RE: AI Companies destroying rare books to train their AIs
bi3mw > 1 hour ago
I’d accept the argument “I can do whatever I want with a book I’ve bought” when it comes to individuals, but not when a corporation is making purchases on a massive scale. The problem isn’t that old books sometimes end up in the trash. The problem is the system behind it. Antiquarian bookstores function like a kind of circulating library. An old book is sold, read, and resold. Then, years later, it resurfaces and finds new readers. This keeps knowledge accessible, including niche knowledge, old editions, and out-of-print titles that can’t be found anywhere else. Now, AI companies are buying up these books by the pallet. In other words, they’re systematically purchasing entire inventories, scanning them for AI training, and then destroying them. This is an unacceptable “one-way street”; in the medium term, secondhand bookstores and individual customers will lose an entire segment of the book market, resulting in the loss not only of junk but also of cultural heritage. Furthermore, it’s clear that the value attributed to a book is always in the eye of the beholder. It isn’t always measured by the price one has to pay for it. So what one person sees as “just paper taking up space” is something valuable to another. However, only individuals can make this decision. That’s how the market in this field normally works.