AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.

ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.

“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”

www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/ai-labs-buy-scan-shred-millions-of-rare-books/news-story/0c3b45a67093ab462a587a0348538ce9

To be honest, what surprises me most of all is that, after three decades of intensive digitisation of analogue media, there are still purely analogue copies in existence at all!? In that respect, I see this more as a benefit than a threat, as some people here are suggesting.

Three decades?

You mean to tell me that you think that three decades is enough to digitize centuries of printed media in almost all languages in the world?