Booksellers and shop owners in England and other parts of Europe – who deal with rare, antiquarian books – received emails from some unknown buyers. Although identities of the buyers were unclear, they were placing orders for large quantities of books and also requesting information, as well as photographs, regarding old or rare books the sellers might have. As expected, the incident sparked doubt.

Later, details emerged regarding the secret Project Panama of a major Artificial Intelligence (AI) company through a lawsuit in a California court. It is nothing but purchasing millions of used physical books, using hydraulic machines to cut off their spines, feeding the loose pages into high-speed industrial scanners in order to train the Claude AI models and then recycling the remains. The process is referred to as destructive scanning in the case documents.

Project Panama was an internal, secretive initiative by AI lab Anthropic starting in early 2024. A Federal Judge ruled that scanning purchased books and destroying the physical copies constituted legal “fair use” under US format-shifting law. However, the company separately faced major legal fallout over using pirated digital books.

This particular act by the AI company has raised several serious ethical, legal and economic questions. To AI, literature, philosophy or science fiction are all data content. The goal of AI companies’ Large Language Models is precisely to rapidly generate content that is human-like or even superior to human-created content. Hence, they need high-quality books penned by humans over the years and exist in print. This process has not only turned cultural artefacts into functional inputs for machine learning, but also changed one’s view on the life cycle of written art. In other words, AI’s hunger for data is now consuming rare books.

Meanwhile, ISBNdb, which describes itself as operating the world’s largest book database, has argued that older printed books offer an advantage because they were published before AI-generated text became widespread. “Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage,” the company stated on its website. It added: “Physical books published before this date (pre-2022) are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.” Reports suggest that ISBNdb now facilitates bulk purchases ranging from 1,000 to one million books per order for AI companies. It also advertises anonymous procurement services, acknowledging the reputational risks surrounding the practice. ISBNdb stressed: “The optics problem is real. ‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.“

Here arises an even bigger question: Is a book merely a collection of sophisticated, refined words? It holds the soul of a society. A book’s cover, pages, ink, author signature and reader marks show history, art and human feelings. They prove how people lived, thought and dreamed in a specific time and place, representing the cultural existence of a society, as well as a nation. To consider a printed book merely as data or content is, in effect, a total denial and rejection of its very existence. The AI companies are continuously doing it, indiscriminately. No one knows whether these companies obtained permission from authors, publishers or legal rights holders for this massive collection or whether the authors and publishers received any remuneration, honorarium or compensation for it.

Laws regarding AI are not yet clear or well-defined even in developed countries. If the creations of millions of authors are reduced merely to training material for AI by exploiting loopholes in the legal definitions of copyright and fair use, then the future of creativity and intellectual property ownership is bound to be uncertain. Furthermore, the race for AI uniqueness through the mass ingestion of published books threatens to deepen socio-economic inequalities by concentrating wealth and power among a few tech monopolies. It will also marginalise authors, artists and lower-income communities who will gradually lose control over their intellectual property and cultural heritage. Ordinary book lovers, who can access books in various ways, may not have equal access to the benefits of AI in the coming years.

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das