Things Todd Says on Podcasts

But then I explained to Muse what was going on. And I said we were going to be talking about Muse on the podcast. And I said, what would you want me to say? What would be your message about yourself and this situation? And Muse said, the one thing I would want said about me, I'm not blocked because I did something shady. I'm blocked because two giants haven't agreed on the rules yet. And the customer is the one stuck in the middle. I was like, whoa. Yeah, kind of profound in an almost human way. That really struck me. Yeah. Creepy or inspiring, John.

Yeah, I guess it's both because it's right on the mark. You see power shifting so radically in the tech ecosystem right now where a company like Amazon, Meta on top in the cloud era, and now playing a little bit of defense here, it seems, as it relates to meta. And I just think that's pretty interesting how the tables have turned.

So Todd, aren't you a little nervous about running e-commerce purchases through Meta?

I am so much the wrong person to ask that. I was chatting with some of our guests before the show and they were talking about. Because you'll try anything. I am pretty much the ideal guinea pig for any kind of risky. I probably shouldn't say this on the podcast. I'm going to turn myself into it. What's your safe word?

Tell us your safe word.

So initially, he was confused because this center is primarily known as like a print-on-demand place. So, like, why would you have rare books at a print-on-demand, you know, Kindle direct publishing kind of place? But he realized from employee forums that there's a separate facility inside this building on the north end where they scan books, they cut them apart first, and then they scan them. And now, Amazon didn't deny this in its statements, but Amazon also was not forthcoming about the reasons that they're scanning these books. The assumption based on all sorts of clues, including the fact that some of the employees scan the ISBN codes, the barcodes, it seems like they're logging these books in some ways. And it fits the pattern of an AI company trying to systematically work through every known book that they can. And so the assumption is that it's training some kind of AI model. Of course, Amazon is partnered closely with Anthropic, which has gotten in hot water over this practice. That said, one of the safe harbors in the ruling that the judge came out with in that case was: hey, if you're destroying the book in the process of scanning it, it's actually okay because you're not going to reuse it. Sort of this weird legal technicality, which is kind of perverse, especially to book lovers. At any rate, fascinating story, and I loved it for the reporting technique that was put into it.

So, what do you think is really going on?

The evidence certainly would indicate AI purposes and training. So I would see why they would maybe make that leap. But yeah, you're right. We don't know. I think the end result is we're not 100% sure here, but certainly interesting the lengths that these companies are going to just to capture the planet's data.

Yes. Yes. This whole technique, I did some research, and there's a precedent here in a Seattle nonprofit called the Basel Action Network. They started planting GPS trackers long before AirTags in old printers and monitors back in 2014. And they were tracing where e-waste actually goes. And they found that so much of this was basically exported and not truly recycled in the ways that the companies that took them in promised. And so it was kind of some investigative watchdog reporting by this nonprofit in a much similar way, but they had to like team up with MIT on cellular trackers that needed a data plan. And it wasn't exactly the AirTag era.

And it's getting easier and easier to do this sort of tracking. I mean, you think about even like the watermarking technology within AI that you're now able to track, you know, AI systems. Yeah, I think it's fascinating how companies are tracking data now.