AI companies are buying up millions of books, and destroying them: the next centralization is human intelligence.

Almost every day, I find myself waking up to headlines that further confirm Terminator was, in fact, a documentary about our current reality.

The dystopian things I find that our own government continues to do and allows large corporations like Meta, Anthropic, Palantir, and OpenAI to do baffle me. Not really, though; when you look at history, you’ll find that nothing is new under the sun; we are just creatures that don’t like to learn from our mistakes.

AI companies are buying up millions of books, and destroying them….

A report came out that some large AI companies have been caught buying up older books or just books from resellers, ripping the pages out, running them through imaging technology to then input into AI models, and from there destroying the books.

We could naively believe that, oh, these books will live forever! But that cannot be the case when these are private and for-profit companies. A court ruling shows that the company Anthropic has been involved with this, a project known as Project Panama. This court ruling was tied to over a billion-dollar copyright class action lawsuit.

The kicker is that some of these purchases are going under the radar, using “AI-labs” using a service called ISNdb facilities, millions of books destroyed, some may have been the only copy.

To help you understand, the information is fed into these machine models to help teach them, and then after the machine has the data, the physical books are destroyed, and the private company now has the monopoly on that information.

Books of human intelligence are being fed into a machine to then be sold back to the very human intelligence that created that same knowledge.

That is the level of dystopia we have reached.

But looking back through history shows that resources have always been sought after: food, land, water, and now human intelligence.

They want to own the human mind.

That is what AI is truly all about, especially for our tyrannical, obsessed governments. At one time I believed it must be demon-possessed folks, but I have concluded that these are power-hungry, greedy, sons of bitches (that is my southern dialect coming out).

Knowledge is a gift from our creator, like all of the resources, yet those who seek power come to assert that they should render the gift.

In these dystopian times, return to what is physically real. Write down knowledge, buy physical media, learn real skills, and own what you can.

The time has arrived to choose if we will keep our humanity or give it over to machines. I will not give it over willingly.

Wendell Berry wrote in 2000 a quote that lives in my mind:

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines."

Many have come before us warning of such times; some were labeled as quacks, a part of the occult, but it’s time to listen and choose to create a parallel system.

Talk soon,

Shelby

If you do value physical media, consider ordering Revive the Table, a reader-funded publication, focused on helping revive real food, reconnect to the land, and rebuild local community.