3 ms·

I am thinking about a long essay Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson wrote to his pals abroad, and were left abroad. I am thinking about a photo book by an Ind

I am thinking about a long essay Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson wrote to his pals abroad, and were left abroad. I am thinking about a photo book by an Indonesian naturalist who is famous on Bali, and took amazing photos of wildlife on Sulawesi in 1926, and colored in, and somehow ended up in New Jersey in the 1980s. I am thinking about a collection of essays written by a teenage J.D. Salinger who he left unsigned at a café thinking nobody would want to read them but just leaving it up to chance. Or maybe a Jackson Pollock sketchbook he lost at a party which ended in the host’s bookshelf, and finally at an estate sale. Plenty of such unknown unknown exist, and the AI machine will inevitably destroy a bunch of them at this scale.

tptacek 2mo ago
You're trying to imagine rare valuable books and then fantasizing about AI companies destroying them, but what's actually happening here is that AI companies are acquiring, digitizing, and then pulping the instruction manuals to 1983-vintage copy machines. This is all such a special-pleading argument. You know what other institution snatches up books and destroys them at huge scale? Public library systems. People clean out their attics and basements and drop off huge boxes full of books at libraries; libraries take the things they know will circulate, and destroy the rest. Take a guess as to how Þórbergur Þórðarson fares at the Newark Public Library. Wait, bad example, they stopped accepting book donations because nobody wants your old books. They tell you to give the books to thrift stores instead. Guess what the thrift stores do with them? You know how many times I've read stories about the grave damage libraries are doing to human culture? Zero, zero times.
- frm88 2mo ago
  You're trying to imagine rare valuable books and then fantasizing about AI companies destroying them, but what's actually happening here is that AI companies are acquiring, digitizing, and then pulping the instruction manuals to 1983-vintage copy machines. Source? You state that in a tone that implies you have verifiable knowlege of this. All the information I found says that the exact number, titles and authors are under NDA.
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    It's in the 404 story.
    - frm88 2mo ago
      It's not. The 404 article states (paraphrase): we're not going to disclose any titles, so where does your information come from. Please provide a link.
      - tptacek 2mo ago
        https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-companies-are-buying-up-tons-of-rare-old-books-to-train-their-ai-models https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-compan...
        frm88 2mo ago
        But we don't necessarily know what we might find valuable in the future. 1. This is not the 404 media story you quoted as source 2. Maiberg's answer is most likely a book that has no emotional value. Translation: they do not know
        tptacek 2mo ago
        You're right. It's merely the writer of the 404 story, discussing their story.
  - svachalek 2mo ago
    Given no information, would you assume companies that are buying "huge quantities" of "rare" books are getting first edition Jules Verne by the crate, or 1989 Highlights magazines recovered from dentist offices?
    - runarberg 2mo ago
      Both. I think they are just buying whatever they can get their hands on most of it is going to be junk, but one in a million is going to be a rare and valuable book which we didn’t even know existed. After scanning and destroying 10 million books, AI companies will have destroyed 10 such books. (I am obviously assuming a Poisson distribution here where I pulled the parameter p = 1/1000000 out of thin air; point is p is non-zero; and at this scale the undesirable event is bound to happen a bunch of times).
- runarberg 2mo ago
  I assume public libraries know what they are doing and know which book they are destroying, that they keep an accurate inventory and hire professionals maintaining said inventory and marking which books can safely be destroyed. I assume no such things of AI companies.
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    Obviously that's not true. Newark is literally telling people to talk all their old rare books to thrift stores, which will immediately throw them in dumpsters.
    - runarberg 2mo ago
      This is a bad comparison. Public libraries are trying their best to preserve rare copies, despite being overwhelmed and underfunded. If they come across a rare copy chances are it will be preserved. When an AI company comes across a rare book, it will not recognize it as such. There is also a fundamental difference in intention. AI companies are seeking out old books and will destroy them. Public libraries are trying their best but simply don‘t have the resources to find rare books in every collection. And finally there is a fundamental difference in scale. Public libraries are not buying millions of copies to destroy, completely eliminating the chance they will ever be discovered. --- PS. I don‘t like the anti-academic tone of your post. Librarians know what they are doing, their expertise is valuable, and when they act according to their specialized knowledge it does have a positive effect on the world.
      - tptacek 2mo ago
        What comparison? I'm talking about libraries as they actually exist and you're talking about what you think libraries should be doing. I'm arguing positively, and you're arguing normatively. I'm not "anti-academic". I'm just very involved in my local community and I read the annual reports from our library system. We accept book donations, like a lot of suburban library systems do (from our extremely book-y community), and we are open about the fact that most of those books get trashed. We do not have the personnel on staff you claim libraries generally do. I would say that between the two of us, I'm the one arguing more respectfully about libraries. I see them as real institutions with real pressures and constraints that do an important public service, and you see them as an instrumentality in your argument against AI.
dukeyukey 2mo ago
Can you explain why AI companies destroying these is worse than a library or bookseller destroying these?
- breezybottom 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dukeyukey 2mo ago
    If someone was ok with Nazis killing Jews but not Soviets, I am going to think they don't believe it's the killing that is the problem.
- runarberg 2mo ago
  Public libraries staff professional archivist, they take careful inventory and know exactly which book they are destroying. AI companies buy boxes and boxes of books with unknown content staff anybody who can operate a scanner and have no idea which books they are destroying. If a public library comes across a book they didn’t know they had, it is very likely that somebody will notice and know how to continue, to find out if this book is worth saving etc. AI companies will treat this book exactly like any other and destroy it to feed the plagiarist machine.
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    At this point I believe you're just sort of making up a fantasy of what you think a public library should do, not what they actually do.
  - kasey_junk 2mo ago
    This is not what most public libraries do with donation books. They mostly just recycle them. The very act of cataloging donation books takes a huge amount of resources that the collection managers don’t have. Many public libraries don’t have a collection management department at all! They outsource that function entirely to vendors and those vendors mostly source new books and spend resources preparing them for the hard use of a library (changing bindings, uploading and cleaning metadata, tagging, etc). Decommissioning is done by volunteers who just look at the condition of books and chuck the bad looking ones in a bin for recycling. My wife worked in this industry on the vendor side, your model of public libraries is closer to a small subset of certain big city libraries narrowed to their rare and research departments. The median book bought by a library is a Danielle Steele romance novel packaged for library consumption and sent to a small town library system that will be lucky to have a single professional librarian for the whole system.

tptacek 2mo ago

You're trying to imagine rare valuable books and then fantasizing about AI companies destroying them, but what's actually happening here is that AI companies are acquiring, digitizing, and then pulping the instruction manuals to 1983-vintage copy machines. This is all such a special-pleading argument. You know what other institution snatches up books and destroys them at huge scale? Public library systems. People clean out their attics and basements and drop off huge boxes full of books at libraries; libraries take the things they know will circulate, and destroy the rest. Take a guess as to how Þórbergur Þórðarson fares at the Newark Public Library. Wait, bad example, they stopped accepting book donations because nobody wants your old books. They tell you to give the books to thrift stores instead. Guess what the thrift stores do with them? You know how many times I've read stories about the grave damage libraries are doing to human culture? Zero, zero times.

frm88 2mo ago
You're trying to imagine rare valuable books and then fantasizing about AI companies destroying them, but what's actually happening here is that AI companies are acquiring, digitizing, and then pulping the instruction manuals to 1983-vintage copy machines. Source? You state that in a tone that implies you have verifiable knowlege of this. All the information I found says that the exact number, titles and authors are under NDA.
- tptacek 2mo ago
  It's in the 404 story.
  - frm88 2mo ago
    It's not. The 404 article states (paraphrase): we're not going to disclose any titles, so where does your information come from. Please provide a link.
    - tptacek 2mo ago
      https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-companies-are-buying-up-tons-of-rare-old-books-to-train-their-ai-models https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-compan...
      - frm88 2mo ago
        But we don't necessarily know what we might find valuable in the future. 1. This is not the 404 media story you quoted as source 2. Maiberg's answer is most likely a book that has no emotional value. Translation: they do not know
        tptacek 2mo ago
        You're right. It's merely the writer of the 404 story, discussing their story.
- svachalek 2mo ago
  Given no information, would you assume companies that are buying "huge quantities" of "rare" books are getting first edition Jules Verne by the crate, or 1989 Highlights magazines recovered from dentist offices?
  - runarberg 2mo ago
    Both. I think they are just buying whatever they can get their hands on most of it is going to be junk, but one in a million is going to be a rare and valuable book which we didn’t even know existed. After scanning and destroying 10 million books, AI companies will have destroyed 10 such books. (I am obviously assuming a Poisson distribution here where I pulled the parameter p = 1/1000000 out of thin air; point is p is non-zero; and at this scale the undesirable event is bound to happen a bunch of times).
runarberg 2mo ago
I assume public libraries know what they are doing and know which book they are destroying, that they keep an accurate inventory and hire professionals maintaining said inventory and marking which books can safely be destroyed. I assume no such things of AI companies.
- tptacek 2mo ago
  Obviously that's not true. Newark is literally telling people to talk all their old rare books to thrift stores, which will immediately throw them in dumpsters.
  - runarberg 2mo ago
    This is a bad comparison. Public libraries are trying their best to preserve rare copies, despite being overwhelmed and underfunded. If they come across a rare copy chances are it will be preserved. When an AI company comes across a rare book, it will not recognize it as such. There is also a fundamental difference in intention. AI companies are seeking out old books and will destroy them. Public libraries are trying their best but simply don‘t have the resources to find rare books in every collection. And finally there is a fundamental difference in scale. Public libraries are not buying millions of copies to destroy, completely eliminating the chance they will ever be discovered. --- PS. I don‘t like the anti-academic tone of your post. Librarians know what they are doing, their expertise is valuable, and when they act according to their specialized knowledge it does have a positive effect on the world.
    - tptacek 2mo ago
      What comparison? I'm talking about libraries as they actually exist and you're talking about what you think libraries should be doing. I'm arguing positively, and you're arguing normatively. I'm not "anti-academic". I'm just very involved in my local community and I read the annual reports from our library system. We accept book donations, like a lot of suburban library systems do (from our extremely book-y community), and we are open about the fact that most of those books get trashed. We do not have the personnel on staff you claim libraries generally do. I would say that between the two of us, I'm the one arguing more respectfully about libraries. I see them as real institutions with real pressures and constraints that do an important public service, and you see them as an instrumentality in your argument against AI.

dukeyukey 2mo ago

Can you explain why AI companies destroying these is worse than a library or bookseller destroying these?

breezybottom 2mo ago
[flagged]
- dukeyukey 2mo ago
  If someone was ok with Nazis killing Jews but not Soviets, I am going to think they don't believe it's the killing that is the problem.
runarberg 2mo ago
Public libraries staff professional archivist, they take careful inventory and know exactly which book they are destroying. AI companies buy boxes and boxes of books with unknown content staff anybody who can operate a scanner and have no idea which books they are destroying. If a public library comes across a book they didn’t know they had, it is very likely that somebody will notice and know how to continue, to find out if this book is worth saving etc. AI companies will treat this book exactly like any other and destroy it to feed the plagiarist machine.
- tptacek 2mo ago
  At this point I believe you're just sort of making up a fantasy of what you think a public library should do, not what they actually do.
- kasey_junk 2mo ago
  This is not what most public libraries do with donation books. They mostly just recycle them. The very act of cataloging donation books takes a huge amount of resources that the collection managers don’t have. Many public libraries don’t have a collection management department at all! They outsource that function entirely to vendors and those vendors mostly source new books and spend resources preparing them for the hard use of a library (changing bindings, uploading and cleaning metadata, tagging, etc). Decommissioning is done by volunteers who just look at the condition of books and chuck the bad looking ones in a bin for recycling. My wife worked in this industry on the vendor side, your model of public libraries is closer to a small subset of certain big city libraries narrowed to their rare and research departments. The median book bought by a library is a Danielle Steele romance novel packaged for library consumption and sent to a small town library system that will be lucky to have a single professional librarian for the whole system.