A cultural crime against humanity? AI firms are destroying ultra-rare books so nobody else can read them
- ISBNdb ships up to a million books anonymously to AI labs
- Pre-2022 books are prized because chatbots never touched their text
- Spine-cutting scanners destroy originals to speed up digitization for training
AI companies are increasingly turning to printed books published before 2022 as preferred training material because those works predate the widespread use of AI-generated content.
Large-scale scanning operations reportedly involve cutting book spines, separating pages, and destroying physical copies to create digital datasets for large language models.
The practice has attracted growing criticism because some books entering these pipelines are reportedly extremely rare, raising concerns about irreversible cultural losses.
Pre-2022 books become valuable AI training material
Reports by 404 Media found data broker ISBNdb supplies physical books in bulk to AI developers seeking human-written material unaffected by modern chatbot output.
The company argues books published before 2022 offer cleaner datasets because they cannot contain text generated by contemporary...
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