Advocacy Groups Urge FTC to Investigate AI Firms Over Book Destruction
· Technology · CBS News, Mashable
More than a dozen public interest and consumer advocacy groups have urged Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador to investigate leading artificial intelligence developers. The coalition alleges that AI companies are buying books in bulk, digitizing the text to train large language models, and then permanently destroying the physical copies. Groups including the Demand Progress Education Fund, Consumer Federation of America, and Institute for Local Self-Reliance claim the practice is anticompetitive and removes nonrenewable resources from public access. The letter highlights that some destroyed volumes are the last surviving copies of original works, potentially violating Section 5 of the FTC Act. The complaint references an August 2024 copyright lawsuit against Anthropic and recent reports that Amazon also buys and destroys books after scanning.
Why it matters
The FTC petition raises regulatory questions about how tech companies source training data for AI models and whether destroying physical books harms public access.
Read the original report — CBS News
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