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.
Yeah why don’t they just spend an order of magnitude more effort and money to maintain an unusable forest of dead trees until *checks notes* forever minus a day?
I fucking hate bad arguments, for my own sake. I hate misinformation going round and round, with shrill comparisons to the fucking Nazis, because someone dared to buy and privately preserve a copy of a book that nobody else was likely to ever purchase.
Relax copyright if you want this to go better. The idiots inflating the bubble are doing this because our stupid laws say they kinda have to. It’s an asinine legal situation that leads to crap like this, and no amount of well-they-oughtta is gonna change crap like this.