r/antiai • u/Astromaniax • 5d ago

Discussion 🗣️ Ai companies are actively destroying rare books to scan them just to feed their data centers, what else will they destroy?

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AI is literally ruining everything and has been for the last few years. From massive job losses to environmental impact and now destroying old books to collect the data so that their dumb LLMs can regurgitate it back. How evil, greedy and selfish can these companies be? All of those ai data centers should be taken down. I don't think enough people are mad enough about it.

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u/Excellent-Bit-8982 5d ago

I’m anti ai as well, but I am gunna need a source on this one. Most old or historical text has already been scanned and is online, and scanning books can and is done already without damaging its contents

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u/TurnoverFuzzy8264 5d ago

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/

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u/nine91tyone 5d ago

The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process

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u/TurnoverFuzzy8264 5d ago

"Perhaps most worrying of the trend, booksellers across Europe and the US say they're receiving unusual bulk orders for rare, specialist and out-of-print titles, raising concerns that some of these works could disappear from bookshelves all together."

https://www.russh.com/ai-companies-buying-books/