AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

A volunteer from Anna's Archive is calling for worldwide assistance to scan and preserve millions of physical books before they are destroyed by AI companies. The issue stems from AI corporations secretly purchasing, scanning, and destroying millions of books in order to train their models, effectively locking human knowledge away in private servers.

Several AI companies, including Anthropic's Project Panama, have acquired large quantities of secondhand books, scanned and destroyed them all, spending tens of millions of dollars to train their large language models (LLMs). This practice, while legally allowed, poses an ethical dilemma as it monopolizes knowledge on private servers and prevents public access.

Anna's Archive, the world's largest shadow library, urgently needs volunteers to help scan materials from libraries and archives around the globe to create a digital library of Alexandria, ensuring that valuable knowledge is not lost forever. With AI-generated content now making up more than half of new internet content, the future of human civilization may be at risk if AI absorbs all human-written content, leaving only AI-generated words behind.

This is a race against time, and the only way to preserve knowledge is through the efforts of humanity working together.