An investigation by 404 Media found that Amazon bought a shipment of rare books so it could scan and destroy them to train AI.
    • joe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      16 hours ago

      I read the article and don’t see what you’re seeing. Can you point out the “false pretenses”. It seems the order was placed via a site that intentionally allows anonymous purchases.

      As a sidebar:

      a bookseller suspected that an order they received for 1,000 books on Biblio, a marketplace where buyers can remain anonymous, was for an AI company. So to get to the bottom of the mystery, they agreed to place an Apple AirTag between the pages of one of the volumes.

      Emphasis mine.

      That seems sketchy to me. I’m not confident it’s illegal, but I’m guessing a website that intentionally allows anonymous purchases isn’t going to take kindly to a vendor putting a tracking device in an order.

      • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
        12·
        8 hours ago

        Oh no. Won’t somebody think of the billionaire whose monopoly that got exposed by some independent journalists who couldn’t be bought or bribed. How tragic.

        If Amazon is behaving ethically, they don’t need to hide what they’re doing.

        • joe@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          Hindsight makes people come to very foolish conclusions.

          Hint: what if it didn’t turn out to be Amazon?