AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale

Traditionally, books have been good for two things: reading, and looking
nice on a shelf.

But AI companies are interested in neither.

To those building large language models, books are nothing more than fodder
to be devoured en masse before being spit out like fishbone. Often, they’re
happy to use digital books — or even better, pirated digital books, as Meta
has been accused of doing, and as Anthropic was forced to pay a $1.5
billion settlement to authors for also doing.

But many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical
books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap.
According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered
cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from
book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging
equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to
train its AI.

This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale
doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without
the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning the
original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them
as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore
protected by fair use.

Now, as 404 Media reports, this practice has become prevalent enough that
even well-established book sellers are looking to cash in on the AI boom.
One called ISBNdb, which boasts the “world’s largest book database,”
extolls that the “world’s best AI training data is setting on a shelf,”
upholding these physical texts as uncorrupted by shoddy AI writing that’s
already polluted so much of the internet (and indeed, newer books).

“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of
this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage,” it explains in
an article on its website, as quoted by 404. “Physical books published
before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning
tools.”

Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and
sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000
to one million books per order, according to 404.

As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their
purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like
Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how
incredibly shady the practice sounds.

“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two
million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no
more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the
customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how
they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out
of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the
few remaining copies that can be found.

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” the bookseller told
404. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory
that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales
with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand,
I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being
pulped.”

More antique books may be endangered. 404 noted how rare booksellers in the
Netherlands are being inundated with bulk purchases they believe are being
made by AI companies, though they can’t know for sure.

Similar suspicions are being felt all throughout the industry. Services
like ISBNdb facilitate these bulk orders, keeping the AI buyers anonymous
as promised. There may be strong hints thats a bulk order is for an AI lab,
but booksellers can, for the most part, merely speculate.

<https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books>

<https://archive.ph/Rq923>