Earlier this month, we reported on the disturbing trend of AI companies using and then destroying physical copies of books to train their agentic AI, in a practice so eerily reminiscent of book burning that it’s spooking even devotees of artificial intelligence.
Well, according to Axios, the FTC is now being urged to investigate the practice, not, as we might like, for crimes against humanity, but for violations of antitrust law, since every book destroyed is one less book available for competing AI agents to use.
Axios reports that “[m]ore than a dozen civil society groups,” including Demand Progress Education Fund, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, are urging the FTC to investigate these practices, particularly those involving rare books. In their letter, they “urge the FTC to view this practice not in isolation but rather as the latest escalation in a documented pattern of anticompetitive conduct designed to create an insurmountable systemic moat around AI incumbents.”
The problem is all the more acute because these companies are allegedly targeting older books — especially those published before 2022 — since those books are guaranteed not to have been written by AI and are far more likely to have been well edited.
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The letter continues:
“Unlike a standard data acquisition strategy, this hoard-and-destroy practice could serve as yet another structural mechanism to raise rival companies’ costs and deny start-ups and fledgling competitors a key source material essential to competing in the AI marketplace.”
Recall OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s description of knowledge as a utility that could be sold to you “like electricity and water“? That business proposition looks a lot less wholesome when it involves the wholesale destruction of books, our first and still-unsurpassed repository for human knowledge, most of which can still be acquired cheaply or freely loaned from a local library.
Sadder still is the fact that our best practical defense against this modern book burning isn’t an ethical one but a legal one: that it would be bad for other businesses.
