AI companies are buying old books to avoid training on AI-generated slop

CackleRooster · reddit · 2026-07-21

A post highlights a claim that AI companies are buying lots of old printed books because they are free of AI-generated text.

The argument is that web data increasingly contains synthetic text, which may contaminate future training sets and contribute to “model collapse.” Books published before 2022 are presented as a cleaner source because they predate the recent flood of AI slop.

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