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.”
They are buying up used books at rates that push up the cost of used books. That is enough to piss off people legitimately.
We also are fully aware they are not careful. Yes, they will occasionally shred the last few examples of a book that might have otherwise become useful in the future, and there’s no indication that they are archivists. They will eventually destroy or loose this training data and the book contents will be gone to future generations.
Used books are practically free to begin with. Libraries will often give away whole storage containers of books that they don’t want anymore. Bookstores will sell books for pennies on the wholesale market.
Half-Price offers Books By The Yard to be used entirely for decorative purposes. $50 for 40-60 books, largely organized by color and binding style.
We have vastly overproduced the physical reading material relative to consumer reading habits. We have vastly overproduced certain genres and subject matter material. We have overproduced individual volumes. These books are not useful in any material sense. No more than the clothes we overproduce or the snacks we overproduce or the automobiles and electronics we overproduce.
We are swimming in trash. We produce mountains of it. We fill ravines with it. Stop treating hording as a virtue.
if you want any old used book, sure. if you want a specific used book, maybe you might have to spend ten to twenty to a thousand (i have needed some rare texts over the years).
Show me the thousand dollar copy that an AI company destroyed and we can revisit this.
Nothing in the article identities an actual valuable work being destroyed. They’re just “rare”, which can be anything from unpublished manuscripts of failed writers to drafts of screenplays that never got produced to limited run publications that never sold a copy.
Now you’re just being argumentative. It’s destroyed. How can I do that?