Report says AI companies are training on rare books and destroying the originals at scale
Steap-Edit · reddit · 2026-07-27
The post links to a report alleging that AI companies are buying antique and rare books, ingesting them to train models, and then destroying the physical copies at scale.
The controversy is not about a single book or isolated incident, but about the scale: if almost no copies remain, destroying them after digitization could permanently erase unique artifacts. The piece frames this as an AI-industry practice with significant cultural and ethical implications.
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