Editor’s Notes: Skynet presents ‘Fahrenheit 451’
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If you are the kind of person who cringes when you think about what happened to the Library of Alexandria, or watched Dr. Elsa Schneider cry while Nazis burned books in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" and thought "OK, she can't be ALL bad," you're one of my people.
It will pain you then, as it did me, to learn about what AI companies are doing, according to a report by Futurism.
AI large language models have become such monsters that they've already poisoned their own wells. There is a deficit of "pure" text from which to train them because so much available text has already been tainted with AI content (or is entirely AI content).
The solution? Companies like Anthropic are ingesting physical books.
"Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage," Futurism quotes 404 Media as reporting. "Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools."
ISBNdb is helping them do this, by the way -- profiting by selling thousands of books per order to AI companies.
If you're thinking it's not so bad that bulk orders of books with thousands of copies lying around in warehouses are being consumed to feed AI, it gets much worse.
Futurism reports rare booksellers in the Netherlands are being "inundated with bulk purchases they believe are being made by AI companies, though they can't know for sure."
They can't know for sure because facilitators of these sales, like ISBNdb, help the buyers hide their identities. After all, even the tech grunts in an AI lab understand destroying books is not something any company would want to advertise.
And they do destroy the books. According to one lawsuit, which has been settled, Anthropic used a hydraulic cutting machine to shear the pages out of their binding and then scan them using industrial-grade imaging equipment.
So back to those rare books: Futurism reports a small bookseller whose sales went from no more than 20 in a week to hundreds believes the customers may be AI labs -- because of the random selection of the orders and because they all have ISBNs. He told Futurism his inventory is filled with rare and out-of-print books, meaning these AI labs could be destroying the last remaining copies.
Those books are just gone, with not a whiff of regret from the folks who want so desperately for the rest of us to believe we need AI more than we need old books. (And, again, by "old," I'm talking about before 2022).
According to a Facebook post attributed to astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson -- Meta felt like it needed to advertise its own bot by noting the titles for the post were generated from AI -- the companies destroying these books are then turning them into pulp. The post also notes "One widely cited forecast estimated that at current scaling trends, the supply of quality human-written text could run out somewhere between 2026 and 2032, which is exactly the pressure driving AI companies to raid used bookstores instead of the open web."
Mad about the proliferation of data centers? AI is the biggest reason for their explosive growth. Worried about the crumbling of students' (and everyone else's) ability to think and create for themselves because AI has made itself such a crutch?
Or worse, worried about people's inability to tell what is real and what is AI-generated?
We don't need it. (No, really. We just don't.)
It hasn't been around for even a decade. And the companies that make money because so many people DO believe they need it are destroying something that should be precious to all of us.
If that sounds familiar, it's a cycle we humans just don't seem to be able to break.
So, to circle back to "The Last Crusade," I'm afraid one day, generations from now, someone will look back at how humans were captivated by the slop these AI companies turn out, and say "(They) chose poorly."
They'll be right.
Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com.