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Comment by Mouvelie | Hacker News Reader

"Amazon DID NOT answer PubLunch’s questions about “what rights the company was relying upon to execute the new feature was not answered, nor did they elaborate on the technical details of the service and any protections involved (whether to prevent against hallucinations, or to protect the text from AI training).”

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> what rights the company was relying upon to execute the new feature

what rights does a bookstore clerk need to answer questions about a product on the store's shelves? what a presumptuous question

Yeah, the "but what about a human" argument doesn't really work here. Scale of data matters as always. And an Ai for kindle has the scale of 20 years of literature (and more if they just scrape the internet).

> Yeah, the "but what about a human" argument doesn't really work here. Scale of data matters as always. And an Ai for kindle has the scale of 20 years of literature

I haven't seen a convincing argument why not. There's millions of librarians with the knowledge of more than 20 years of literature under their belt. Why can they answer your questions about a book but the robot can't?

> Why can they answer your questions about a book but the robot can't

Robots simply do not deserve the same consideration and the same rights that humans have

It's really that easy. Humans deserve more rights than inanimate objects

Luckily we do not live in an allow-list based society where we need to ask permission for every new thing we invent. The burden is on someone to show that robot answers book questions is somehow bad, to justify outlawing it. And that has not been shown. Bringing up the ontology of humans having human rights has nothing to do with the argument at hand.

That way it should be illegal or discouraged to select text from a book and paste it elsewhere

Is the "clerk" scanning the books an digitizing them to generate other products using an LLM under the guise of "Answering Questions?" I believe this is the question being asked.

Companies like Amazon and Google have some really sticky fingers when it comes to intellectual property and personal data. I think it's worth asking these questions and holding them accountable for exploiting data that doesn't rightly belong to them.

> Is the "clerk" scanning the books an digitizing them to generate other products using an LLM under the guise of "Answering Questions?" I believe this is the question being asked.

That's what I mean by presumptuous. If that's really what they want the answer to, and what they object to, they should ask it plainly instead of alluding to it by asserting that there's some requisite but missing entitlement for the feature to exist on its face.

Either the Clerk would have read it, because they bought it, or borrowed it from the library.

I mean they could have read it on company time as well.

However, let us not use a straw man here. Its not some company clerk, its one of the largest company on earth using other people's copy right to make more money for them selves.

The author also gets a cut of this, no? It is the author's prerogative to sell their books to be read on a Kindle and they get compensated, maybe perhaps unfairly, when I choose to buy the book. Whatever happens after that, other then copying it and sticking it on Anna's archive is basically free game as long as I'm making derivative works and making money off them. Anything short of that, I'm good.

That's my thoughts on that, anyway.

You don’t need any rights to execute the feature. The user owns the book. The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right, and asks questions.

>The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right,

I don't think that's cut and clear yet. Throwing media onto someone else's server may count as distribution.

Sure, in the sense that any belief about the law isn’t cut and dried until a judge has explicitly dismissed it in the court of law.

How likely do you think it is that Amazon doesn’t have a pre-existing contract with these publishers to host these books on Amazon servers?

1. The user doesn't own the book, the user has a revocable license to the book. Amazon has no qualms about taking away books that people have bought

2. I doubt the Kindle version of the LLM will run locally. Is Amazon repurposing the author-provided files, or will the users' device upload the text of the book?

I am so confused by some of the comments in this thread. All these weird mental gymnastics to argue that users should have less rights.

“Oh, you think you should be able to use an LLM with a book you paid for? Well you don’t own and book.”

Ok, and you like that? You want even less ownership? Less control?

> All these weird mental gymnastics to argue that users should have less rights

We probably agree more than not. But users getting more rights isn’t universally good. To finish an argument, one must consider the externalities involved.

I don't agree with the way you're interpreting the comment. If anything I think it's BAD that you don't really "own" digital content.

I guess my argument is that Amazon shouldn't be able to have their cake and eat it too

You agree that we should own our digital content but it sounds like you don’t want this particular capability because… fuck Amazon.

I can totally understand that sentiment but I don’t think giving up end user capabilities to spite Amazon is logically aligned with wanting ownership of digital media.

> protect the text from AI training

Hasn't training been already ruled to be fair use in the recent lawsuits against Meta, Antrhopic? Ruled that works must be legally acquired, yes, but training was fair use.

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