{
  "id": 94554,
  "title": "AI Companies Are Pulping Our Humanity",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/03/ai-companies-are-pulping-our-humanity",
  "topic": "culture",
  "section": "Culture",
  "published": "2026-08-03T17:52:37.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Hyperallergic",
    "slug": "hyperallergic",
    "url": "https://hyperallergic.com/ai-companies-are-pulping-our-humanity/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In 1553, Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus was burnt at the stake for religious heresy, resulting in only three surviving copies of his The Restoration of Christianity. One such copy, held by the University of Edinburgh, was reportedly saved by Calvin himself, despite his fervent condemnation of Servetus. This raises questions about Calvin's motivations, as his preservation of the book likely stemmed from a love of collecting rather than a genuine respect for Servetus. Nevertheless, his actions pale in comparison to those of modern artificial intelligence companies, who have engaged in the bulk purchase, digitization, and destruction of out-of-print books to train their large language models. This process, known as \"destructive scanning,\" is a means of evading copyright regulations by creating a legal loophole, ultimately depleting the world of rare and irreplaceable books. The act of book destruction, exemplified by Servetus's story, is not a new phenomenon; publishers are responsible for destroying approximately 25% of released works each year, primarily due to poor sales. However, the recent revelation of AI companies' voracious appetite for cultural artifacts raises a chilling prospect: the systematic consumption of humanity's literary heritage to fuel the very technology intended to supersede humanity. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it, \"We see a future where intelligence is a utility, and people buy it from us on a meter.\" This vision entails a future where technocracy has triumphed over the sanctity of the book, rendering all knowledge and expression into a mere collection of predictive algorithms. This act of literal erasure, for which George Orwell's cautionary tale serves as a grim reminder, serves to underscore the grave implications of our current trajectory.",
  "summary": "The recent revelation about Anthropic’s systematic digitization and destruction of out-of-print books portends a rapacious future, one where soulless LLMs swell while the shelves starve.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}