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.
Just change one other mind. If everyone did the same they would be gone in no time. Do two and it will be done even sooner.
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.
I’ve been on Lemmy since 2023 and I’ve never seen this article. Not everybody is chronically online. Please don’t listen to this guy.
Repost spam kills forum discussion. If you missed this post you can see it in the 10 other places it was posted yesterday.
Friends don’t let friends use any form of Amazon they can choose to.
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
fucking book burners
It’s like if Fahrenheit 451 had the firefighters meticulously remove the spines and digitize the books before burning them. Amazon is buying a single copy of these books, and destroying the books to make it faster to digitize. Just not at all book burning.
You should be pissed about them using other peoples works to train their AI behemoth for profit. Not make a false equivalence to book burning…
that information is as good as gone if its in the hands of corporation while they destroy the original. also, you cant get the original info back from the training data, what they are doing is kind of like putting the information in a blender.
and since they destroy the original books, no one else can have them. They also destroy piece of history since physical book is immutable while digital information can be tampered with. With rare books its possible they are destroying the last copy of the book, no way to know for sure.
And i’m already beyond pissed that they use others work for profit. It has already been demonstrated that corporations are above any law, as long as they can manage their bribes and connections. You should trust corporations as much as you would a demon if demons were real.
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?
I wish I had fewer opportunities to post this gif, I hate it
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.
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Buying food in order to destroy it is bad.
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Buying art in order to destroy it, also bad.
Ownership itself is a pragmatic social construct: you “own” things insofar as that “makes sense.”
Does it make sense for Amazon to own rare books? Not really. I’m not sure why that would be allowed. It’s like a child owning a rocket. It simply makes no sense in most contexts.
Are you suggesting we have food and art police? Would a government body decide what I am allowed or not allowed to do with my wagyu steak? Having freedoms sometimes mean we have to accept the actions of others we disagree with.
Did I make any policy suggestions? These are simply moral facts. Laws are a matter of convenience, and if it’s inconvenient for us to legally constrain some evil behaviors, oh well.
What do you think is the appropriate action to this? When you start to establish laws based on evil behaviour, you eventually get witch trials.
What?? Every law we have is a matter of moral debate. Why do you think murder is illegal, or rape? Because these are evil behaviors.
Not every law is a moral debate. Laws limiting the height of my fence is not a moral debate.
Remember the guy who bought an ‘art’ banana for $6m and then ate it? That also wasn’t a moral debate.
If you pass a law protecting rare valuable books, then you also need to decide which books are protected.
Laws limiting the height of your fence are debated in the following way.
- First, the benefits and harms to you and your neighbors are considered.
- These considerations are weighed against the relative costs to the rest of the community.
- Rules are agreed upon that take everyone’s interests into account.
This is a moral exercise, because to debate something is to engage in normative deliberation. Indeed, your only mechanism for social appeal is moral: “This is the right thing to do” for some reason, such as justice, fairness, harm reduction, or whatever.
If you pass a law protecting rare valuable books, then you also need to decide which books are protected.
You’re right. Laws are constrained by pragmatism. It turns out, figuring out which books are important is analogous to figuring out which natural habitats should be legally protected from construction, etc. This is fairly easy.
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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.
