Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense?

Also, who’s forcing AI companies to “ingest” books in such a destructive way?

Also also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from AI scrapers, it’s that they’d never scan the exact same thing multiple times at the expense of public access to the resource.

Relinquishing copyright does not imply any of the labor you're suggesting. It's the opposite: you're just committing not to perform the labor of pursuing legal action against someone who does digitize and freely distribute the work.

Anna's Archive, for one, would be more than happy to host at no cost to the author.

AI companies are buying the physical books, they can turn them into confetti if that's what they want to do. If the physical books are running out, the authors can print and sell more. Or they can sell digital copies so the information is not lost.

The law is currently forcing these companies to destroy the books after scanning them.