Amazon wasn’t caught doing shit. “Caught” implies there is a possibility of consequences. Two days from now nobody is going to remember this story and the world will move on and there will be no consequences for this.
“caught” also implies they’ve been hiding it… It’s been out in the open how they scan books to train AI for a while now.
I don’t think most people realize that the most efficient process for scanning books involves disassembling them.
So of course they’re upset to hear the books are disposed of afterwards.
It has been almost a trope that every time the discussion of them buying up the used market and cutting them up to scan, some apologist comes along and says that these books are mass produced garbage and not rare.
Especially since the articles make it clear that the AI companies don’t care about rarity or quality. It’s just a dragnet to get as many books as possible. Sure, a lot of the books are going to be garbage, but some of them are going to be valuable, too.
The AI must be fed, and the only criterion is the book has to be published before 2022.
Amazon, destroying books, this is such a full circle moment for them
They also love to publish stuff exclusively through Amazon so libraries won’t get it.
I stopped using Amazon like 8 years ago over various previous inhumane issues
Seems the rest of the world prefers slightly more convenience
What are you gonna do I guess
just remember. the planet is going to be just fine.
remember how quickly wildlife came back when covid shutdowns hit? it’ll be like that when the last human dies.
The last human will be descendant of billionaires who’s lineage lived underground for 8 generations
Great. The ants, cockroaches and rats will fight over world domination once we drove nearly everything else into extinction. That‘s so reassuring. I only ever cared about the ants anyway. /s
I genuinely don‘t give a shit about the 99% of the planet that isn‘t it‘s outer crust so obviously I don‘t care if „the planet will be fine“ either. That‘s not mine or your world. Neither is anything that happens in millions of years after pretty much every species we ever knew is no longer there. It‘s such a straw man argument. Nobody is talking about what that clown was talking about when saying „the planet“ and he knew it.
you’re thinking too small scale.
in 150 million years after humans who knows what kind of life will evolve.
Nobody knows and nobody cares. That‘s not our fight.
hence the attitude of, “the planet is fine, people are fucked”.
I miss electronics shops :( The chain and small hobby shops around me don’t carry things like resistors and capacitors. I checked every single one. Really.
Then I bought a lifetime supply of resistors, like actual hundreds, and it was delivered to my doorstep in under 6 hours for $8.
Can they at least provide all the scans to the public for free? It’s not like anyone is going to care if they violate copyright, that only applies to regular people.
Unfortunately, that would violate copyright law. In fact, the whole point of the destruction is to circumvent copyright, as apparently there was a ruling that scanning, tokenizing, and then destroying the original is transformative enough to be considered, “fair use.”
You are definitely right. It just sucks that destroying books is “fair use” while using movie clips to make a parody video gets taken down with little recourse.
That’s why they are scanning them and destroying them. Someone realized they can capitalize knowledge. We’re going to get the privilege of letting billionaires gate keep information and knowledge
They scan them and destroy them so other AI companies can never get them.
https://lemmy.world/search?q=rare+books&type=Posts&listingType=All&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=true
This has been posted to death. Does this really need ot be a weekly thread? There is nothing to discuss its bad and we hate AI and we hate amazon.
Where I draw the line for whether it is ethical to light things on fire is when they start destroying rare knowledge and books as fast as possible for no other reason than to hoard and obscure knowledge for private benefit.
It is one thing to fund the creation of knowledge and then hoard it, it is entirely another to begin actively attacking and destroying pre-existing publicly shared resources of knowledge in the pursuit of monetizing access to that very knowledge behind a gargantuan profit motivated entity.
They’re destroying the books because it’s cheaper than scanning them intact.
They’re not acquiring actual knowledge, simply the most likely next word.
They would only need a single copy of each book. They aren’t trying to get all possible copies to prevent others from getting them. They are trying to train their AI as quickly and cheaply as possible
I wish I had fewer opportunities to post this gif, I hate it
The most ironic thing is that this is the only way that the current cultural metastasis appreciates rare knowledge. Which we once did!
Like music it is the most fundamentally human endeavor and it has been destructively gamified. Thank fucking god for libraries, support yours!!!
So Amazon should be destroyed to train humans?
there’s this idea in the AI development zeitgeist that “rare data” is the only advantage left. this stuff is almost certainly motivated by that type of thinking. if they can have data in their datasets that no one else does, they view that as the only way left to be ahead of the competition.
Rare does not mean good. I could write a novel, and it would be fucking atrocious. If I released 5 copies, it would be extremely rare, but it wouldn’t be worth shit.
i mean, i’m not arguing for this position necessarily. i agree with you.
that said, in practice, the “bad data” comes out in the wash. for example, all of Reddit is likely in their datasets. who knows what their data cleaning process is like, but diversity in the data is generally a good thing from a training perspective.
This is a weird one. If I buy a book, rare or not, do I not own it?
Think of it like the difference between pulling your car’s registration info and tracking your car across thousands of Flock cameras. At some point, scale is qualitatively different.
If you buy a house, it is illegal to set it on fire. It is also illegal to pump infinite molten lead into the soil under your house. It is also illegal to spray aerosolized asbestos out of the chimney of your house 24/7.
You still own the house.
If I buy a book, it is not illegal to destroy it. Your analogy doesn’t work. You are talking about acts that could affect the health and well being of others.
Rare doesn’t automatically imply valuable, useful or anything like that.
My Anthony Fauci x Drowsy Don fanfic is “rare”, but nobody including me would bat an eye if it was destroyed.
You’re so smart and well informed, thanks for sharing those sources and details that provide that context. Awesome work!
Rare doesn’t automatically imply valuable
I agree, there is only one of you, and you’re worthless.
These books were purchased from booksellers. Booksellers don’t typically carry books that won’t sell. That’s why it’s unlikely these are somebody’s fanfics printed on CreateSpace or something like that.
They were purchased from Biblio. Literally Biblio’s tagline: “Used Books and Rare Books from Antiquarian Booksellers”
Booksellers “carry” utter shit.
Guess what they do when the book is refunded by the publisher due to bad sales? They cut off the covers and send them back as proof. The pages are destroyed. Nobody bats an eye.
No publisher or bookseller wants to carry 50000 copies of Joe Bob’s “How to cook maggots” when it flopped
Also how do you know if my fanfic is a physical book sold at a store or not? 😀
Also how do you know if my fanfic is a physical book sold at a store or not? 😀
Because you’re a loggerhead shrike, and you don’t look anything like E. L. James.
