AI companies are turning old books into training data, Fahrenheit 451-style

AI companies are increasingly sourcing physical used books, including rare and out-of-print titles, to create training data for large language models. ISBNdb briefly offered a service to supply up to one million physical books per order for AI training, promising confidentiality, but later discontinued it. Anthropic has reportedly purchased and scanned millions of physical books, raising questions about the prevalence of destructive scanning and the fate of original books.