Firehose

Several AI companies, including Anthropic, are bulk-buying rare books, scanning and shredding the originals to train AI models, with a service called ISBNdb facilitating orders of up to a million books. A federal judge has ruled this practice as fair use, citing that eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time, and the company offers NDAs to keep the practice anonymous. This has sparked concerns about the irreversible loss of historical artifacts. AI summary