AI companies are buying rare books in mass and destroying them.
Why, you ask?
Because their language models are inbreeding. There is so much AI slop on the internet that their models keep scraping the internet and training themselves on AI content, which is degrading the integrity of the models.
The solution?
Buy as many old and rare books as they can that predate online LLMs.
They buy books in bulk, strip the spines, scan the pages, then shred everything.
It’s being defended in court under the “first purchase principle,” meaning that when you buy a book, you are free to do whatever you want with it, short of violating copyright laws. Since the companies are using the texts to train algorithms, that falls under fair use and is thus legally protected.
I cannot physically express how awful this is. There are no regulations to determine what these books are. Many of them may be the last of their kind. Scholarship, war memoirs, hidden history... the list goes on.
Gone forever in a puff of mechanical smoke.
So, I’m going to tell you about the time a rare book broke open a misunderstood piece of history.
During my last year of college, I spent the entire year, and multiple classes, trying to prove Eusebius’ account of Constantine’s conversion story wrong.
Eusebius was the primary historian of Church history during the 4th century CE, but he was also a Constantine fanboy who openly admitted that it was a good thing to twist history in order to advance the goals and reach of the Church.
Eusebius was an apologist, not a historian.
But it took a very long time for me to find the right pieces to fit together the actual conversion story. Nothing about Constantine was working. Everything revolved around Eusebius’ account.
So I pivoted. I needed the history of Helena Augusta, Constantine’s mother.
You can read more on how the conversions actually happened here:
I went to my university library and searched the entire academic network across the state and found an extremely rare book documenting Helena’s history. It was the only copy in the network and I had to have it shipped to my university.
In it, I found the one tiny detail that made everything fall into place. I was able to prove that she triggered Constantine’s conversion. If she had died earlier, or if she hadn’t converted at all, history would look incredibly different.
I’ve looked for that book over the years, but I’ve only ever found it once, and it was too expensive at the time to add to my collection. It’s by far the most valuable book I’ve ever had in my hands because it was the culmination of an entire year’s worth of elusive research.
A tech bro would never see any value in it aside from what they could literally rip out of it and feed into their machines.
I can only imagine how far the ripple effects of this destruction will reach. All those little moments where perceptions change. When history corrects itself. When knowledge jumps off the page into culture. When scholarship shifts in the middle of coffee filled, all-nighters.
All of it gone without anyone realizing. The future changes when history is erased.
AI companies cannot be allowed to do this. This is the literal destruction of history. The kind we will never get back.
Literature is the containment of everything that is human, and they are ripping it apart.
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