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— Written by San Choudhury

When I read the headline, 

“AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain”,

…I was overcome by a sharp wave of revulsion. I felt my body physically squirm, as though the headline was reporting on some destruction inflicted upon my own body. 

Later that afternoon when my partner and I sat down on our verandah, he asked me if I’d seen what AI companies were doing to our physical books. Mind you, not just ‘any’ books, among them also old and hard-to-find books. 

Of course, I had. 

Of course, I’d heard what AI companies, among whom Anthropic is the most widely recognised, were doing to humanity’s literature. I’d agonisingly read through pieces detailing Anthropic’s Project Panama focused on gathering data to train their AI model – Claude. And not just any data, but data that had not been tarnished by generative AI. With chills running down my spine, I’d read that morning that in their search for high-quality, human text – something that’s become a rarity in the sea of text comprising the Internet today – they had hungrily set their eyes on physical books from before 2022, that is, before the mass availability of generative AI. As they procured millions of these books from commercial and used-book suppliers, old, rare, and antique books came into the hands of these companies. Hands that prepared them for their execution. 

They are calling it ‘destructive scanning’, this execution of these books, where they:

“stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form – discarding the paper originals.”

Stripping, cutting, scanning, pulverising. Discarded after being used and abused. I can barely bring myself to picture the heart-wrenching scene of the executioner’s pile: the remains of the books. 

Even the notion that they were destroyed for the sake of efficient scanning – and therefore to ‘preserve’ them by giving them a new digital life – does little to make me view this act as anything other than violence. That the ‘souls’ of these books survived by gaining permanency in their digital form does not comfort me. We cannot still live in some Cartesian era where we can without a bother hang onto the assumption that matter and form are separable from each other.

The conversation between my partner and I that afternoon about this topic did not last very long. The both of us felt something so visceral, so deeply uncomfortable at the most embodied level, that we decided to park it there. But on these pages, I decided to turn once more to the matter for I wanted to make sense of the embodied discomfort I experienced as a result of this matter. 

Matter, which comes from the Latin word materia – meaning the substance from which something is made – is today used in a few different but related ways. We use it to refer to an ‘issue’, in the sense of asking for example, what’s the matter? Consequently, matter also comes to be viewed as something that has value, is of significance. As in mattering or to matter. Then there is of course also matter which means physical substance, or a thing. These three uses of the word ‘matter’ are not completely separate from each other. A matter only becomes a matter because it matters. That is, if it really is a thing. Not necessarily that it needs to have physical properties to be a matter, but anything that is able to affect and be affected can be regarded as matter.  

In thinking about the matter of AI companies waging destruction against printed books, I have come to a conclusion that what affected me deeply about this matter was the utter disregard for matter itself. 

In many ways, we have become accustomed to think that ‘things’ and ‘matter’ – taken to mean in the most physical sense – are inert and passive, that they are unable to affect us and the world independent of human intent. Yet, as Jane Bennett argues in her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, a ‘thing’ is not just a passive, inert object. Instead, things have an uncanny ability to ‘hail’ us, to catch our attention, and to make us humans feel and even do things. In this manner, things ought to be seen as ‘vibrant, active material’ with its own agency and force. We ought to acknowledge that they act upon us, with us, and shape our lives and world, with what Bennett refers to as thing-power. 

We’ve all felt this thing-power in our lives, and do so every day. Nietzsche did almost a hundred and fifty years ago when he started writing with a typewriter – a Danish-made Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. A strikingly gorgeous instrument, resembling an ornate golden pincushion, Nietzsche was so taken with it that he dedicated an ode to it: 

The writing ball is a thing like me: made of iron
Yet easily twisted on journeys. 
Patience and tact are required in abundance. 
As well as fine fingers, to use us. 

It wasn’t simply that Nietzsche felt enchanted by the writing ball. It had an effect on his writing style as well. This was observed by one of his closest friends Heinrich Koselitze, a writer and composer. He noted that Nietzsche’s prose had become tighter, involved shorter sentences, and thus was beginning to read much closer to a telegraphic style. Nietzsche even acknowledged this change, responding to his friend’s observation:

“You are right. Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” 

With the iron of the machine somehow mysteriously transferring itself into the words written using it, its thing-power affected the way Nietzsche wrote. In much the same way, I feel the differences in my writing when using the notes app on my iPhone, compared to when I’m writing on my computer, and the altogether different writing produced using pen and paper alone. My thoughts, my language, my style depend upon the things that I’m writing with. They write as much as I do. 

What about books then?