How an AirTag Planted by a Reporter Led to a Secret Amazon Site Where Old Books Are Cut Apart and Scanned
404 Media says an Airtag in a rare book led to Amazon’s Las Vegas AI facility, where workers scan and destroy book spines for training data.
- On Monday, 404 Media tracked a Rare book to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas using an Airtag, confirming the company buys bulk lots of Rare books to scan for AI training.
- For the past year, booksellers suspected AI firms were destroying Rare books after scanning them to train LLMs. These texts are valuable because nothing published before 2022 was written by an LLM.
- The Amazon facility, known as VGT3, identifies itself with a logo of a Tyrannosaurus preparing to devour a book. 404 Media documented the warehouse team tearing books from their spines to scan pages.
- Amazon told 404 Media it purchases books through commercial channels to improve products and services, but declined to comment on whether these books are used for AI training.
- Competing with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic requires massive unique training data for Amazon. However, firms risk model collapse when LLM output quality degrades after ingesting too much AI-generated text.
54 Articles
54 Articles
Now Amazon Has Been Caught Destroying Rare Books to Train AI
Amazon has been caught systematically scanning and destroying rare books to feed its artificial intelligence systems, according to a report from Futurism detailing an investigation by 404 Media. The revelation exposes a quiet industrial process in which physical volumes are permanently dismantled so their text can be converted into training data. A bookseller grew suspicious […]
Tracking device exposes Amazon's secret plans for rare books
A dinosaur logo is at the center of controversy surrounding the whereabouts of some rare literature.This story, involving Amazon, has taken wild cross-country turns and led to one of the most unexpected places.'They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.'As AI companies have rushed to gobble up texts for digitization and model training, suspicion has mounted that companies are buying up batches of rare tomes for uses they'd r…
A 404 Media investigation reveals that Amazon buys and destroys books in large quantities to train its AIs.
An AirTag hidden by a bookseller ended up in an Amazon facility where the specimens are dismantled and scanned to train AI models
The discovery arises after booksellers notice an out of the ordinary increase in online purchases and orders
A journalist hid an Apple AirTag in a rare book to discover the fate of the bulk orders of used books made by Amazon. Advanced by 404 Media, a recent investigation has...
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