Booksellers Suspect AI Firms Are Destroying Rare Books for Training Data
Ars Technica AI · rss · 2026-08-12
According to Ars Technica, booksellers suspect that AI companies are buying and destroying rare books on a large scale to rapidly acquire high-quality, long-form training text.
The article notes that the cheapest and fastest way to scan books involves cropping and scanning torn-out pages before discarding them. While the exact scale of this destructive scanning is unconfirmed, book lovers fear it is happening widely, leading to the permanent loss of physical copies.
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