Anthropic · ChatGPT · The Atlantic Technology
Someone Is Mysteriously Snapping Up Tapped Books Around the World
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Last week, the internet raged as social-media posts and news articles accused AI companies of “destroying the world’s books” —including “millions of rare” ones—by chopping off their spines to scan them more easily, and discarding them afterward.
Key facts
- On May 26, a book-industry newsletter called Publishers Lunch noted accusations that Zoom was buying books for AI companies
- The examples given were academic books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics
- Documents unsealed earlier this year in a lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that in the spring of 2024, the AI giant bought millions of new and used books and destroyed them to scan the pages to train
- Anthropic and other AI companies are likely keen on books published before the launch of ChatGPT, in 2022, which are all but guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text
Summary
The destruction of physical books training AI has been public knowledge for more than a year, but debate over the practice intensified after an article by 404 Media, which described several orders coming to booksellers, suggested that rare books might be included, and named a book-database company called ISBNdb as the possible buyer. Lost in the outrage, however, are several unanswered questions. Despite that, the conversation rapidly intensified into a panic. Many of the specifics of this situation are obscured by hard-to-trace purchasing histories and the silence of AI companies and other potential buyers, so let’s lay out what they know.