Major AI companies are buying millions of used books through intermediaries and destroying them after digitization to obtain high-quality training data while avoiding public scrutiny, according to a recent investigative report.
Tom’s Hardware reports that an investigation has revealed that AI companies are reportedly engaging in large-scale purchases of secondhand books to feed their language models, with the physical books subsequently being destroyed after scanning. The practice involves using middlemen to secretly acquire the books, potentially to avoid the controversy that has surrounded AI companies’ use of copyrighted material.
The demand for quality training data has pushed AI developers to seek out human-authored content that predates the proliferation of AI-generated...
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