If AI companies avoid AI slop, shouldn't we?
If AI companies avoid AI slop, shouldn't we?AI companies expect us to consume AI-generated content, even though they themselves vastly prefer human-generated content for training AI models. Jul 23, 2026∙ Paid21ShareSILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (JULY 23, 2026) — 404 Media reported recently that AI companies are buying pre-AI books for training AI. One major source for book data is a company called ISBNdb, which started out as a source of book metadata for libraries and book sellers, then pivoted to also offering digitized books for training AI.
- ▪If AI companies avoid AI slop, shouldn't we?AI companies expect us to consume AI-generated content, even though they themselves vastly prefer human-generated content for training AI models.
- ▪Jul 23, 2026∙ Paid21ShareSILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (JULY 23, 2026) — 404 Media reported recently that AI companies are buying pre-AI books for training AI.
- ▪One major source for book data is a company called ISBNdb, which started out as a source of book metadata for libraries and book sellers, then pivoted to also offering digitized books for training AI.
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Machinesociety |
| Canonical URL | https://www.machinesociety.ai/p/if-ai-companies-avoid-ai-slop-shouldnt |
| Publication time | Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:04:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-24T00:58:56.734Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-24T00:58:56.734Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Nrco3LLY1VUY |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
If AI companies avoid AI slop, shouldn't we?AI companies expect us to consume AI-generated content, even though they themselves vastly prefer human-generated content for training AI models. Jul 23, 2026∙ Paid21ShareSILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (JULY 23, 2026) — 404 Media reported recently that AI companies are buying pre-AI books for training AI. One major source for book data is a company called ISBNdb, which started out as a source of book metadata for libraries and book sellers, then pivoted to also offering digitized books for training AI. The company claims to be the world’s largest repository of book data and contains around 111 million books. ISBNdb says that books printed before 2022 largely don’t contain AI-generated content, and are therefore coveted for AI training.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Machinesociety.
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