Is AI destroying books?

Something weird is happening inside used bookstores. Time to “check it out.” 📗

[Sponsor FryAI]

This link leads to one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in AI recently.

What’s cookin’? Used bookstores in Canada are seeing strange bulk orders for random, often old or specialized books, and some owners suspect the books are being bought for AI training. The fear is that companies are scanning physical books, cutting off the spines to move faster, and then throwing the books away. This concern grew after a U.S. lawsuit revealed that Anthropic bought millions of books, scanned them to train Claude, and discarded them. Physical books are valuable because many were published before AI-generated text flooded the internet, making them cleaner training material for language models.

🤔 Hunter’s take: This is a wild reminder that AI still depends on very human things: books, authors, libraries, and culture. The issue is not just that books may be destroyed. It is that old knowledge is being turned into private AI fuel, stored within the training data of LLMs.

What’s cookin’? OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads has hit a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch. The ad platform is now used by tens of thousands of advertisers and is expanding across India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa through a self-service Ads Manager. The basic idea is simple: people already come to ChatGPT when they are making decisions, like choosing software, planning a project, shopping, or learning something new. ChatGPT Ads lets marketers show clearly labeled ads that match the context of those conversations. OpenAI says the ads stay separate from ChatGPT’s answers, advertisers do not see private chats, and users can control personalization.

🤔 Hunter’s take: ChatGPT is not just becoming another place to run ads. It is becoming a place where buying decisions actually form. Google catches people searching. Meta catches people scrolling. ChatGPT catches people thinking.

Hi — I’m Hunter, a PhD candidate whose work has appeared in major academic journals and popular tech outlets. I founded FryAI to make staying ahead of AI clear, accessible, and fun.

How close are we to the point where AI surpasses human intelligence across nearly every domain and begins advancing beyond our control or prediction?