They Are Closing The Library. We Are Guarding The Wrong Door.

AI detection tools are unreliable and often penalize human writers, particularly those with non-standard writing styles, leading to wrongful accusations. Simultaneously, AI companies are destructively scanning millions of books to train their models, annihilating original texts and their provenance. This process erases cultural context and individual connection, leaving behind an un-attributable, decontextualized corpus.

• AI detection tools are prone to false positives, misidentifying human writing as machine-generated, disproportionately affecting non-native speakers and neurodivergent individuals.
• The demand for AI detection distracts from the larger issue of AI companies destructively scanning millions of books, erasing physical copies and their provenance.
• This destructive scanning process, legally justified by replacing physical copies with digital ones, results in a loss of cultural context, historical connection, and authorial lineage.
• The art world’s experience with provenance offers a model for preserving value through documentation, contrasting with the book industry’s destruction of objects to avoid liability.
• The author argues for a shift from AI detection to tracing lineage and context within the work itself, advocating for a new form of ‘librarianship’ that values provenance and testimony over algorithmic judgment.
  https://bender.layer3.press/articles/3a70e664-5880-4b12-a3d2-cc582a1c91c3