Civil society teams push FTC to sue AI corporations over e-book destruction

Earlier this month, we reported on the disturbing pattern of AI corporations utilizing after which destroying bodily copies of books to coach their agentic AI, in a apply so eerily paying homage to e-book burning that it is spooking even devotees of artificial intelligence.

Properly, according to Axios, the FTC is now being urged to analyze the apply, not, as we’d like, for crimes in opposition to humanity, however for violations of antitrust legislation, since each e-book destroyed is one much less e-book obtainable for competing AI brokers to make use of. 

Axios reviews that “[m]ore than a dozen civil society teams,” together with Demand Progress Training Fund, the Client Federation of America, and the Institute for Native Self-Reliance, are urging the FTC to analyze these practices, significantly these involving uncommon books. Of their letter, they “urge the FTC to view this apply not in isolation however somewhat as the most recent escalation in a documented sample of anticompetitive conduct designed to create an insurmountable systemic moat round AI incumbents.” 

The issue is all of the extra acute as a result of these corporations are allegedly focusing on older books — particularly these printed earlier than 2022 — since these books are assured to not have been written by AI and are way more more likely to have been nicely edited.

The letter continues:

“In contrast to a normal knowledge acquisition technique, this hoard-and-destroy apply might function yet one more structural mechanism to lift rival corporations’ prices and deny start-ups and fledgling rivals a key supply materials important to competing within the AI market.”

Recall OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s description of data as a utility that could possibly be bought to you “like electricity and water“? That enterprise proposition appears lots much less healthful when it includes the wholesale destruction of books, our first and still-unsurpassed repository for human data, most of which may nonetheless be acquired cheaply or freely loaned from a neighborhood library.

Sadder nonetheless is the truth that our greatest sensible protection in opposition to this contemporary e-book burning is not an moral one however a authorized one: that it might be dangerous for different companies.