AI Companies Are Destroying Books. That's Not Nearly as Scary as It Sounds.
Yes, AI companies are buying books, scanning them for training data, and destroying the physical copies. But as Jack Nicastro argues in Reason, the reality is much less dire than headlines suggest.
The Demand Progress Education Fund recently sent a coalition letter asking the FTC to investigate whether bulk book digitization illegally protects incumbent AI companies from competition. The letter focuses on Project Panama, Anthropic’s effort to destructively scan books. While the process might sound sinister, Nicastro explains that it efficiently converts physical books into digital text and helps companies comply with copyright law.
The coalition argues that pre-AI human-authored text is finite and inelastic. Yet publishers can print more copies, out-of-print books often remain abundant, and other training data abounds. There is also no evidence that AI companies have used monopsony power to bid up book prices. Bulk digitization can improve AI models and help booksellers clear inventory that might otherwise go unsold.
Nicastro concludes that the practice doesn’t threaten humanity’s cultural inheritance and that the FTC shouldn’t waste its resources investigating conduct that reflects dynamic competition rather than market foreclosure.
