AI Companies Are Destroying Books by the Millions. What Will It Mean for Art?
ARTnews reports that some AI companies are buying and physically destroying large numbers of books to scan them for training large language models, raising concerns for artists and researchers who rely on access to older publications. A lawsuit against Anthropic revealed “Project Panama,” in which the company bought millions of books, cut off bindings, scanned pages, and shredded originals, with internal documents stating an aim to “destructively scan all the books in the world” and plans to scan about 2 million books in a six-month period. The article notes that after copyright lawsuits over pirated digital books, companies have turned to purchasing physical copies—often seeking books printed before 2022—to avoid training on AI-generated text. It contrasts this industrial-scale destruction with artists’ limited use of books in collage and assemblage, citing examples such as Jess, Carol Bove, and Marta Minujín’s The Parthenon of Books (1983; remade for Documenta 2017).
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This story was covered in Museum Expansions, AI Book Carnage, and Power Plays