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Booksellers suspect AI firms are buying and then destroying rare books (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 hours ago by zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml to c/books@lemmy.ml

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Marvelous. Just marvelous.📚🙁

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[–] Skyrmir@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

I'm just wondering why they would? I mean rare books have already been scanned, if they wanted them for training, what's the point of even wanting the physical copy?

[–] frank@sopuli.xyz 6 points 4 hours ago

The idea is some of them aren't scanned, and to scan them (efficiently) they de-bind them and then throw them out

[–] artwork@lemmy.world 5 points 4 hours ago

The other major issue is that scanned books go directly into a private database to train AI, which the general public does not have access to. True, we will have smarter AI, but at the cost of the information not being available to future generations.

Source: https://lemmy.world/post/50067424

Related: AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books... (...documents about its plan to scan millions of books... to destroy the books in the process...) [web-archived; 2026-07-21_14-58-43_Z]

[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 2 points 3 hours ago

A lot of old books are not scanned and scanning them without destroying them is expensive and time consuming (at times even requesting expert knowledge in their treatment)