Amazon has been caught scanning and destroying a large shipment of rare books so it can train its AI models.
In an investigation by 404 Media, a bookseller suspected that an order they received for 1,000 books on Biblio, a marketplace where buyers can remain anonymous, was for an AI company. So to get to the bottom of the mystery, they agreed to place an Apple AirTag between the pages of one of the volumes.
They tracked the shipment to a site at a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off of books they receive so they can quickly scan their pages, destroying them in the process.
“I work at VGT3 here in Vegas, and all we do is scan books,” an Amazon employee wrote on a forum for Amazon workers, as quoted by 404. “Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the barcodes. We didn’t have rates, but now we do, but it’s not stressful.”
Despite Amazon clearly trying to keep this practice under wraps, the logo for the part of the warehouse the book scanners work in, called VGT3, is so on the nose that it borders on farce: a T-Rex holding a book in its hand that it’s about to eat — which, we have to say, kind of looks AI-generated.
The company only had this to say in a statement to 404: “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.”
The public only became aware of this AI industry practice in a lawsuit against Anthropic, which revealed that the Claude chatbot maker was using industrial equipment to cut the pages out of millions of books and scan them, before they were disposed of.
More alarming was the upshot of that lawsuit: a judge ruled that because Anthropic was turning the physical texts into digital ones and destroying the original copies, it was “transformative” and therefore didn’t violate copyright law.
Since then, book sellers have often suspected that their wares are being used, and then destroyed, to train AI models. In previous 404 reporting, one said that some of the giveaways were the size of the orders, the seemingly random selection of books, and that the books all had ISBNs. But they couldn’t prove this hunch because the orders are anonymous.
As 404 notes, that the workers at the Amazon site are apparently scanning the ISBNs of all the books they process gives credence to a spooky theory by booksellers: that AI companies are trying to scan every printed book in the world by going through a list of all their serial numbers.
The bookseller 404 worked with sold books that are rare, meaning that there are few copies left in circulation. That can be for a myriad of reasons — they’re not necessarily first editions of old classics — but they’re still valuable.
“There are different types of value,” the bookseller told 404. “There’s monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There’s historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don’t care about. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.”
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