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Amazon: "You consented when you published your book on our platform. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Yes, even before 'AI' came along."
lol yeah that’s not gonna fly in court. You can’t unilaterally make tectonic post hoc contractual adjustments like that. Or, you’re not supposed to be able to. But who knows these days.
lol yeah that’s not gonna fly in court.
Doesn't mean they won't try.
Wasting everyone's time and money in the process, while hoping to bankrupt anyone standing in their way with obscenely huge legal bills.
It's not really an adjustment though? Amazon's publishing contract has always preserved the standard AND extended publisher rights (which other publishers do the same way btw, maybe not with this level of hostility as they can't afford to lose writers, but publishers have had an insane amount of leverage for decades now).
Basically the moment you agree for Amazon to publish your book, you give them permission to handle it as if it were their own product - you're "just" the author, who gets a pittance from sales.
So unless the authors can show that Amazon's approach is causing them direct financial harm and therefore the publishing contract is to be terminated, courts won't be too helpful.
Yes it will. "We can change this contract at will any time without notice"
You signed. You don't have an inaliable right to be informed. These kinds of sentences show up all over EULA's and other consent forms.
Amazon isn't entering a business contract with you. They're merely selling/publishing your product.
And you signed away your ownership.
Yeah, pretty much how I figured it'll go down
Yeah, pretty much how I figured it'll go down
I'm reading book instead of asking it. Why they push AI so much where it's not needed.
Why they push AI so much where it's not needed.
Because they "need" to intrude on every second of everyone's life in order to increase their profits.
How those profits will increase is probably by shoving more advertising down your throat once their "advanced technology" has been inextricably entwined into everything.
“Excellent question! Winston Smith would naturally have understood that AI-powered surveillance and data gathering has a vital role to play in protecting us all from woke ideologies like Ingsoc.”
I don't like AI much, but I'm fine with this. Note, I don't buy books on Kindle. I just think it's fine if you want to ask "who is this person again" or "what happened in this place?" There used to be digital books that were all hyperlinked up so you could do that anyway, but I guess it was too much work or people didn't really use it enough to justify the work. Especially if the names are strange to you and you don't know them — like high fantasy stuff.
I think it's unreasonable to ask authors to provide this information as well when you can just have an AI sum it up. The problem occurs when the AI gets it wrong. Especially if you, in turn, want to blame the author. It needs to tell you this information is coming from the app, not the author, or the publisher, and that it can sometimes make mistakes.
Or, here's another idea. Some authors write bibles (basically info dumps) but readers never see these. So what if they bundle that and the AI can reference that? The problem I see then is something like Game of Thrones, if you ask who Jon Snow is and it tells you he's the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. (This was never confirmed in the books, but it was a popular fan theory. It was confirmed in the HBO series (like a decade ago) so it's assumed that that was the author's intent... so having a document full of the author's notes could spoil you in other ways.)
more shiiiit!
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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