It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

That is also my understanding of the claim, and I would intuitively agree with it.

Your example is very flawed because if the LLM gave you the exact recipe then it would be infringement, but many recipes need to be exact. LLMs aggregate information so wanting a very specific recipe (to the point of hunting down an old cookbook) is a non-starter because it the LLM is really only guessing.

This has been less true every year since Usenet and Geocities. Much of the stuff on their was pirated, but that was the "stale and same" stuff you're complaining about anyway. The rest of the stuff was all kinds of original, good and bad. There's never been more total "content" and more total variety. You just have to look around for it (but that's also never been easier).

Letting AI companies try to profit off of all that creativity forever while choking the ability of the creators to make future revenue off of it is exactly what would actually lead to a "everything is stale and the same" situation. Preserving variety and novelty of new creation would look like putting in new restrictions to reduce this not-envisioned-when-the-laws-were-made sort of read-once-slop-forever usage.

For a refresher: The Internet Archive scanned books then shared them online, trying to claim that converting them into digital copies qualified as a derivative work. You don’t have to be a lawyer to see how that claim doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.

The LLM companies are not redistributing the works. They are using them for training. This blog post calls it IP theft, but it has actually been litigated in court already. Using books for training does not qualify as theft or redistribution, even though some people have different opinions about the moral angles.

One of those same lawsuits also extracted a huge settlement from Anthropic for using digital downloads from pirate sites. The conclusion was that the only acceptable way for them to use the books is to buy them and scan them. The courts forced it to be this way.

The current hand-wringing about the destruction of books is based on claims that they’re doing it to rare books that are also valuable. So far nobody has been able to actually provide an example of one of these books that is supposedly ultra-rare, but also valuable, but also only available at one of these book sellers that sells these things in bulk. We’re supposed to assume that one of these books might actually be super valuable but also super rare and also only available at these places they’re buying from.

I've read a lot of unknown old literature that has little to recommend it as far as literary history goes, but it all has a certain charm, and at the end of the day it was all the work of a human being who walked this earth just like we did and captured their thought on the page.

What if their family has an interest in the preservation of that text? What if they simply don't yet know of it, or couldn't afford it?

Yes all hypotheticals, but I think a lot of people are underestimating the potentially permanent damage being done to the public good just because the actions are not illegal.

Everyone should be uncomfortable with a single company unilaterally pillaging the public good for its own ends. Period.

IDK about you geniuses on hacker news, but I'd much prefer to pay a few hundred dollars for a rare book once to be able to read it than pay amazon token costs monthly to get the LLM's chopped and screwed regurgitation, without any recourse to even knowing where the information comes from.