What happens to rare books used to train AI?

The controversy surrounding AI firms buying up rare books, scanning them, and then destroying them has been simmering for a while now - and it's not hard to see why booksellers are up in arms. I mean, who wouldn't be horrified by the thought of priceless works being torn apart and discarded like they're nothing? But proving this practice has been tough, until an investigation by 404 Media blew the lid off the whole thing. They hid an Airtag in a rare book and tracked it to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas, where it was scanned and destroyed - pretty damning evidence, if you ask me.

Amazon's not commenting on the findings, unsurprisingly - they're just issuing vague statements that don't even mention AI training. But let's be real, the company's been developing those fancy frontier AI models, and they need a ton of unique training data to stay ahead of the game. Using rare books for this purpose would definitely give them an edge, especially since their rivals, like Anthropic and xAI, have sworn off training on rare or antique books. The whole thing's sparked a heated debate about the ethics of destructive book-scanning, with some people calling it "evil incarnate" - and honestly, it's hard to argue with that. Although, apparently, some Amazon workers think the job's a "nice" opportunity with flexible hours, which just goes to show how complex this issue is.

The investigation's also given us a glimpse into how Amazon selects rare books for scanning. Apparently, their workers are trained to scan barcodes or ISBNs before scanning the books themselves, which suggests they're targeting books with ISBN numbers to get the most unique works into their training data sets. This is something booksellers have suspected all along - they've noticed AI firms going after books with ISBN numbers to maximize their training data. Now that we have confirmation, it raises some big questions about the impact of AI training on the rare book market. As the debate rages on, maybe we should all consider supporting booksellers and authors who are working to preserve rare works and promote alternative methods of AI training that don't involve destroying books.

Source: Ars Technica