AI Companies Are Buying and Destroying Millions of Physical Books to Train Their Models
The practice is known as “destructive scanning.”
Major AI companies have come under fire after reports emerged that companies have been mass-buying physical books and then destroying them after lawsuits against them pulled them from vast digital libraries.
The practice is known as “destructive scanning,” according to Cybernews, and the outlet reports that companies are using hydraulic cutting machines to chop the spine off of books – both used and even rare ones, at times. The newly released pages are then quickly scanned and uploaded in order for the companies to train their various AI models. What’s left, the outlet reports, is then sent to recycling.
“Anthropic’s internal initiative, referred to as ‘Project Panama,’ reportedly aimed to destructively scan up to two million books over a six-month period,” reports the outlet. “The pivot to physical books comes after a federal judge ruled that training AI on legally purchased physical media constitutes ‘fair use,’ even if the original physical copy is destroyed in the process.”
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Futurism notes that Anthropic was forced to pay $1.5 billion to authors for pirating digital texts.
The destructive scanning process, “took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so,” Futurism reports.
One small bookseller who specializes in rare books told tech reporting media outlet 404, which first reported on this phenomenon, that in April he began selling hundreds of books after weeks of selling about 20 only. He told the outlet he believes AI companies are purchasing the books.
The companies behind the sales remain anonymous thanks to services provided by companies like ISBNdb.
“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” he told 404. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”
