Amazon cuts bindings off rare books for AI training, 404 Media finds
It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
A 404 Media investigation tracked a shipment of rare books to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, where employees cut bindings off books to scan them for AI training data, destroying the books. Amazon employees at the VGT3 warehouse say they receive massive shipments of printed books and destroy them in the process. The bookseller who sold the tracked books said AI companies don't care about historical, intellectual, or sentimental value, only content as words.
There's monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There's historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don't care about.