AI companies are buying rare books to train their bots—but they are destroying the books in the process. They remove the spines, scan the pages, and then shred the paper.

Some rare book dealers have seen a 400% increase in sales, due to this hoarding of volumes by tech companies. In some cases, the works destroyed are almost irreplaceable.

This is almost a metaphor for AI’s destructive relationship to literary culture. But there’s even greater irony in the reason why AI companies prefer old books for training—it’s because they want to avoid contaminating their bots with AI slop.

I wish they had the same concern for us.