I grew up in a house in Rawalpindi where a book was not a small thing. We did not have money for...
Enterprise AI rollouts extract workflow knowledge from experienced staff but discard the institutional understanding of why processes work—treating speed as the only success metric. The real cost emerges eighteen months later when automation hits undocumented edge cases and the person who understood the exceptions is long gone.
I grew up in a house in Rawalpindi where a book was not a small thing.
We did not have money for many of them.
The ones we had got read twice, three times, passed to a cousin, read again.
A book was slow proof that something was worth keeping.
So when a story went around today about rare books being pulled apart to feed a scanner, then shredded once the pages were digitized, I did not read it as a tech story.
AI Book Burning? Companies Are Destroying Millions of Books to Feed Chatbots - Decrypt
AI's hunger for data is now consuming rare books and booksellers are cashing in
AI companies are buying and destroying old books for training data
‘More than just objects’: Australian book sellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI
Paperback writer, meet the shredder
AI firms are quietly buying and destroying millions of printed books to train their models
Buy, scan, destroy: AI firms are shredding millions of books to train their chatbots
'Dystopian' - AI firms target London’s rare bookshops in hunt for training data
Le società di AI stanno comprando milioni di libri per poi distruggerli
Perché le aziende di IA stanno acquistando e distruggendo i libri, anche rari e antichi: l’assist del Fair use negli USA
AI developers are quietly buying physical books by the millions, slicing them apart, and scanning every page into AI training…
Artificial intelligence firms are purchasing vast quantities of physical books. These books are scanned to train large language…
Before AI can learn from old books, someone has to scan them. For millions of physical copies, that has meant cutting off the…
Secondhand booksellers believe they may have been caught up in the AI supply chain that sees old books scanned then destroyed
A US court legitimises shredding books for AI training, raising questions about copyright, culture and consequences for South…
Its pitch is simple: older books offer cleaner data. "The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf," the company says…
