Consumer advocate and political activist Ralph Nader founded the print newspaper Capitol Hill Citizen in 2022. Its mission is to expose political corruption, corporate lobbying, and the shortcomings of mainstream political journalism.

Younger readers may not be familiar with Nader. He is best known for his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which exposed dangerous practices and corporate negligence in the North American automobile industry. Now 92, Nader remains an energetic nuisance to politicians and corporations that put profit before people.

I discovered Capitol Hill Citizen through an article about AI—an abbreviation that might more accurately be replaced by AA, for “advanced automation.” It begins by quoting Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), said when he chaired a Judiciary subcommittee:

This hearing is about the largest intellectual property theft in American history. AI companies are training their models on stolen material, period. And we’re not talking about these companies simply scouring the internet for what’s publicly available. We’re talking about piracy.

Are we going to protect our creative community, or are we going to allow a few mega-corporations to vacuum it all up, digest it, and make billions of dollars in profits—maybe trillions—and pay nobody for it?

Following are excerpts from Capitol Hill Citizen:

A book printed hundreds of years ago can still carry the thoughts of someone long dead into the hands of someone not yet born.

But in the age of artificial intelligence, some of the world’s largest technology companies see books differently. They see data.

…AI companies need enormous quantities of high-quality text to train systems capable of generating essays, legal arguments, computer code, and human-like conversation.

And increasingly, they are looking beyond the internet. They are looking at bookshelves. According to 404 Media and other outlets, AI companies and their vendors have begun purchasing large quantities of physical books, scanning them, and in some cases destroying the original copies afterward.

The practice has raised questions among authors, historians, booksellers, and lawmakers about what happens when humanity’s cultural archive becomes training fuel for private artificial intelligence systems.

…AI companies argue that books provide some of the highest-quality training materials available. Unlike much of the open internet, which contains spam, misinformation, and increasingly AI-generated content, books are edited, structured, and often written by experts in the field.

…For AI developers, the appeal is obvious. Books contain history, science, literature, legal analysis, philosophy, technical manuals, and countless forms of human reasoning. They provide models with examples of how humans organize ideas. But acquiring millions of books presented a problem. Publishers own copyrights. Libraries have restrictions. Authors have objected to their work being used without permission.

…The argument made by AI companies was that while downloading unauthorized digital copies might be illegal, scanning purchased books into digital formats for internal AI training was “transformative fair use” and therefore protected under fair use. The destruction of the physical copy became a central part of the argument.

The process described in court documents was industrial. Books were purchased in large quantities. Their spines were removed. Pages were separated and processed through high-speed scanners. The resulting digital files became searchable collections of text. The physical books were then discarded, shredded, or recycled.

…A library scans a book to preserve knowledge and make it available. An AI company scans a book to build a commercial product. That distinction matters.

…if the company destroys the original after creating a digital copy, it can argue that it is not creating a competing marketplace for the book.

…The more destructive the process becomes, the stronger the company’s fair-use argument may appear.

A book preserved in an archive remains a public cultural object. A book converted into private training data becomes a corporate asset.

…Critics argue that AI companies are extracting centuries of human knowledge while concentrating the benefits among a small number of corporations.

The debate is not only about copyright. It is about ownership. Who controls the accumulated knowledge of civilization?

…And who gets to decide what is worth preserving?