On July 21st, 404 media published AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop. It describes the practice where, to train their models with ‘premium’ human-written data, AI companies are using brokers to buy copies of books they don’t already have in their datasets, which they scan using a destructive method (which may be because they’re not allowed to keep physical copies due to copyright law).
On July 25th, Futurism repackaged this article as AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale. The books have now become “antique”; being generous, I could put this down to a misunderstanding because some of the books come through antiquarian booksellers, rather than being antiques themselves.
One book retailer involved in these sales, Half Moon Books, actually describes the titles that were ordered as:
Not what I would consider rare or antiquarian. They were more obscure academic commentaries on philosophy, politics and science. Nothing signed, no first editions and nothing that hadn’t been published in the 20th century or later.
Being less generous, I note Futurism’s use of scare language about the “incredible scale” of the destruction.
If we’re talking incredible scale, the book industry pulps hundreds of millions of books per year (we don’t know exactly how many because they never release that information). In a 2025 article, Pulping Fiction: Where Books go to Die, Alexiane François writes: Every year, millions of unsold books around the world are destroyed. It is hard to know how many books exactly, as there is a huge effort from the publishing industry to hide the scale of the waste. But in the U.S. alone, estimates hold that between 65 to 95 percent of returned books are destroyed. This does not happen only in the US. In France, the volume of pulped books represents around 140 million copies every year.
In the most recent available figures I could find, the UK pulped 77 million books in one year. But that year was 2009, and nobody seems to have talked about it since then.
Anyway, four days after Futurism’s piece, the story starts making the rounds of social media, with all the subtlety and consideration for the truth that you’d expect. This is probably the most egregious example:
AI companies are buying up
the world’s rarest books, scanning them, and thendestroying the books so there are no copies. This is one ofthe biggest alterations of historywe have yet to see.
This is a HUGE exaggeration of the original reporting. Every one of the claims I highlighted above are false. “Old” books have become “the world’s rarest” books. “Destroying the physical copy during scanning” has become “destroying the books so there are no copies”. A report of a practice that some people find objectionable has become a nefarious culture-spanning conspiracy theory.
I’d dismiss it, but it’s been liked over 56,000 times already. Some people like to claim that AI is unreliable because it can hallucinate but honestly, people are capable of far worse.
It’s noted in the initial article that, on the website of one of the brokers, it says “The optics problem is real. ‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy”. It may not generate sympathy, but it certainly generates bullshit.
Aside: when I posted about the scale of book destruction that already goes on, a typical reaction was “yeah, but we’re mad because this destruction is to train AI” (I had an excellent example of this, but they deleted it). This is a moral judgement, not a rational reaction.
Andy Masley wrote an excellent article, Toward Liberal Environmentalism, which goes into much more detail about this type of criticism. I urge you to read it in full, but this is a very salient part:
We the good people broadly know what is good and what is bad, how scarce resources should be spent to maximize people’s wellbeing, and which contentious ethical values are right and wrong. Because we’re in an environmental crisis, our main goal should be to make sure no resources are spent on the bad things, since any environmental cost paid for something bad is by definition pure waste, which we just can’t afford right now. We have no responsibility to mediate the complex, contradictory desires of the billions of people alive right now, or to think about how to trade off their desires for radically different goods and ways of living. Instead, the goal is to attack the bad guys, the people spending scarce resources on things we already consider bad for other reasons. All good people know what’s bad, or will once they’re awakened from the lies of the bad people.
“I don’t like AI so this book destruction is bad book destruction.”