Somewhere right now, a machine is slicing the pages out of an antique book so an AI company can scan them into training data and throw away what's left.
Anthropic has already admitted to
doing this at massive scale, and paid $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit over it. Meta has been accused of pirating digital books for the same purpose. And thanks to book brokers who promise buyers anonymity, there's no way to know how many other companies, including the biggest names in AI, are doing the exact same thing right now.
Sign the petition to demand OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic commit to never destroying physical books ever again!It's a massively concerning trend, and one that's incredibly hard to track. Small booksellers across the globe who specialize in rare, out of print, and antique books say their sales have spiked – and they suspect the buyers are AI labs. These suspicions are based on the fact that the books being bought are in large quantities, seemingly across a random smattering of subjects, and they all have ISBNs, or a "International Standard Book Number."
ISBNdb calls itself "the world's largest book database" – but what it does more quietly is source up to a million books at a time to then sell to AI companies to consume and destroy, promising these companies total and complete anonymity.
Once a book is scanned, it's destroyed, along with any chance a library, collector, or reader could ever own that copy again. And because some of these books are rare or out of print…they could be the last copies in existence, gone forever.
It does not get more dystopian than this.
There is no good reason for AI companies to destroy these precious books. AI technology is moving quickly, and we deserve the companies at the helm to respect and revere the art that humanity has been making for centuries before AI ever existed. Art like beautiful, original, inspiring writing cannot be replaced, no matter how many times an AI model ingests it.
Choosing to shred books instead of preserving them isn't a requirement of the technology, it's a choice, and one that is erasing pieces of literary history that can never be replaced.
Anthropic, and any other AI company that has done this, should be ashamed. And we must let them know that the world is watching, and we will not rest until they commit to preserving art, not destroying it.
Sign the petition and demand OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic stop destroying physical books, and instead preserve or return every copy they have bought!