In that thread, the original poster said that the real problem was that tiny details and even major historical insights that can be gleaned from reviewing rare books will be lost to AI greed. AI firms will “never share the contents” of books they scan, the poster said, “as they don’t want anyone else to be able to train their AI” on the same works.
“This sounds like propaganda from the AI haters,” another Redditor pushed back, but a subsequent commenter shared similar fears. Although people might clash with someone who argues that training AI on these works will make all the knowledge that a work contains more accessible online, the commenter suggested instead that AI models would only make available “warped, censored, and paywalled fragments of ideas” from forgotten works.
“Even if you love the technology, you can admit that the concept of an AI literally eating books to become more powerful is pretty dystopian,” someone else on the thread said.
Some booksellers agree that not every text needs to be saved, the BBC reported. However, Scottish bookseller Derek Walker told the BBC that AI firms should be striving to distinguish between works that won’t be missed much—such as little-known academic texts that may technically be rare—and lesser-known antique works that may be “the only known surviving example of an edition.”
“It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long,” Walker said.
For AI firms guarding their training data and using services that mask their identities as buyers, there’s likely little desire to discuss their bulk buying directly with booksellers. Allowing booksellers to weigh in on the works they plan to feed into their models would require a level of transparency that may seem riskier than a possible reputation hit if it’s ever proven that a treasured first edition was destroyed in the name of advancing AI.
