Books

The latest AI boom is creating an unusual paradox. The more AI companies need high-quality information, the more aggressively they are buying the physical books that contain it, and in some cases destroying those books once their contents have been absorbed. In recent months, independent booksellers in the United States, Britain, Europe, and elsewhere have reported sudden surges in unexplained bulk purchases, sometimes involving hundreds of unrelated and obscure titles. Some of these books are subsequently being sent to facilities where their bindings are removed, their pages rapidly scanned, and the remains discarded or recycled.   The scale could become far larger than the cases already exposed. ISBNdb, a major book database, now facilitates purchases ranging from 1,000 to one million books per order, while booksellers have described previously unsold titles suddenly becoming highly sought after. At the same time, an Amazon facility in Las Vegas has been identified as a site where employees described cutting book spines, scanning loose pages, and disposing of the resulting paper. The controversy raises a question that extends well beyond publishing. What happens if the race to build better AI systematically removes the physical sources from which that intelligence was created?