Tomás Kenny of the long-standing Galway book retailer Kennys recently got an order for “several thousands books” which he suspects are destined for AI programmers.
“It wouldn’t be unusual for us to get one-off orders of several hundred books to supply libraries or that sort of thing,” he told RTÉ’s News at One.
Such orders often come through a third party with the identity of the buyer not being disclosed.
So Mr Kenny assumed that this order, which he received in May, was of this nature.
“But as we started picking the order it became more unusual,” he said.
The order was “scattergun…anything and everything”, focused on titles which are “so obviously out of date and unusual”, and are also of “poor quality”. Most were non-fiction.
Titles ordered included three-decade-old driving test manuals and a guide to the Celtic Tiger financial scheme the Special Savings Incentive Account (SSIA).
He emphasised that while he doesn’t “have any concerete evidence”, Mr Kenny thinks the orders may be for AI.
“That’s the suspicion, very obviously”.
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Mr Kenny said this is not an isolated incident.
The advent of online shopping has “enourmously” reduced the number of book vendors, including in Ireland, he noted, meaning there isn’t the close knit community of sellers there once was.
But he started noticing on social media overseas sellers, including in Sweden and German, flagging similarly unusual orders.
The matter of copyrighted material being used without authorisation to programme AI is a hot topic.
Anthropic has been ordered to pay in an historic €1.3 billion copyright class-action settlement.
The lawsuit accused the AI company of using over 500,000 pirated books to train its Claude AI model.
Eligible authors and publishers stand to receive roughly €2,600 per qualifying title
A US federal judge granted final approval for the settlement last month.