The artificial intelligence industry, having already stripped the open web of its bark and devoured every morsel of its illegally acquired libraries, has developed a new appetite. Millions of physical books are now being bought in bulk and fed into a process that the industry nervously calls “destructive scanning”.

Data acquisition increasingly involves cutting the spines from millions of books, scanning them and then shredding and discarding them afterward.

The service comes courtesy of a company called ISBNdb. They promise to obtain “up to one million titles per order.” They specifically tout “older, rare and specialist volumes” as premium training data because books from the pre-2022 era are “structurally guaranteed” to be free of AI contamination. As AI starts to feed on itself into a delirious loop, information from the old world becomes more valuable to the momentum and continuation of large language models.

Read more about AI and the arts from Derek McArthur:

A prestigious literary competition is being accused of rewarding AI-written works

Replace all artists? The strange logic of the AI art defenders

A rapper is pretending his new viral hit isn't a blatant AI creation

OpenAI’s Sora was going to destroy Hollywood... until it came abruptly crashing down

Can we pass a law banning the sale of Highland cow AI art?

A nonsensical AI-generated mural is the last thing Glasgow ever needs

This film veteran was stunned when he asked AI to give him ideas

The........

© Herald Scotland