François Picard speaks to investigative journalist Emanuel Maiberg, Co-founder of 404 Media. As we embark on AI’s uncharted waters, Maiberg has made a most unexpected discovery: the mass acquisition, dismemberment and scanning of rare books for use as training data. His investigation reveals a globalised and deliberately opaque supply chain in which books purchased through anonymous marketplaces arrive at large-scale scanning facilities, where their bindings are removed so that pages can be processed at great speed.
