AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

2026-07-28 19:32 UTC

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.”

Replies (6)

@wasabi_noir@lemmy.zip 2026-07-28 20:16

I hope when the bubble bursts the cunts making these kinds of decisions are so distraught by their losses they resort to suicide.

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@peaceful_world_view@lemmy.world 2026-07-29 03:13

That’s fucking evil.

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@redwattlebird@thelemmy.club 2026-07-29 03:45

That’s absolutely disgusting. At this rate, governments should really be stepping in and stopping all this.

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@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-07-29 05:09

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.

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@FireWire400@lemmy.world 2026-07-28 19:49

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?

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@_NetNomad@fedia.io 2026-07-28 20:54

if this was about Number Go Up, they'd probably make more money selling the despined books or something instead of destroying them and selling (or do whatever they're doing with) the raw pulp. this sounds like an expensive process and there's no guarantee that expanding these datasets is going to improve their models in a quantifiable way, let alone a profitable one. they must just get some kind of perverse pleasure out of making the world a worse place

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