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TechRadar
Efosa Udinmwen

A cultural crime against humanity? AI firms are destroying ultra-rare books so nobody else can read them

Ultra-rare books are being destroyed by AI.
  • ISBNdb ships up to a million books anonymously to AI labs
  • Pre-2022 books are prized because chatbots never touched their text
  • Spine-cutting scanners destroy originals to speed up digitization for training

AI companies are increasingly turning to printed books published before 2022 as preferred training material because those works predate the widespread use of AI-generated content.

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