AI companies are shredding rare books
AI companies are shredding rare books
AI 公司正在销毁珍稀书籍
Hedgie@HedgieMarkets🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they’re free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain “all the books in the world.”
Hedgie@HedgieMarkets🦔AI 公司正在批量购买珍稀书籍，通过高速机器扫描，这些机器会切掉书脊并将原件粉碎。一家名为 ISBNdb 的服务商协助处理高达百万册的订单，并为买家保密。2022 年之前的书籍被视为“优质资源”，因为它们不含 AI 生成的文本。一位联邦法官裁定这种做法属于“合理使用”，理由是销毁原件意味着同一时间只存在一份副本。Anthropic 聘请了前 Google 图书合作负责人，旨在获取“世界上所有的书”。
My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb’s website literally says “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy,” and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it “digital preservation.”
我的看法：这让我感到愤怒。一位书商告诉 404 Media，那些几乎没有存世副本的珍稀书籍正被送入这条流水线。那些历经战争、火灾和数百年流传下来的书籍，仅仅为了让 AI 学会写出更好的营销邮件就被粉碎了。ISBNdb 的网站上甚至直白地写着：“‘AI 公司销毁两百万本书’并不是一个能博取同情的标题”，但他们依然围绕着如何悄无声息地完成这件事建立了一整套商业模式。他们将签署保密协议（NDA）作为一项服务功能，并指导客户将其美其名曰“数字保存”。
I’ve covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it’s irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can’t replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it’s legal. So it’s going to accelerate. “We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out” is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
我曾报道过 AI 公司抓取互联网数据、通过种子下载图书馆资源以及窃取音乐的行为。但这件事更糟糕，因为它是不可逆的。你可以重新上传一个网站，可以重印一本畅销书，但一旦有人为了训练数据而粉碎了 18 世纪植物学文献的最后三份副本，你就再也无法找回它们了。而法官却说这是合法的，所以这种行为只会加速。在 2026 年，“我们粉碎珍稀书籍并提供保密协议以防泄露”竟然成了一种合法的商业模式。这是什么时代啊。
Elon Musk@elonmusk: I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning.
Elon Musk@elonmusk：我已经要求 SpaceXAI 团队保留图书馆中的任何珍稀书籍，并采用费力的方式进行扫描，而不是直接切掉书脊进行扫描。
axcilla@axcilla: If you destroy history you can use AI to rewrite it.
axcilla@axcilla：如果你摧毁了历史，你就可以利用 AI 来重写它。
Own Your Compute@MoonlitMaven: Burning of the library of Alexandria 2.0.
Own Your Compute@MoonlitMaven：亚历山大图书馆焚毁事件 2.0 版本。