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AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books (www.news.com.au)
submitted 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours 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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[-] _NetNomad@fedia.io 1 points 8 hours ago

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

this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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