The Devouring of All Knowledge

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:55:25 -0600

I was horrified but unsurprised to read reports¹ this week of the AI/LLM² companies buying, butchering, scanning, and shredding rare books at an unprecedented scale.

With all online forums, PDFs, articles, and books consumed, the next best source of human writing is the abundance of physical books published before the advent of LLMs. The year 2021³ and the emergence of LLM² text generation is coarsely termed “the ensh**tification of all knowledge”. Writing published after this point is potentially LLM-written and therefore unsuitable to be used as training data. Whatever we wrote before this historic point is exclusively the work of human hands and minds.

Books on Ryan Fleck

The Devouring of All Knowledge