Jeff Bezos has gone too far.
He’s lured us into the cult of Amazon by preying on our need for immediate gratification.
Order it and you get it overnight. Sometimes the same day. We get upset if it says two-day delivery because we’ve been sucked into the promise of faster and cheaper.
I admit I’m guilty – and when stuck for time will hit the buy button.
But I try to support local and buy local. Local is the whole focus of our papers. So I try to shop valley retailers – independently-owned, mom and pop, or even larger retailers who at least have a valley footprint and keep our sales tax dollars here.
I spend far too much money at Barnes and Noble in Calabasas. Everyone knows I’m a voracious reader. I don’t really even like my Kindle. I like books. Real books you hold in your hand and can touch and feel. The staff at the library knows my name, and my daughter’s. I love The Next Chapter bookstore in Canoga Park.
So this is where Bezos hit me hard.
It has come to light that his facility in Vegas is digitally scanning books for AI training data.
They are buying up thousands of books – mainly older titles that aren’t available online. They rip them apart to scan them.
Then destroy them.
It gets me in the gut. Books being trashed so one of the richest men in the world can expand his empire.
The operation was discovered by 404 Media, who placed a tracking device in a rare book and followed it to the final destination. They were suspicious – then appalled.
So was the Director of Collections and Bibliographic Services for the Las Vegas Library System. Rebecca Coulter said, “Tearing apart a book to get past a transformative use clause to get around copyright laws is wrong. And when you’re destroying print books to gain access to content – you’re also destroying a lot of literature and history.”
Unfortunately, in June a judge ruled against a trio of authors whose books were transcribed into AI – saying it was a fair use of copyright law. That’s the judicial system under the current administration – there are no longer any protections for writers or journalists.
But it’s not just about Bezos tossing the books aside.
Think about it – hard. By deciding which books to digitize, and then destroying the original, Bezos gets to decide what we read. What we think.
It’s all too reminiscent of Germany in the 40’s. Book banning. Book burning. Selective choices, made by one man.
That’s what scares me.
This week the news relayed warnings that AI will become too smart and kill us all.
If books disappear and all we have to read is what’s force fed to us online, Fahrenheit 451 will no longer just be a lesson learned in school, but what we’re doomed to.
