Anthropic spent billions of dollars to slice the spines off millions of books, including very rare ones.
AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books and scanning their contents to train LLMs. They then turn the originals to pulp.
The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded. Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently.
Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.