We Tracked a Rare Book Shipment. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
A 404 Media investigation placed a tracking device in a rare book shipment to uncover Amazon's secret book-scanning operation. The book traveled from a bookseller to Biblio, then to a warehouse in Wisconsin, and finally to Amazon's VGT3 facility in Las Vegas, where employees cut bindings and scan books for AI training data. Amazon confirmed it purchases books to improve its AI models, but the practice destroys the physical books, raising concerns among booksellers and authors.
There are different types of value. 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.