AI is eating old books!

 

Yes, chewing them!

It is genuinely alarming as AI companies are buying thousands upon thousands of books from secondhand and even antique shops. Booksellers who until recently sold 20 copies a week now claim to be receiving online or phone orders from the US and China for hundreds or thousands of copies. They're buying them in bulk, for one specific purpose: to destroy them. Artificial intelligence needs training, and to do so, it must acquire as many texts as possible. 

Preferably published before 2023, because that way, it can be sure they were written entirely by humans. To get AI to read a sufficient number of texts, however, it's impossible to scan them in the normal way, page after page: it's too slow. "Destructive Scanning" is needed, a method that involves cutting off the book's cover and spine, reducing it to loose pages that can be scanned at enormous speed, and then thrown away. The machine learns. 

Books are destroyed, digested, lost. Thousands, millions of them. It's essential nourishment for AI, but it comes at the price of destroying even rare and irretrievable texts. 

A sacrifice. In honor of what?