Pure Milk of the Word

From the Department of Very-Much-Intended Consequences, you may have recently read that AI companies are purchasing massive quantities of rare books, scanning the pages to “train” their algorithms, then shredding the original books. If not, you probably will soon.

If that sounds improbable considering the almost inestimable quantities of training data available to them free via public domain access on the Web, there is indeed a sort of twisted logic behind the ‘scan-and-destroy’ strategy.

The Driving Force

Willow Tohi of Natural News explains:

“The driving force behind this destruction is what researchers call ‘model collapse.’ When AI systems train on text generated by other AI systems, quality degrades with each generation, producing increasingly incoherent results. The internet has become so saturated with synthetic content that companies now actively seek pre-2022 printed books as the last uncontaminated reservoir of human-authored knowledge.”

What created the overwhelming glut of synthetic content that now saturates the internet? Why, AI, of course. I’m always highly wary of so-called solutions thought up by the same people who created the problem that now demands them. So now the internet is useless for AI training, and the companies building these monstrosities have to find new sources of training material. Christians might say they have to go back to the ‘pure milk of the word’, so to speak, very much with a lower case ‘w’.

Why the Shredding?

Why the shredding, you ask? The answer is a 2026 edict from a US District Court judge named William Alsup. Tohi continues:

“Judge Alsup’s ruling explicitly validated the buy-scan-destroy pipeline, writing that ‘every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.’ Because the digital copy was never shown, shared, or sold outside the company, the judge found this ‘clearly transformative’ and therefore protected by fair use.

This reasoning effectively creates a legal incentive for destruction. If a company keeps the physical book, it must store it. By destroying the original, the company can argue it ‘replaced’ the physical copy with a digital one. The ruling handed the entire AI industry a template, and companies now explicitly cite it.”

Of course, once any literary work exists ONLY in digital form, AI can and will modify it endlessly, either to conform to changing standards of political correctness, to make it more readable for a decreasingly literate public, or for any number of well-intended or nefarious reasons. Some of our readers have already experienced this phenomenon thanks to Amazon, which feels perfectly free to replace digital texts you have bought and paid for with “updates” or even to delete them entirely when someone disputes their intellectual ownership.

What is therefore at stake is quite literally (and literarily) the integrity of human history and thought.

The Last Days

Scripture teaches that the last days just prior to Christ’s return in judgment on this world will be characterized by “a strong delusion”. I’m always reluctant to speculate about the specific form the Big Lie will take. I don’t expect to be around to hear it anyway. What we can say is that with the potential destruction of the vast majority of existing original sources, a globalist government that effectively controls the digital world may finally have the power to dictate the popular narrative and maintain it with no fear of contradiction worldwide.

As an aside, Christians should also remind ourselves that so-called unintended consequences are rarely unintended. The useful idiots building AI models may not intend them, but others most certainly do.