Booksellers suspect AI firms are buying and then destroying rare books
AI firms quietly bulk buying rare books face resistance from booksellers.
Booksellers suspect that artificial intelligence firms are acquiring and subsequently destroying rare books to train their AI models. This practice, while financially efficient, is causing distress among book enthusiasts who value the historical and sentimental significance of these physical copies. The rapid advancement of AI technology in the form of long-form texts, which can only be found in books, has led to a surge in demand for scanning and digitizing rare books.
However, the cheapest and most efficient method for doing so involves tearing out pages, cropping, scanning, and discarding damaged pages. This method is causing an irreparable loss of physical book collections, a sentiment that is deeply troubling to book lovers. The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that such destruction is not a necessary evil, and there are alternative methods that could be employed to achieve the same objective without causing such irreparable damage to rare books.
Written by urgent.news from Ars Technica's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
