SMRTR AIJul 22, 2026Daily.dev

AI firms are buying old books for slop-free training data

SMRTR summary

AI companies are quietly buying old physical books — printed before 2022 — to use as clean, human-written training data, avoiding the growing flood of AI-generated text online. Data broker ISBNdb sells bulk books to labs, often destroying them by slicing off spines to scan pages, while keeping buyers secret under strict NDAs.

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