A coalition of 18 advocacy organizations has asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate AI companies for buying physical books, scanning them for model training, and then destroying the or…
AI companies are buying pallets of old printed books to avoid training on AI-generated 'slop,' according to ISBNdb, a broker sourcing bulk print acquisitions for AI labs. Meanwhile, Google announced o…
AI companies are buying old printed books to train their models, with ISBNdb offering high-volume book acquisition services, because clean human text has become scarce. Epoch AI estimated in a 2024 pa…
An Apple AirTag hidden inside a book from a large used-book order led 404 Media to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas that employees described as a site for scanning printed books into AI training data. …
Used book sellers in Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands report a surge in bulk orders for obscure titles, suspecting AI companies are buying and destroying books to train large language mod…
ISBNdb, a book data tracking company, briefly offered AI training data from destructive book scanning, which involves slicing spines off books and recycling pages, before pivoting away after public ba…
ISBNdb, a book database company, removed its landing page offering printed books for AI training and denied ever purchasing, scanning, or selling books, following 404 Media's reporting. The company st…
Elon Musk pledged that SpaceXAI will preserve rare books by scanning them non-destructively, responding to reports that AI developers buy and destroy printed books, including rare editions, to speed u…
AI companies are turning to physical books for training data as the internet fills with AI-generated content, with ISBNdb briefly offering to source up to 1 million books per order for LLM training be…
AI companies are buying old books, scanning them, and destroying the physical copies to obtain training data free of AI-generated content, according to a report by 404 Media. The program is facilitate…
AI companies are targeting London's rare bookshops in a 'dystopian' hunt for training data, after court documents revealed Anthropic bought, scanned and destroyed millions of physical books under a se…
Court records establish that Anthropic spent millions of dollars acquiring millions of print books, then had vendors remove their bindings, scan their pages and discard the originals, according to a d…
AI companies are purchasing rare and out-of-print books in bulk, cutting off their spines, scanning the pages, and then disposing of the originals, according to court documents and industry reports. A…
AI companies are systematically buying millions of secondhand books, scanning them for training data, and destroying the physical copies, according to an investigation by 404 Media. The practice, whic…
AI companies are bulk-buying physical books, having them industrially scanned, and then shredding the originals, according to a Futurism investigation. The practice, brokered by data firm ISBNdb under…
AI companies are buying and destroying thousands of printed books to feed AI models, sparking copyright debates and cultural preservation worries. A federal judge ruled that Anthropic's scanning of le…
AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them with high-speed machines that cut off the spines, and shredding the originals, according to a report by 404 Media. A service called ISBNdb facili…
AI companies are buying and destroying physical books at massive scale to train large language models, with one database company, ISBNdb, now facilitating bulk purchases of 1,000 to one million books …
AI companies are buying pre-2022 books and human-generated Reddit data to avoid training on AI-generated content, fearing 'model collapse'—a decline in output quality when AI trains on AI data. A stud…
AI companies are buying physical books printed before 2022 from data broker ISBNdb to train large language models on human-authored text free of AI-generated slop, according to a 404 Media report. ISB…