No. A copy is still a copy even if you destroy the original.

i would assume that would come into play if they were uploading scans of the books? there must be some gray area where training like this doesnt apply to that. or ya know, just do it and face the consequences later because you already have the data and know that ai obsessed government will just shrug their shoulders.

Not to my understanding. To begin with, it's far from given that "rare" books are all covered by copyright. But if they are, it's at best murky: whether you destroy the original doesn't really have anything to do with what you're doing with scanned contents. The scanned contents themselves may be inherently a copyright issue, regardless of destroying the original. The actual trained model has separate arguments more in its favor, so if no scanned contents exist - IE the data is read once for training and not stored or saved, they have a better argument. But in that case the destruction is totally disconnected from copyright, as they'd be totally okay to rescan the material.

Bias disclaimer: Amazon is my current employer, but I don't work on AI or anything else mentioned in the article.

Yes, this is a result of copyright laws. The other commenters are wrong/uninformed.

If it was up to the companies training LLMs, they wouldn't destroy the books: It's a waste of company resources, it's needlessly destructive/evil, it generates bad PR, etc etc. There are essentially zero advantages, other than it is what is required under US copyright law (or at least, it is what their highly paid lawyers believe is required under US copyright law).

The worst part of Amazon destroying priceless old books in the quest to build the torment nexus is the hypocrisy

Is it a “loophole” that you can buy something and burn it? That’s how property ownership works. If the books were really so rare and valuable then the original owner should have given them to a museum rather than sell them as scrap. Yet no one who is complaining right now cared about them before Amazon got involved.

Its somewhat ironic.

Do you really think they aren't? Do you think Amazon are carefully culling rare books from the list?

Although, we have to face the fact that the 'indie' book industry isn't necessarily preserving stuff either. I was recently in an old fashioned book shop in Charing Cross road, and they were selling old pictures as well as books. I was going to buy one as a present until I realised that they were pages that had been cut out of some book, because they could get more selling them separately.

no one uses ai for writing at tc. you're gonna end up chicken-littling yourself