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AI companies are shredding rare books

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Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#11

Post by orthoxerox »

vessenes wrote: post #7
sherr wrote: post #3

I see mentions of Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" in that thread but what this really seems to be mostly like is Vernor Vinge's "shred and scan" factory in his novel "Rainbows End".

Perhaps the last great near-term predictor. I often wish he'd written more. To remind us all, he predicted shred and scan would be a short stop over done by villains on the way to nondestructive scanning. That said, supporting Anna's archive is one of the best things you could do for humanity long term in my opinion.

Were they the villains? I remember the rogue three-letter-agency executive being the BBEG.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#12

Post by Cynddl »

thechao wrote: post #4

Which book that was rare was destroyed? I'm interested to know a few titles.

The 404media article mentions notably https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi... which says:

> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#13

Post by vessenes »

I don't see any proof of shredding here. Most book scanners I'm aware of are from Google's scanning days, and those had cameras plus page turning.

If we use 'shredding' to mean A book is laid flat, its cover is removed, and then a paper cutter cuts through the binding to create a flat stack of sheets, which are then fed to a sheet feeder, then I could maybe imagine this is better than a page-turning scanner. But, sheet feeding old paper sucks shit, bro. It's not fun.

Upshot, I think we'd like to hear from an anonymous frontier lab employee here to see what's going on -- there are a lot of books in Anna's archive available at considerably less difficulty.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#14

Post by clickety_clack »

vessenes wrote: post #7
sherr wrote: post #3

I see mentions of Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" in that thread but what this really seems to be mostly like is Vernor Vinge's "shred and scan" factory in his novel "Rainbows End".

Perhaps the last great near-term predictor. I often wish he'd written more. To remind us all, he predicted shred and scan would be a short stop over done by villains on the way to nondestructive scanning. That said, supporting Anna's archive is one of the best things you could do for humanity long term in my opinion.

That’s digital though, so it requires the continued survival of readers for the data that is stored. The best thing you could for the long term is probably to buy a few hundred physical books to keep in a bookcase in your home.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#15

Post by SirFatty »

ACCount37 wrote: post #10

The publishers sued AI companies for training on shadow library data, hoping to negotiate content deals for big $$$ down the line. Instead, they got analog hole'd. Turns out that buying an old book for $5 and destructively scanning it for $25 is way cheaper than paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers. What I don't buy is it being "rare, precious books". First, they're not after ancient texts - they're after t…

I see.. so the various AI companies are in the right on this?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#17

Post by Cynddl »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #9

I think people are, on the whole, too precious about old things. In the case of books produced after major commercial printing began, I don't believe it is the paper that imbues the book with historical value. Indeed, I think there's a high chance that this process increases preservation of the most relevant part of the media - the actual content! There are tons of old rolls of film slowly rotting away in warehouses…

> For now these books are in corpuses of training data, but eventually I trust they will make their way to the rest of us.

What makes you think they will? What would be the incentives for these companies to do so?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#18

Post by croes »

est31 wrote: post #8

> You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright? IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright…

Books that are shredded can’t be scanned by competitors.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#20

Post by croes »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #9

I think people are, on the whole, too precious about old things. In the case of books produced after major commercial printing began, I don't believe it is the paper that imbues the book with historical value. Indeed, I think there's a high chance that this process increases preservation of the most relevant part of the media - the actual content! There are tons of old rolls of film slowly rotting away in warehouses…

So if the Mona Lisa is part of a model we can burn it?
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