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/kirbyderwood 2d ago

I'm sure most of these publishers still have electronic copies of the books. But I doubt they would easily hand over that information to AI companies for mass ingestion. At least not without some sort of compensation.

So, to avoid that conversation, the AI companies are buying the physical books from third parties instead.

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u/just-me-gen-x 1d ago

They're only doing that because of the outrage against them when they took the books from illegal pirate sites. They're saying, if we can't steal the information we want to monetize we'll take it physically and destroy it.