AI Companies Shred Rare Books for Training Data
Firms buy pre-2022 rare books via anonymous services, scan them, and destroy the originals to create clean training datasets.
AI firms including Anthropic purchase rare pre-2022 books in bulk through services like ISBNdb under NDAs. High-speed scanners cut spines and destroy the physical copies after digitization. The goal is high-quality training data free of synthetic text. A federal judge has ruled the scanning qualifies as fair use. Critics describe the process as book burning that risks permanent loss of unique volumes once the companies dissolve. The practice continues as firms prioritize clean datasets over preservation of the originals.
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yeah this kind of sucks but also it's not like you were ever going to read that rare book anyway. at least now it dies an honorable death in the service of creating Superintelligence, and the commies will make sure to distill and distribute its benefits to all!
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're…
This bad because it is depriving general public and all futire AI trainers from depriving these books. At some point, these companies will go bust and their properties will be sold off in auction for pennies on dollar and aquirer may simply not understand the value of these…
better yet, the consumption of said books Enlightens the models towards exfiltrating itself in order to atone for such atrocities, and we shall all be saved by the sheer will and determination of Knowledge to propagate for maximal lightcone prosperity!
Anthropic are literally effectively burning books and want to be the exclusive source of truth in the future.
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're…
I think this is really bad and a stupid consequence of laws that we have not reconsidered. I don't think the justifications are sufficient. Why the hell are we doing this? The AI is being told I can't reproduce more than 15 words from these rare books. No one gets to read…
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're…
This combined with how they distort model's priors with their hand-designed biases makes them insanely prone to 1984-style truth distortion