Amazon is facing fresh scrutiny over the use of physical books for artificial intelligence training after an investigation reportedly tracked a shipment of hard-to-find titles to a company facility in Las Vegas, where workers allegedly cut the bindings from books before scanning their pages and eventually destroying them.
The investigation, reported by 404 Media, involved placing a tracking device inside a book from a large order and following its journey across the United States. The shipment ultimately reached an Amazon facility associated with an operation known as VGT3.
The discovery has raised concerns among booksellers, librarians and readers about what happens to physical books once they are acquired as potential sources of AI training data.
Words cannot express how much I fucking hate corporate AI
Fascism*
Modern day book burningHow is this in any way comparable to that? The bad thing abt nazi book burning wasnt the destruction of physical copies of books, but the destruction of knowledge and their intent behind it
hard-to-find titles
but the destruction of knowledge
- So the only scenario where your think makes sense if we have a seller with a book that is the only unit in existance and it is not digitized.
- The bad thing about nazi book burnings was the targetting of the books of political enemies and jewish authors. This isn’t the case here. They destroy at most one copy of any book across the board.
- That’s what rare & H2F means
- Read point one, carefully. If the books weren’t rare, it wouldn’t have enemies, but more commonly copied. Like the Christian Bible.
I think their point is that scanning preserves the content rather than destroying it, but I’m guessing the scans aren’t exactly public.
Destroying the original is flat out stupid from every angle unless it’s unavoidable or destruction (or taking control) is the goal.
Honestly it might be worse if that’s not the idea, but yeah it’s still nazi coded at best
Very good you’re close to the point. The destruction is a legal neccesity.
The same applies here
I’m flirting with radicalization over here
Was global warming not enough?
It should have been
Welcome to the movement. This is a good book to get started. I would recommend you to skip straight to chapter 1.
Thank you!
You are welcome :>
It’s because that might allow them to monopolize access to information later on. Your future library is called Amazon and it costs you a 100 bucks per month subscription. Plus, they can change the information displayed to you at will, as it all comes from their algorithmic black box.
First off, if my future Library of Everything is called anything other than “Alexandria”, I’ll be quite cross
Sadly, they might just call it Alexa-Libria or some sht
They aren’t doing this to gatekeep information, they’re doing this to rewrite history. Fascism cannot survive otherwise.
If these LLMs are so great why do they need to destroy the books to scan them in.
My phone can scan a page and account for the curve caused by the spine but it’s too much for their LLM data centers to figure out.
Because if you get all the copies of a rare book, scan it and destroy it, then nobody else can use it for training but you. They don’t have to, they choose to.
They’re feeding it in, like a copier machine – one sheet at a time so they lop off the binder, run the stack, and send it to the trash or furnace or wherever.
But yes, they could be doing it non-destructively, but they’re being fascist-like.
It’s faster, cheaper and can be automated. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. To avoid paying a person to do it.
I feel like we’re missing information from that summary:
- why are they “hard to find” titles?
- are the books being sold digitally under a license?
- is that license for 1 digital copy, or is the same book being copy-pasted to each buyer?
- how were the books acquired?
- do the books have redistribution rights?
