As if one really needed another reason to question AI, now they're literally destroying books?

This hurts so much to read -- as the current online information landscape gets more and more polluted with “AI slop”, AI companies are in a search for pristine training data by other means. This investigation reveals companies are bulk-buying pre-2022 books, scraping off the spines, scanning the contents, then DESTROYING them.

Even worse, via Futerism:

One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.

I personally have mixed feelings about all of this," the bookseller told 404. "It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped."

If I were a book seller, I would be extremely circumspect about who I was selling old books to.

Related reading

• "ISBNdb Pitches Pre-2022 Print Books as Slop-Free AI Training Data" AI Weekly. 07/21/26.
• "AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale", By Frank Landymore, Futurism.com. 07/25/26.
• "District Court Issues AI Fair Use Decision: Using Copyrighted Works to Train AI Models Is Fair Use, but Using Pirated Copies to Build a Central Library Is Not", by Robert D. Carroll, Timothy Keegan, Eunbi Choi. GoodwinLaw.com. 07/25/25.
• and here's the link to the actual court filing declaring that the purchase-scanning-and-destruction of printed books is considered "fair use" (pirated copies downloaded online, however, are another matter)