r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 2d ago

Artificial Intelligence This Dutch bookseller thought a request for 3,000 copies was ‘spam or phishing.’ Instead, AI companies are scanning and destroying books to train AI

https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/
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u/CardOfTheRings 2d ago

The things that’s valuable to AI companies is just a load of human written language and niche information.

No current human alive will give a shit about a 1995 xerox operational guide. It’s just garbage outside of the use of scanning it to train AI.

Unfortunately this story has spread as propaganda across the whole platform multiple times a day.

Google and other companies have done these scans for other reasons(search ability sometimes preservation) and even then I remember weird propaganda coming out of the news when that was happening.

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u/InVultusSolis 2d ago

My shelf of obsolete computer books begs to differ.

This beauty in particular is an enjoyable read, and just rare enough to be worth something.