Behind the Blog: Rare Books and Baseball Brain
404 Media Samantha Cole
404 Media's Emanuel says his story on AI firms buying books to scan for training data blew up on X. Problem: an engagement-farming account twisted it and skipped the link back, so readers got confused and traffic went elsewhere.
Based on reporting by 404 Media, Samantha Cole — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Behind the Blog is 404 Media's regular check-in on how its biggest stories actually get made, and this week's edition touches on Flock blogging, "rare" books, and, somewhat randomly, Jesus Christ. But the meatiest bit comes from Emanuel, who was out of the office last Friday and used this installment to circle back to a piece he published two weeks earlier about AI companies buying up printed books specifically to scan them for training data.
That story, he says, went mega viral on X. Not through any normal sharing, though. An engagement-farming account picked it up, repackaged it, and pushed it out to a huge audience, all while misrepresenting what the original article actually said and failing to properly link back to 404 Media's site.
Emanuel is frustrated for two reasons that are really the same problem wearing different hats. First, the traffic that should have flowed to 404 Media instead got siphoned off by an account that did none of the reporting. Second, and arguably worse, the distorted version of the story left a lot of people with a warped understanding of what AI companies are actually doing when they buy these books.
It's a small case study in how information moves online now: the outlet that does the actual legwork, tracking down the book-buying angle and writing it up, ends up watching someone else's paraphrase eat the attention. The facts get bent slightly in the retelling, the credit disappears, and the audience walks away with a fuzzier picture than if they'd just read the original.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Engagement farmers ripping off reporting and stripping the link back is not some gray area, it is just theft with extra steps, and platforms that reward it are choosing virality over accuracy every time. If a story about AI companies buying physical books to feed training data gets more confused after going viral than before, the platform's incentives are broken, not the reporter's writing.
Read more about this at: 404 Media