Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI
Amazon is buying rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to a 404 Media investigation that tracked a book to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. The facility, VGT3, is identified by a dinosaur holding a book. Amazon confirmed it purchases books through commercial channels to improve its services. Rare books offer valuable training data because they are not online and predate AI-generated content, which can cause model collapse.
Amazon told 404 Media in a statement that it “purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use.”
- ChrisArchitect
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742
and previously:
- littlecranky67
Well they have to destroy them after scanning, else it is a copyright violation. Maybe not in the US, but in a lot of jurisdictions you are allowed to make copies/scans of Books, CDs etc. but if you sell the media, you have to delete the copy.
Given that anthropic was just fined a $1bn fee for torrenting/piracy, we cant really blame the companies for shredding the books after a scan. We should blame copyright laws.
- anygivnthursday
Another discussion on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336050