AI companies are buying rare books, scanning them, and pulping the originals
socialwithaayan · x · 2026-07-29
- The post says AI companies are buying large quantities of used and rare books, scanning them for training data, and then turning the originals into pulp.
- It frames the practice as a permanent loss of physical knowledge: the books survive only as data inside systems people cannot browse, hold, or resell.
- The post is a moral critique rather than a policy announcement, but it points to a real AI-industry data-acquisition practice and the tension between training data and preservation.
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