If you’ve wondered where books end up after they are cut up for AI scanning, I have the answer. A bookseller I know put a scanning device in a book. According to the Wall Street Journal, the book ended up in a paper recycling plant south of the border.
The journal didn’t say what was made at the plant: post-consumer recycled toilet paper.
A bookseller I know received an order for a book to be sent to a Trifinity warehouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a common destination for AI company orders. My friend put a tracking device in the book and watched as it went to Kenosha, then Las Vegas, and finally to a warehouse in Mexicali, Mexico. The warehouse is part of a large Papel San Francisco paper plant.
The plant is a leader in manufacturing post-consumer recycled products, including toilet paper.
If there is any remaining doubt that AI is destructively scanning books, I hope that this ends it. There is no plausible reason for a company to pay for a book and then send it to a paper recycling plant unless it has been cut up and turned into loose paper during a scanning process.
AI companies already have a bad reputation for driving up interest rates on home loans; building massive data centers with little public input; inducing widespread cheating among students and sometimes lawyers; and destroying books by the tens of millions.
Books are, in the words of AI company engineers, perhaps the most valuable data for training their large language models.
AI companies are using pirated ebooks and buying used books for scanning, which means that the authors who created this valuable material mostly earn nothing for their contributions.1 The companies, however, are chasing trillion-dollar valuations of their AI products.
And now we learn that at least one AI companies is trucking their destroyed books thousands of miles and disposing them in a foreign country. The brave bookseller who put the tracking device in the book doesn’t want to be named because the AI companies have bottomless resources to pursue their critics.
The only good news in this is that Papel San Francisco turns AI waste products into something that makes everyone’s life better.
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For more an AI scanning books see my previous posts: All the Companies Scanning Books for AI; AI Is Destroying Collectible Books; AI Models Forget the Books They Read; and my initial essay about being a rare book dealer in the AI era.
If you want still more on the subject, the Orange County Register also has a story.
—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books
Papel San Francisco did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Anthropic, alone of the AI companies, has agreed to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit, paying the authors of about 500,000 books $3,000 each (typically split between the author and the publisher). As of this writing, none of the authors have been paid, and none of the other AI companies have paid authors or even promised to.
It is instructive to follow the narrative a bit further. More "authors" will rely on AI to assist them with their work in the future. Their published work will in turn be fed into the insatiable maw of the AI beast. It won't require many iterations of this process before all new published work will begin with the words "It was a dark and stormy night." Then we hit the reset button.
Unbelievable, except I do believe it