Caitlin Johnstone reports:
404 Media has been doing some great reporting on how companies like Google and Anthropic have been buying up rare and out-of-print books to train their LLM models before destroying them, and now 404 has a new article out describing how its reporters placed a tracking device on a shipment of books and followed it to an Amazon warehouse where the books are being scanned and shredded.
Amazon's Bookosaurus team are shredding books on an industrial scale and meanwhile an Australian library is reconsidering shelving a book that discuss genocides, especially the one in Gaza.
What's next? Kristallnacht?
But what does it mean to scan and destroy rare books. Is it all bad?
Well to begin with it will make rare books rarer, especially first editions, and therefore more valuable.
So many books are now being generated by AI that someone has to shred them when they don't sell so maybe Amazon is providing a public service? Although print on demand has surely reduced the amount of unsold book inventory around the world.
It's possible that some books will truly disappear and only be available via intermediaries such as Amazon or Google.
There will come a time when only AI trained on the rare book will 'remember' these books and they will slip from human memory.
Some books that someone or AI does not like could disappear altogether like Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four or Forster's The Machine Stops.
Why should anyone want to know that someone predicted the world they are living in many years ago?
Why indeed.