AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books (www.news.com.au)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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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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[-] Flying_Lynx@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 days ago

Picks up a clay-tablet, and starts chiseling:

*"As the archeologist wandered around he found basically nothing other rectangular plates. A clay-tablet hinted this layer should have been part of an information rich age, a so called 'digital age'. Somehow there was no evidence to be found other than rectangles in all shapes, sizes and composition. Not only for that time period, but surprisingly also a thousand years prior to that... *

[-] A_be_seedy@beehaw.org 3 points 4 days ago

A small blue brick with a strange marking on it was found, "NØKÍÁ". When a button was pressed a screen lit up with a young blond female and pink hyroglyphics "HANNAH MONTANA LINUX FOR NOKIA 2026". On it, an instance of Minecraft with a library unlocked keys to the past as archeologists roamed a pixelated landscape as an avatar named Rahul.

this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026

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