AI Companies Are Purchasing and Destroying Millions of Used Books for Training Data. Really!

Sounds more like a conspiracy theory! The company accused of it denies it!

This piece of sensationalism is junk journalism! It was repeated all over in different media outlets!

What about books stored in public and private libraries? They will still be around. Most of these books are most likely not rare!

Just look at the headline of the supposedly originating article (see second link from the bottom) suggests a almost laughable motive and it is behind paywall!

"Tom’s Hardware reports that an investigation has revealed that AI companies are reportedly engaging in large-scale purchases of secondhand books to feed their language models, with the physical books subsequently being destroyed after scanning. The practice involves using middlemen to secretly acquire the books, potentially to avoid the controversy that has surrounded AI companies’ use of copyrighted material. ..."

AI Companies Are Purchasing and Destroying Millions of Used Books for Training Data "Major AI companies are buying millions of used books through intermediaries and destroying them after digitization to obtain high-quality training data while avoiding public scrutiny, according to a recent investigative report."

AI companies are reportedly shredding millions of books after using them to train AI models — tech giants outsource to middlemen to secretly buy up books for training material

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop (behind paywall) "ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”"

ISBNdb "The facts: ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or destroyed a book - for AI training or anything else. We don't train AI models, and we never have. The page was up to explore demand for a service we never brought to life. We've taken it down."