We can’t save all the books. But we can save some of them.
The driving force behind this destruction is what researchers call “model collapse.” When AI systems train on text generated by other AI systems, quality degrades with each generation, producing increasingly incoherent results. The internet has become so saturated with synthetic content that companies now actively seek pre-2022 printed books as the last uncontaminated reservoir of human-authored knowledge.
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI training data, advertises on its website that “the world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf.” The company describes printed books as “curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate.” Pre-2022 publications are “structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination,” the company states, referencing both AI-generated text and the growing practice of authors “poisoning” web content to sabotage scraping pipelines.
Harvard University, partnering with Google and Microsoft, demonstrated that an alternative exists. The collaboration released nearly one million public-domain digitized books in 254 languages — no destruction required. Microsoft’s Burton Davis called starting with public-domain data “prudent,” noting that libraries hold “significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data.” That alternative track makes clear that labs have cleaner options. They simply choose not to take them.
We’re going to come up with a program to save and bind some of these rare books. They don’t have to be destroyed. What I’m thinking of is an “adopt a book” program that will permit people to fund the rebinding of a rare book in leather, after which they will receive that book or be recognized as the sponsor of that book in Castalia’s library. If we can just convince the AI companies to send us the pages instead of pulping them, this should be something doable.
In the meantime, you can help us create books that are going to outlive the AI companies engaging in this destruction.
And be sure to take notice of how this is being caused as a downstream consequence of copyright law…