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How artificial intelligence is literally eating the world’s rare books

A rare old book can now be worth more dead than alive. Antique 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 discusses the destruction of knowledge to build artificial intelligence.

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Guest: Author Sarah Wilson

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