404 Media worked with a bookseller to discover that Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI. Wait until you see how they did it!
As reported by Ashley Belanger in ArsTechnica (Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI, available here), 404 Media revealed yesterday in a story that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported. Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, which is shown on the 404 Media report.
Amazon declined to comment on 404 Media’s findings, only providing Ars with the same statement it gave to 404 Media, which does not mention AI training specifically.
“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” Amazon’s statement said.
However, Amazon is developing what it considers frontier AI models, which require a massive amount of unique training data to stay competitive with leading firms like Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Right now, firms carefully guard their training data to avoid losing an edge. And training models on text from rare books that are difficult to find would seemingly offer an advantage for Amazon, especially since rivals like Anthropic and xAI have publicly stated that they are not training on rare or antique books.
After a reportedly historic year of sales, booksellers had suspected that AI firms were targeting books with ISBN numbers in order to ensure that the highest volume of unique works were present in training data sets. And 404 Media’s review of Amazon workers’ online discussions indicated that they were trained to scan barcodes or ISBNs before scanning books. That practice, 404 Media reported, “gives further credence” to booksellers’ theory that “AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by working through the list of ISBNs.”
Not surprisingly, many book lovers are horrified by destructive book-scanning, especially since there is an alternative. Google patented a non-destructive book-scanning technology in 2009 that AI firms could use to efficiently scan books—if they were willing to slow down and invest in the process.
Amazon (at least, and probably others) doesn’t appear to be willing to do that. Yet another casualty of the need to feed AI.
So, what do you think? Are you concerned that Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Image created using ChatGPT, using the term “robot gleefully tearing out pages of an old book to scan them”.
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