One independent book retailer in Galway, Ireland, received an online order for 5,000 books, which would be elating for many shop owners, especially at a time when people prefer shopping online from major platforms like Amazon or ditch physical books altogether and buy eBooks instead. However, according to The Irish Times, it’s not the number of titles that went into the order that raised red flags, but the obscure books that went with the orders, prompting fears the books are being acquired to train AI, possibly resulting in their destruction.
“Some was high-quality non-fiction, like A History of Connemara, and the next thing might be The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA,” Tomás Kenny of Kennys Bookshop told the publication. In this example, the former is a history book that covers a region in western Ireland while the latter is about the Special Savings Incentive Account unique to the country. Berlin bookshops are also reportedly seeing similar orders that contain titles that wouldn’t make sense for a person to purchase today, like “Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition.” It follows a report last month that AI companies are reportedly shredding millions of books after using them to train AI models, using destructive scanners to quickly digitize the books.
