AI Companies Are Destroying More Books than You Think, Says Bookseller

AI companies are destroying more books than you think, says bookseller

ANAHEIM, Calif. — It’s evening in Frankfurt, Germany, when Scott Brown picks up the phone.

Book lovers react to AI companies scanning, destroying books for data

Artificial intelligence learns by being fed data and identifying patterns in that data, which it uses to produce results when prompted. And according to Forbes, some AI companies have started feeding books to AI, through a process of scanning each page. These companies are purchasing millions of physical books, scanning them and then destroying them. [...]

AI companies are destroying books. That’s not nearly as scary as it sounds.

Destructively scanning books is making information more accessible to the masses.

Why AI Companies Are Buying—And Then Destroying—Old Books

We’ve long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn’t been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence. One…

‘I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them Into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform’

Jack Loftus, writing at McSweeney's: People assume scanning is the exciting part. And, sure, it is impressive. They shear off the spine, separate the pages, and run everything through these enormous machines so the computer can absorb every sentence ever written and use it to create some fairly compelling LinkedIn posts. But then, boy oh boy, the wheeled cart carrying those decimated remains comes to me. That is where the human touch enters the …