India, Sept. 5 -- The Artificial Intelligence (AI) race has a new victim - second-hand books. Over the past summer, reports have emerged of AI developers around the world purchasing vast quantities of used books. Once acquired, these volumes are destructively scanned: Their bindings are cut off and the resulting loose pages are fed through automated scanners, rendering the physical volumes unusable.

This interest in used books stems from two factors. The first is technical. A growing body of literature on model collapse suggests that recursively training AI models on slop (or AI-generated data) can progressively erode their ability to track distributions. The problem is commonly compared to making photocopies of photocopies, a process th...