Shredding Rare Books
The following comparison could be tedious and misleading. Notwithstanding, the destroying of books by AI companies like Anthropic to train their language models is much closer to the burning of books by the church or totalitarian regimes in public squares. They wrecked books to stop people from reading them. Tech executives broke them because they’ve already contaminated the internet with synthetic garbage and desperately need fresh human sentences to mine. They engineered a global collapse in text quality and are now stripping the shelves to sell us the cure.
Indeed, there’s no legal prohibition on the beloved rare and antique books being destroyed. The practice started in 2024, when Anthropic allegedly hoovered up millions of titles through pirate platforms in what was dubbed the Panama Project. A lawsuit then was filed against them, and the company had to settle $1.5 billion. So, what did they do? Well, US property law states that anyone who legally purchases a physical book can do whatever they want with it. Therefore, AI companies established a quiet partnership with a book retailer, ISBNdb. This interphase helps to keep the anonymous buyer from bookstores, especially the little ones.
To set an example, a small store in Amsterdam that hardly sells a copy a day suddenly in a week sells hundreds of copies. Rare books that are almost impossible to find throughout the Internet. The pattern was set, and millions of books were landing in unmarked warehouses. Once inside, a high-speed scanner and a machine ripped pages for a faster digital copy that’ll feed the starving AI-bot. They must harvest these physical pages because the internet is now utterly saturated with the very AI-generated text these same companies unleashed.
Their solution is to buy bulk books. Rare masterpieces that have different styles and valuable information that mortals cannot digest in a single afternoon. But what's the point? Are AI companies much different from the church or the Nazi regime or the USSR? The resulting destruction mirrors the darkest impulses of authoritarian regimes, minus the ideology or the beliefs. Erasing a text written with genuine human suffering to feed a mindless prediction robot is a dreadful practice. It permanently removes these irreplaceable works from public libraries and shelves. The books never return. Yet under the strict definitions of American commerce, obliterating a masterpiece is simply the cost of doing business as usual.
The ironic and cynical deed of destroying physical culture to train autocomplete engines is staggering. Once the problem was set, the outcome was overwhelming. From politicians automating their speeches, academia outsourcing their essays, and ordinary people flooding with AI-slop every social media post. The AI models eventually hit a learning wall because they ran out of human genuinely thought to consume. Our minds have limits, and they never foresaw this or neglected to justify their practices. Nevertheless, their solution to this self-inflicted bottleneck is to purchase the only remaining copies of precious texts and annihilate them. This legal, systemic eradication of knowledge guarantees that the encroaching brain-rot will be accelerated.
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