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.
40 Articles
40 Articles
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...
Amazon book scanning: an AirTag traced rare books to Las Vegas
A bookseller hid an AirTag inside a rare book and let it go with a bulk order. The tracker travelled across the United States and stopped at a warehouse in Las Vegas owned by Amazon. Emanuel Maiberg reported the result for 404 Media on Monday. Booksellers have spent a year suspecting that AI companies were […] This story continues at The Next Web
Rare Books Shipment Tracked to Amazon AI Facility Where Books Are Allegedly Scanned and Destroyed
Amazon is facing fresh scrutiny over the use of physical books for artificial intelligence training after an investigation reportedly tracked a shipment of hard-to-find titles to a company facility in Las Vegas, where workers allegedly cut the bindings from books before scanning their pages and eventually destroying them. The investigation, reported by 404 Media, involved placing a tracking device inside a book from a large order and following i…
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