AI Firms Are Shredding Millions of Books to Train Chatbots
Tech developers are purchasing print books by the millions, shearing off their spines, and scanning the pages to build clean training datasets.
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Key takeaways
- AI companies are purchasing physical books by the millions for dataset collection.
- Firms slice off book spines to rapidly scan every page into AI training models.
- The original print copies are discarded immediately after digitization.
Tech firms are quietly purchasing physical books by the millions, slicing off their spines, feeding every page into scanners for training datasets, and tossing the paper scrap.
From paper to training data
Bigger AI models demand bigger hoards of clean, structured human prose. Raw web scrapes simply don't cut it anymore. Facing a bottleneck of high-quality digital text, developers are turning back to paper. They buy print runs en masse, cut them up for high-speed scanners, and convert pages into raw data. Once ingested, the ruined paper gets thrown out.
Why it matters
Training models takes massive data, and the rush to feed large language models is altering how print IP moves through the market. If you build or trade in decentralized AI, pay attention: this highlights why verifiable data sourcing matters. Crypto protocols are actively constructing decentralized data markets and tracking systems for IP. In that environment, proving where your training data actually came from will be a key advantage for Web3 AI projects.
Source: Decrypt
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Daniel Okoro
Daniel tracks crypto regulation and policy across the US, EU and Asia, with a decade in financial journalism.
