AI Companies Shredding Rare Books for Training Data
AI companies are shredding rare books
AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them, and shredding the originals to train models, a practice facilitated by ISBNdb. A federal judge ruled this destruction legal under fair use, arguing that eliminating the physical copy ensures only one version exists. This irreversible loss of historical texts, including pre-2022 works free of AI-generated text, is being masked as digital preservation while companies like Anthropic seek to acquire all global books.
You can re-upload a website. 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.