After Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in 1553 for religious heresy, only three surviving copies of his The Restoration of Christianity escaped the fire. One of them, now in the University of Edinburgh library, is ironically thought to have been personally preserved by the Protestant leader John Calvin, the very man responsible for Servetus’s execution in Geneva. Anyone who knows Calvin, who boasted in a letter that he had “purged the Church of so pernicious a monster,” understands that the book was not saved out of sympathy for Servetus, but from a bibliophile’s impulse — even if that bibliophile was doctrinaire, fanatical, and tyrannical.
However strange Calvin’s motives may have been, they still pale beside those of artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic, which have been involved in bulk purchasing, digitizing, and then pulping out-of-print books to train their large language models. Calvin at least could claim the authority of his God; AI companies do not have even that. In a sobering report by Frank Landymore in Futurism, published last Saturday, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being trained on their own slop, prompting demand for pre-2022 writing untouched by AI contamination.
That is the pitch made by ISBNdb, a company that supplies tech firms with books in bulk, often through purchases ranging from one thousand to one million volumes at a time. A “hydraulic powered cutting machine” removes the spines and pages, which are then scanned, digitized, and pulped. The practice, described as “destructive scanning,” takes advantage of a legal loophole to sidestep copyright rules, with the result that “an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found” of these books.
Book destruction, as Servetus’s fate shows, is hardly new. Nor is pulping books for reasons other than ideology especially unusual, since publishers are responsible for destroying nearly 25% of works released each year, almost always because they did not sell. What makes the latest revelation so alarming is the sheer scale and purpose of it: a ravenous, self-consuming culture machine feeding the technology designed to supersede the human.
The indifference of the LLM is unsettling in its own way. One can imagine that if a copy of Servetus’s book passed under the dead eye of the digitizer, it would merely upload the theological arguments into the machine’s hungry maw, where they would become fodder for the advanced plagiarism device that is artificial intelligence. “We see a future where intelligence is a utility,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, “and people buy it from us on a meter.”
This is a future in which technocracy has triumphed over the sacred materiality and artistry of the book, reducing everything to predictive binary. It is a literal act of erasure, one that restores George Orwell’s familiar warning that “who controls the past controls the future” to its original force. As LLMs grow and shelves are emptied, the result is libricide: corporate indifference to the destruction of culture, ideas, and humanity itself.
