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.”
