AI Wants Your Old Books

Artificial intelligence companies are buying millions of older printed books to train their latest models because they are increasingly viewed as one of the last large sources of trustworthy, human-written text, highlighting a growing problem for the AI industry as the internet becomes saturated with machine-generated content.

Why Are AI Companies Buying Old Books?

For years, AI developers have relied heavily on vast quantities of online content to train increasingly capable language models. However, that approach is becoming more difficult because the web itself is changing.