Rare books are going fast. Are others next in AI's hunt?

For Delhi-based antiquarian bookseller Rishabh Jain, who runs Memoirs of India, one of the capital's oldest rare book businesses, that possibility raises concerns far beyond the loss of paper. It is unfortunate and heartbreaking to destroy anything of original heritage.

He believes digitisation can preserve text, but not everything that makes a historical book valuable. There are many books with illustrations having hand-painted gold.

What Happened

Old-school techniques like lithography and aquatints were labour and skill-intensive methods that produced limited prints. His concerns come as AI companies are racing to acquire more human-written material to train their models.

• It is unfortunate and heartbreaking to destroy anything of original heritage.

• For Delhi-based antiquarian bookseller Rishabh Jain, who runs Memoirs of India, one of the capital's oldest rare book businesses, that possibility raises concerns far beyond the loss of paper.

• Your favourite rare book may disappear someday -- not because of age or neglect, but because it could be scanned for artificial intelligence training and discarded afterwards.

Key Details

Earlier this year, The Washington Post reported that Anthropic launched an internal initiative, Project Panama, under which the company bought millions of physical books, scanned them and discarded the originals after digitisation. According to the report, one internal planning document described Project.

• As AI companies continue looking for more books to train their models, one question remains: can technology learn from the past without leaving the original books behind?

• The company, however, still faces copyright claims over the alleged use of pirated books.

• Anthropic says its process is legal, and a US court ruled that using legally purchased books to train AI qualified as "fair use" because it was transformative.

Why It Matters

Originality and the preservation of antiquarian books seem to be real challenges. Experts have started raising concerns about the issues AI is creating.

• Through the National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) and digitisation projects by institutions such as the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), lakhs of rare manuscripts have been digitised while the original documents.

• One user wrote that less popular books are often printed in much smaller numbers than bestsellers, making every surviving copy valuable and increasing the risk of permanent loss.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by India Today as more details emerge