20260701 Unersättliche KI-Systeme

01.07.2026 Unersättliche KI-Systeme

AI and "Fahrenheit 451"

Probably only a few older people remember Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi novel and film "Fahrenheit 451". In it, the fire department is tasked with tracking down and burning any remaining books. Something similar seems to be happening right now through front organizations of the major Big Tech AI companies. Now that (almost) all digitized books have been fed into AI systems for training, the focus has shifted to truly old books that are only available through antiquarian bookstores.

As the newspaper "Die Zeitung der Arbeit" reports in the linked article: “In recent months, antiquarian booksellers have enjoyed higher revenues; with many orders for old books — often several at once — which is unusual in this industry.”

Several examples of order transactions from various parts of the world are cited, where even upon inquiry it cannot be determined for whom the orders are being fulfilled. This raises concerns that these books will then be digitized for AI systems, a process that is not possible without destroying them.

Should cultural heritage be bought up and destroyed by a select few?

Even the use of digitized books for training AI is “actually” incompatible with copyright law, since their content is subsequently reused by the AI. Nevertheless, there have been only a few (successful) lawsuits in such cases. For example, in August 2024, “Anthropic PBC” — known for its AI model “Claude” — was sued for copyright infringement in the state of California by three authors. The training dataset for “Claude” consisted of over 800 gigabytes of book material from so-called shadow libraries. While private use of the content is permitted there, commercial exploitation is not.

This brings to mind the following image, which we also like to display at our information booths to highlight that similar acts are prosecuted very differently depending on a person’s social (and economic) status.

We also remember the case of student Aaron Swartz, who copied several academic books during his studies and made them available to his fellow students, only to be threatened with a 35-year prison sentence and a hefty fine. He took his own life, while the Big Tech billionaires get off scot-free.