[Mouvelie]

"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).”

[akersten]

> 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

[johnnyanmac]

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).

[foxyv]

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.

[KaiserPro]

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.

[catgary]

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.

[Rebelgecko]

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?

[johnnyanmac]

>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.

[thewebguyd]

> 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.