My wife just received an email from the online retailer. She has been asked to "Not take any photographs or copies of the product in question due to copyright issues" and it states, "the product must be returned immediately by special delivery by [DATE]." There's some other statements as well about our account being terminated if we fail to return the product by the specific date. We've got a lot of movies and series that we have purchased over the years on this account, I wouldn't want to lose them.

They've stated that taking photos of the book will break a bunch of laws. They also stated that not promptly returning the book would may break some laws, and lead to the termination of my account.

Does the CEO of Totally-Not-Amazon know that his company is signing it's name to stupid letters?

If this turns out to be real, I suspect its gonna be a major shitshow - not only for the publisher, but for the AI industry as a whole.

For the publisher, they're gonna be lambasted for endangering people's lives for a quick AI-printed buck.

For AI, its gonna be yet another indictment of an industry that's seen fit to put technology, profits, basically everything over human lives - whether in the "AI Safety" criti-hype which implicitly suggests culpability for bringing about an apocalypse straight out of sci-fi, or in the myriad ways they are making the world worse right now.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but,

I still start by asking someone who knows about the thing what books they might recommend. And I know mushrooms are especially problematic, so I go look for um, active communities of people who aren't dead from eating the wrong mushrooms.

Is it possible, that we're looking too far away from accountable sources when we route our knowledge searches through noisy corporate slops?

I'd be too pissed off to take it to friggin reddit. I don't buy it.

I refuse to lend any credibility at all to some anonymous controversial reddit post made from a throwaway. There are way too many of that nowadays and I'd bet a toonie a large proportion of those are either faked to drive engagement or for shits and giggles.

Besides, this is the internet... Didn't anybody get the lesson with the bonsai kittens?!

lol@OP not mentioning it's from Amazon. I bet posting something negative about a potential reddit business partner would get their account nuked.