François Picard is pleased to welcome investigative journalist Emanuel Maiberg, Co-founder of 404 Media. As we embark on AI's uncharted waters, Maiberg has made a most unexpected discovery:: the mass acquisition, dismemberment and scanning of rare books for use as training data. His investigation reveals a globalised and deliberately opaque supply chain in which books purchased through anonymous marketplaces can ultimately arrive at large-scale scanning facilities, where their bindings are removed so that pages can be processed at great speed.
Yet Maiberg’s analysis reaches far beyond the striking dystopian image of books being destroyed. What happens when knowledge changes form, changing ownership and accessibility? A book can circulate between readers, libraries and generations. Once destroyed and absorbed into a proprietary AI system, however, its contents survive virtually, encoded within a model whose outputs and rules of access are controlled by a private company. The paradox is striking: an industry seeking to ingest ever more human knowledge may simultaneously will erase the very sources of that knowledge.
