Yeah, it's happening.

Every modern AI engine has trouble with versioning and outdated info being replaced with newer info. I've had multiple say "oh, that's the new interface. It's here now" about once a week. Scan books from like 1950 and you'll probably get "There actually is no subatomic particle smaller than the proton" and "Actually, women shouldn't work on office environments or their ovaries will explode."

Companies are offering books for sale.

Book sellers are selling books.

The sellers seem to have no idea if the buyers are using it for AI training, just that the sales volumes have increased.

Anecdote: I see an increase in book stores. AI also see in increase in youths reading/collecting physical books at a higher rate than recent years. YMMV

[1]https://techcrunch.com/2026/07... [techcrunch.com]

"The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law, many authors and creators still donâ(TM)t view it as a win.

Thatâ(TM)s because of how the legal question was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use â" a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry. But the ruling didnâ(TM)t excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded."

So... it's legal to scan books you own and then use them to train LLMs, but it's not legal to use scans that someone else made (I'll assume in this case, they didn't own the books in question.) Hence... the perverse incentive to buy and re-scan books that might already have been scanned... and the cheapest way of doing it is to chop the spine off.

"Internal Anthropic documents about its plan to scan millions of books, revealed in the copyright lawsuit, donâ(TM)t make clear why the company wanted to destroy the books in the process. A deposition of Tom Harvey, who Anthropic hired to lead the project and who previously helped create Google Books, shows that one company Anthropic contracted to scan the books was Datamation, which offers both âoehigh volume destructive and non-destructive book scanningâ services. In a destructive book scanning process, the spine of the book is cut so the pages can be fed into a scanning machine, which is faster and cheaper than non-destructive book scanning.

Regardless of its original intentions, the federal judge in the copyright lawsuit from authors against Anthropic, William Alsup, found that Anthropicâ(TM)s creation of digital copies of the books was legal specifically because the books were destroyed.

âoeHere, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy,â Alsup wrote in his ruling. âoeThe print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.â "

Kind of fucked up that the scan can't be shared (or donated). I imagine in most cases, good copies of these books no longer exist in libraries or in the Library of Congress. With current law, all books that are covered under copyright will eventually fall into the public domain, but this is meaningless unless copies exist for people to redistribute once that limit is reached. Essentially companies are exploiting the monopoly benefit extended through copyright without allowing society to benefit from the material falling into the public domain, which is the implicit contract to using state power to enforce copyright.

Ironically, destroying physical copies in order to comply with the 1:1 rule makes the remaining copies that much more valuable.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved/

All because you can't eat your own slop. Tobacco company executives don't smoke either.

Publishers prefer book destruction to reasonable copyright terms.

That's why we, the people, must remove their copyright privilege after five years.

Copyright EXISTS to encourage creation not destruction.

... what ailment may have befallen me?

ChatGPT: According to my knowledge of the latest advancements in [1]Humorism [wikipedia.org], an over-abundance of Black Bile is probably the cause. Thy shall seek to get some cupping done. I learned that from a book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism

There is AI slot and also hand written slop. A book being old does not make it peer reviewed, although it is for sure curated by the publisher. There are also countless non-fiction books that were written at a time when the 'ground truth' was completely different or not as settled. For example: cocaine was prescribed in the past.

When AIs get unarguably smarter and more knowledgeable than even erudite humans and editors, and human domain specialists, as will inevitably happen, then model collapse should no longer be a thing, as long as there is diversity of models feeding off EACH OTHERs' outputs rather than all feeding off their own outputs. A lack of diversity of models could lead to semantic "inbreeding" and model collapse, but a diversity of superhuman intelligent and knowledgeable AI systems should produce superhuman-quality o

Someone's going to feed it a hardcopy of "AI For Dummies" and THEN we'll be sorry. The singularity will be upon us.

That stunt only works once. Everything to keep the hype going a bit longer, I guess.