The Devouring of All Knowledge

I was horrified but unsurprised to read reports¹ this week of the AI companies buying, butchering, scanning, and shredding rare books at an unprecedented scale.

With all online knowledge consumed, the next source of untapped text is the abundance of physical works created before the introduction of LLMs, a point in time casually termed “the ensh**ification of all knowledge” circa 2021.² All writing before this historic point is the work of human hands and minds. Writing published after 2021 is potentially LLM-written and therefore unsuitable to be used as training data.

The race is now on to consume and destroy (at least one copy of) every physical book on the planet first - and I wouldn’t rule out a similar situation to of the global memory shortage of 2025, where purchases became weapons used to stonewall competitors.

“Many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.”

– Frank Landymore¹

The key problem here is not only the destruction of rare and priceless books, which while unused, represent accessible human knowledge - but the sequestering of that knowledge behind walled gardens. Countless dystopian sci-fi visions of humanity’s darkest paths describe the gathering and destruction of knowledge so the record can be set straight by a central authority. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four both come to mind as keen examples of governments and their proxies working tirelessly to destroy the past and rewrite history.

Where this ultimately leads is a situation where all knowledge is consumed by the owners of these large language models, and knowledge is only available through the curated and monitored outputs from these models. Contrary or information deemed ‘unsafe’ will not be available.

One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.

– Frank Landymore¹

What can you do about it? Buy and hold paper books. Your children will thank you, and paper books are entirely yours to mark up, borrow, trade, and love - entirely out of the subscription prison most companies are hurriedly constructing today. Paper books can’t be revoked, altered, or monetized past the point of acquisition, and therefore are unattractive to these businesses who seek recurring revenue above all other things.

Anything we can collectively do to keep old and rare books out of the hands of LLM companies, in particular history books and encyclopedias written before 1945, is a great blessing to humanity.

Here’s to a future with books!