Good point, now AI is a real good excuse for thoughtless data hoarding.

I've passed through the other end of this. I spent a few hundred hours scanning my father's and grandfather's slides, negatives, and prints on high-end scanners in 2010. There were thousands of images, and since then that number has probably increased several orders of magnitude with digital cameras and then phones. The sheer number is beyond human comprehension. Now that images are so trivial to make, I value curation much more than shear number. I suppose it's always a quantity vs quality thing.