Amazon Caught Destroying Rare Books to Train AI

Obviously this isn’t ideal, and fuck the massive amounts of destruction (environmental, economical, societal) of AI, but these stories amount to ‘book owner does what they want with books they own’.

I don’t disagree with any of these responses, and I’m not saying reporting on this to make people aware of it is bad or pointless.

So now what do we do about it?

Just because it’s legal, that doesn’t make it right. Corporations do terrible things all of the time which are perfectly legal.

If I was the owner of the only copy of an important book, I would have the legal right to destroy it, but nobody could argue convincingly that I did a good thing.

If I was the owner of the only copy of an important book, I would have the legal right to destroy it, but nobody could argue convincingly that I did a good thing.

I’d argue that, if the destruction was done to digitize the book, what you did was a good thing. Would you disagree?

There’s a huge difference, an absolute chasm, between non-destructive scanning, which was always an option by the way, for the purposes of putting it in a public archive and And destructive scanning with the intent to hide it from the public where it may never surface for all we know.