...so I vibe-coded a tool for finding more of them
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space...
Why AI Companies Are Buying—And Then Destroying—Old Books
We've long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn't sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn't been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence.
Thousands of AI-written, edited or ‘polished’ books are being sold – an eerie echo of Orwell’s ‘novel-writing machines’
In ‘1984,’ George Orwell envisaged a world in which books were a mass-produced commodity no different from ‘jam and bootlaces.’
Study Guide: Empire of AI by Karen Hao (SuperSummary)
Analyzing literature can be hard — we make it easy! Thi…
AI-slop , GrantaGate and Bad Writing
AI writes poorly because it has crammed too much fanfic jargon
The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem
Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here.
AI is ushering in an age of personal media
It may be AI slop, but it's my AI slop.
We read a lot of AI books so you don’t have to
“Because every camp needs a book right now”
AI Slop is Killing Online Communities
Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further.
Critical AI
On this page are some resources for Critical AI Literacy (CAIL) from my perspective.
AI makes you boring
This post is an elaboration on a comment I made on Hacker News recently, on a blog post that showed an increase in volume and decline in quality among the “Show HN” submissons. I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN projects are overall pretty boring. They generally don't have a lot of work put into them, and as a result, the author (pilot?
I‘m far from an AI doomer, but it is amazing how many serious voices — on LinkedIn, no less! — are sharing stories about how AI slop is quickly becoming one of the top problems they see in academic writing and research “AI will 10x our research!” doesn’t seem to be surviving encounters with reality
I‘m far from an AI doomer, but it is amazing how many serious voices — on LinkedIn, no less! — are sharing stories about how AI slop is quickly becoming one of the top problems they see in academic writing and research “AI will 10x our research!” doesn’t seem to be surviving encounters with reality
Books destroyed in the name of AI*
Specifically related to the physical destruction of books in the process of using them as training material. Search terms: Project Panama * I’m neither “pro-AI” nor “anti-AI.” I’ve been blocked for being perceived as both. —Actually, I’m honestly more anti-AI than pro-AI thus far, aside from specialized models and specific use cases, but I’m willing to consider information that’s new to me
Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training
【独自】古書店で「謎の大量注文」相次ぐ……AI学習か 米国向け「日本の本 50トン」の輸出記録も（2026年9月22日掲載）｜日テレNEWS NNN
出版取次の日販、米AI企業に書籍を大量販売か 業界団体が説明要求：朝日新聞
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models
web.archive.org
