Remember the story about AI companies destroying millions of copies of books while scanning them to use as training data? In terms of bad optics, “destroying books” is right up there with kicking puppies, which is why the AI companies relied on third-party rebuyers to obfuscate what they were actually doing.
It didn’t work, and now as 404 Media reports (having broken the original story), third-party book database company ISBNdb has deleted the part of their website advertising that they could be “your streamlined partner for sourcing printed books in bulk, tailored to your LLM training needs, delivered at the scale AI demands.”
That page is still available on the Internet Archive, of course, as is their blog post about “Reframing the Destruction Narrative” in which they make wild claims like: “The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one.”
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The idea that asking a chatbot to hallucinate a summary of a book has exactly the same value as actually reading it seems bugloving nuts to me, but what do I know? I’m not getting my knowledge from the intellectual cycle. Anyway, ISBNdb is now claiming it never actually offered the service it dedicated multiple parts of its website to, telling 404 Media, “The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life.”
Somebody out there sure is buying up a lot of old and obscure books, however. As reported by Guardian Australia, multiple secondhand booksellers have seen an uptick in online sales from third-party rebuyers, describing them as “waves of orders that did not fit with usual customer patterns.”