A BOOK regarded as one of the most “essential publications” for understanding the history of Jersey has found itself at the heart of a mysterious new phenomenon involving US tech giants and artificial intelligence.

A seminal Société Jersiaise text has been given an unexpected new position at the forefront of debates around AI ethics after its last copy was bought by an unknown buyer from a bookstore in London last month.

Published in 1998 and edited by Francis L M Corbet, A Biographical Dictionary of Jersey: Volume 2 remains an essential vehicle for understanding the Island’s long and tumultuous history.

But according to David Tobin – owner of Walden Books in Camden Town – the book was one of several “obscure” purchases recently made by an anonymous client in recent months.

It is believed that tech companies are buying books and using their highly individualised content to bolster artificial intelligence language models such as ChatGPT and Claude.

Mr Tobin told the JEP: “We bought a whole load [of books] from a chap in Jersey who had a very big library of Channel Island books.

“That was about 10 years ago, and I think ‘A Biographical Dictionary of Jersey: Volume 2’ was the last one we had left.”

He speculated that the book was going to be destroyed and used to help AI models learn Jèrriais, the traditional Norman-French language of Jersey.

“Why exactly they want them is difficult to know,” he conceded. “He just asked me what sort of books they were and if I could send him some pictures.”

Theodore Stone, a doctoral student at the University of Exeter who was awarded a Millennium Fellowship by Société Jersiaise to study the history of democracy in Jersey, described the sale of the “essential” text as a worrying development.

“A lot of older histories of Jersey are exceptionally rare, and its purchase and destruction to develop a large language model [a type of artificial intelligence program trained on massive amounts of text to understand, summarise, generate, and predict human language] is a cause for concern,” he said.

“I bought a copy of Roy Le Herrisier’s study of the development of the Government of Jersey between 1771 and 1972 from the same bookshop a couple of years ago – and I can’t help but feel relieved it wasn’t on the shelf last month.”

Mr Stone argued that “any book like this or the Biographical Dictionary” would be “better-served in the hands of somebody with a genuine interest in the Island.”

“Jersey’s history is complex and exceptionally nuanced, in a way that large language models are unlikely to appreciate,” he noted.