AI is eating the world’s books
· 17 min · Episode 2058
Episode AI is eating the world’s books
A rare old book can now be worth more dead than alive.
Books are being bought, cut apart and scanned to train artificial intelligence.
Nobody knows how many books have been destroyed this way, but second-hand booksellers around the world have reported anonymous orders ranging from thousands to as many as a million books at a time.
And internal documents from AI giant Anthropic revealed plans to “destructively scan all the books in the world”.
Today, author Sarah Wilson on the destruction of knowledge to build artificial intelligence.
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Guest: Author Sarah Wilson
Photo: AAP Image/Lukas Coch
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Transcript
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