AI Is Scanning the World's Books. It Could Be Preserving Them Too
Editorial image generated by the author. There is something instinctively disturbing about cutting the spine off an old book, feeding its pages through a scanner and throwing what remains into recycling. That reaction becomes stronger when the purpose is training an artificial intelligence model. Anthropic did this on an industrial scale under Project Panama , purchasing large numbers of physical books, removing their bindings and scanning them into a digital library. More recently, 404 Media traced a shipment containing rare books to an Amazon facility that its investigation identified as an AI-training operation, where employees described books being disbound and digitised. It makes for an effective story about the excesses of the AI industry: immensely valuable companies consuming physical remnants of human culture to feed their machines. But the outrage obscures a more interesting problem. The problem is not that these books are being digitised. Many of them pro...