AI Companies Accused of Buying Rare Books to Scan for Training, Then Destroying Originals
S_Conradi · x · 2026-07-31
A user reported that AI companies are buying large quantities of used and rare books, scanning their contents for model training, and then destroying the physical copies by turning them into pulp.
This raises ethical concerns about AI training data: centuries of human thought are digitized while the physical books disappear permanently, surviving only as weights inside a system that might be deprecated at any time.
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