Amazon Is Shredding Rare Books in the Name of AI Training
Hope you didn't want to read those.Credit: Alexander Spatari/Getty Images
Decades after becoming the internet's first major bookseller, Amazon is now buying rare books to scan and destroy them. It joins the likes of Google and Anthropic, which have reportedly been buying up physical books in bulk from rare book shops to scan them for more training data. These books are wrecked in the process, 404 Media reports.
As AI developers hunt for ever-more useful data to feed their frontier language models, they've allegedly turned to classic books. Because these were printed before 2022, they're guaranteed not to contain any AI-generated content. They're also unlikely to have been used in training before, representing a new fountain of knowledge and patterns to recognize in building the next generation of AI.
But scanning the books takes time, so AI companies are doing what tech does best: moving fast and breaking things....
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