AI companies appear to be buying old and rare books, then destroying them to scan their pages for training data, according to booksellers' suspicions. The method is reportedly the fastest and cheapest way to digitize large numbers of books, allowing AI firms to train on high-quality long-form texts.
Many book lovers fear the destruction is happening on a much larger scale than reported, putting some physical copies at risk of being lost forever. That is especially painful because more careful, less wasteful digitization approaches already exist.
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