Burning the Past to Build the Future

At undisclosed locations, in nondescript warehouses, vast troves of print books are scheduled for destruction. Each one awaits its bindings hacked off so that its pages can be scanned into a central library, where they will be used to train artificial intelligence models to enhance their capabilities. The more books consigned to oblivion, the more effective these models become at generating outputs that not merely mimic human-like text and speech but become indistinguishable from the real thing.