The Irish Writers Union supports the European Writers Council condemnation of the practice of ‘destructive scanning’ of books fed to AI
Millions of old or rare European books are being ripped apart and fed to Large Language Models (LLMs) for the purpose of creating output using Artificial Intelligence. The European Writers’ Council, of which the Irish Writers’ Union is a member, calls upon decision makers and the whole of our European society to speak up loudly on behalf of authors, publishers, and readers to stop this predatory exploitation.
The EWC statement outlines in gory detail what happens to these books: ‘AI companies are literally ripping apart authors’ works and turning them into toilet paper: as of today, non-European tech giants have purchased at least up to two million books through second hand and antiquarian booksellers across Europe and the world. Old, rare, and also out-of-commerce titles (which in the EU are still protected under author rights legislation but are unavailable on the market) are subject to bulk scanning and being destroyed in the process. Specifically, at the AI scan factories in the U.S., this involves cutting the spine from a book, so its pages can be fed through high-speed scanners before the remaining physical copy is discarded, shredded, and recycled into toilet paper.’ The resulting digitised files are then used by Large Language Models (LLMs) to create generative AI output.
You can read and download the full EWC statement here: EWC Statement on Project Panama.
