't. Miri still had to mostly listen to her parents.
- psychoslave 3mo agoGuys never heard of palimpsests and how your regular scans won’t necessarily catch all data there is in the material? Of course even disregarding this fact, this is utterly disgusting attack on humanity heritage, just as much as any group out there destroying what we should all cherish be it for the historical artifact they represent. Whatever how US judge name it, they don’t worth more than their same-behavior consorts that is terrorists and totalitarian governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://organiser.org/2025/07/24/304285/world/china-wages-war-on-tibetan-faith-300-stupas-and-guru-padmasambhava-statue-bulldosed-in-drakgo-amid-crackdown/ https://organiser.org/2025/07/24/304285/world/china-wages-wa... https://www.historyexpose.com/things/demolition-afghanistans-giant-buddha-statues https://www.historyexpose.com/things/demolition-afghanistans... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-96432-9_7 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-96432-9_...
- tudou527 3mo ago[flagged]
- bigbuppo 3mo agoI can't help but make a comparison to one of those road planning memes. Just one more book, bro, and we'll solve AGI forever. Trust us, bro, just one more book. Come on, let me have those words and we'll solve AGI forever.
- m4rtink 3mo agoDestoying books, for any reason, is a crime and it should not be done, ever!
- juancn 3mo agoI dunno. It's sad in a romantic kinda way, because of the lost artifact, but the information is what makes the book valuable, not really the medium. The out of copyright books don't really need to be destroyed anyway for them to be fair use for AI training, and arguable, even if you needed to, you only need one copy per title per company at most. So it's not a gigantic loss.
- adamddev1 3mo agoBut is the information really scanned and preserved for direct access? Or is it just trained into an LLM so that we can only get fuzzy answers about the information?
- rubylimetea 3mo agoThe gigantic loss is that they are destroying the original copy. They aren’t verbatim uploading the text 1:1. They are creating vector embeddings and training documents from it, changing whatever they want since it’s in private and protected by NDA, and destroying the original source of information so that nobody knows what was originally recorded.
- cormacrelf 3mo agoThis story was reported by 404 media. OP linked some random person’s tweet. https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/ https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-...
- RIMR 3mo agoI feel outraged, but I also worry this article isn't necessarily responding to what's actually happening. It's a weird practice to destroy a book when you digitize it, but it's at least an understandable legal strategy to ensure that the digital copy "replaces" the physical one. However, this is only going to apply to books that have active copyrights. This author suggests that a rare 18th-century botanical text could fall victim to the same fate, but I am somehow doubtful that this is the case. Non-destructive scanning is trivial, and these kinds of books are likely being processed in a quantity that would allow for it without backing up the pipeline. I really like 404 media, but it doesn't really seem like the evidence points to the conclusion here. Yes, AI companies are shredding books that they digitize, and yes, AI companies are digitizing old, rare books. But the rationale for the book shredding doesn't exist for the old, rare books, so I would need more evidence than just "putting two-and-two together". At the end of the day, old books with no resale value, including rare books, end up destroyed with some regularity by libraries and bookstores. While this may be an excessively generous take, at least this way the books are getting digitized before they become pulp. The real tragedy will be if the old, rare books that were digitized are never shared with the rest of us, because they were ONLY digitized to train AI, and not to actually preserve anything.
- dclaw 3mo agoIt's just modern book burning. The contents don't even matter, you will never see the text and images in these books again.
- nh23423fefe 3mo agoPearl clutching nonsense
- rubylimetea 3mo agoI agree, this is bad. They’re privately putting info into their LLMs, changing whatever they want, sorry, “sanitizing” then destroying the original.
- skeledrew 3mo agoAnother consequence of the existence of that thing called "copyright".
- opem 3mo agoIts ironic how the whole systems reacts when someone like open library tries to actually do digital preservation
- imperfect_light 3mo agoWhere's the evidence the books are "rare"?
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- BVHauge 3mo ago[flagged]
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- uslic001 3mo agoVernor Vinge wrote a book that had this as part of the plot. The book you are looking for is Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Published in 2006, it features a fictional undertaking called the Librareome Project. Facebook ·Artificial Intelligence News Key Details from the Novel The Process: Physical library books are fed into industrial machines that shred the pages and blast them through a camera tunnel at high speeds. The Technology: High-resolution cameras photograph the flying paper shreds, and software uses the unique tear marks to piece the text back together (similar to shotgun sequencing in genetics). The Conflict: The story depicts public protests and pushback from people who want physical, analog books preserved rather than violently digitized and destroyed.
- hedgedoops2 3mo agoThat sounds like a great opportunity to digitize all rare books and to provide them to libraries? And the competition, so they dont have to shred 2 or more copies?