AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
Article URL: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/physical-destruction.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383026 Points: 243 # Comments: 166
AI companies are secretly acquiring and scanning millions of physical books in order to train their artificial intelligence models, according to Anna’s Archive. This practice is destroying physical books and locking valuable human knowledge away on private servers. Several AI companies, including Anthropic, are spending tens of millions of dollars to purchase and scan large quantities of secondhand books.
The goal is to obtain “untouched by machines” data from before 2022. While AI companies claim they are making human knowledge more accessible, they are actually dismantling the most fundamental carriers of cultural heritage. Shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive are urgently calling for volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before they disappear forever.
With enough global contributions, this effort could preserve an inextinguishable light of humanity for future generations.
Written by urgent.news from Hacker News Best's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
