I am both a fan of books and AI. A clear win would be if the digitised copies would be made available by the AI companies for the long term, but unfortunately I doubt that will be the case (and probably they also wouldn't care enough compared to e.g. a project Gutenberg approach). Buying up books to digest them and throw their remnants in the trash feels like a destruction of culture - even if no one else has read these copies in years, their existence is still a record that may be useful in the long term.

So a challenge to the AI companies - go on, but please share the results with preservation societies like Gutenberg. And please be thorough enough in digitising to keep these copies useful.

Books that haven’t been touched or opened in years have far more use as training fodder than a nice museum piece