Books shouldn’t exactly be destroyed, but rather preserved—because if there happens to be a power outage, they can be a good way to pass the time in the meantime…

Do we remember that story about when AI companies destroyed millions of books, even though they had scanned them and used them as training data? In terms of negative public perception, “destroying books” is just as bad as kicking puppies, so AI companies relied on third-party buyers to hide what they were actually doing. That didn’t work, and now, as reported by 404 Media (the site that originally broke the story), the third-party book database company, ISBNdb, has removed from its website the ad in which it promoted itself as an effective partner for the bulk procurement of printed books, tailored to our LLM training needs and delivered in the sizes required by AI.

Of course, this page is still available on the Internet Archive, as is their blog post titled “Reframing the Destruction Narrative,” in which they make bold claims such as: “The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle, and the knowledge enters the intellectual one.” To us, the idea that asking a chatbot to hallucinate a summary of a book is exactly as valuable as reading the book is completely crazy.

Our knowledge does not come from the intellectual cycle. ISBNdb now claims that it never offered the service for which it had dedicated several sections of its website. The company told 404 Media that the site was intended solely to gauge market interest, and that such a service was never implemented. However, someone is certainly buying up large quantities of old and little-known books.

According to The Guardian, several used-book dealers have noticed an increase in online sales from third-party buyers and describe these orders as not fitting typical customer patterns.

Source: PCGamer, 404 Media, 404 Media, Archive.org, Archive.org, The Guardian