Bringing to mind a 2023 post, "So Why Were The Chinese Plundering British Shipwrecks Off The Coast Of Malaysia?". *
From Tom's Hardware, July 28:
Buy. Scan. Destroy. Repeat.
Having contributed to the growing shortage of memory and storage, AI companies seemingly have a new target in their sights: humanity's literary history. A recent investigative report from 404 Media reveals that these companies are reportedly purchasing millions of secondhand books through intermediaries to source high-quality training data for their AI models, avoiding public backlash.
AI relies on vast amounts of data to advance, but not just any data. It has to be high-quality data. The problem is that mediocre AI-generated content, commonly referred to as "AI slop," has proliferated across the Internet. This type of content contaminates the data pool and is counterproductive for AI to train on. As a result, leading AI companies have turned to human-authored sources for knowledge, specifically print sources that predate 2022 and are more likely to contain original, uncontaminated content.
There is precedent for AI companies turning to physical books for training AI. For instance, Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies involved in a lawsuit, reportedly invested millions of dollars in extracting information from countless printed books to build its Claude AI models and then destroying them. The company bought books from Better World Books. Although the court decision affirmed that using books for AI training falls under fair use in copyright law, Anthropic faced a staggering $1.5 billion fine for maintaining a repository of seven million pirated books that infringed the copyrights of authors and publishers. Similarly, a coalition of publishers recently filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of allegedly and illegally using millions of copyrighted books to develop its Gemini AI models.
ISBNdb, an online database that reportedly has over 111 million cataloged books, has been a long-favorite platform for booksellers, libraries, and distributors to sell books. With the explosion of the AI industry, ISBNdb has pivoted its business to offer specialized services to bulk-purchase books for AI companies. According to 404 Media, the orders range from 1,000 copies to as many as one million books in a single transaction....
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*And the shipwrecks in Malaysian waters recollection, July 7, 2023:
You may remember the news from last month:
Chinese ship detained for plundering WW2 wreck
Here's the rest of the story, from Ed Conway's Material World substack, June 10:
The Eerie Story of Low Background Steel
Bandits are plundering metal from old shipwrecks, in search, it seems for the world's rarest, and strangest, metal.
The other week a Chinese vessel was detained by Malaysian authorities off the coast of Johor, under suspicion of having plundered old WWII era shipwrecks in the region.
HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales, both of which sank in Malaysian waters in 1941, have had large sections of their bodies and armaments stolen in this way. The practice has been going on for years - these raiders targeting shipwrecks which are also effectively war graves - but this was one of the rare occasions when someone was seemingly caught in the act.
But why, you might be wondering, would anyone go to these lengths to obtain scrap metal. The price of steel hardly merits this kind of effort and risk. So what are these raiders really after? Gold? Silver? Stolen artworks?
The answer, it turns out, is far more interesting: a very, very rare form of metal. Something called “low background steel”.
Steel itself is one of the cheapest types of metal (an alloy technically) but the type of steel we’re talking about is one of the rarest substances in the world. For low background steel doesn’t contain radionuclides, traces of radiation such as cobalt-60. These trace amounts don’t matter for most uses but when you’re making products highly sensitive to radiation - eg special scientific equipment or Geiger counters - you need this steel.
And here’s the thing: all steel made since 1945 contains radionuclides....
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Which was referenced in June 2025's "The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests"; along with the search for dark matter, synthetic data and AI model collapse.
