Amazon Acquires Large Quantity of Used Books, Scans Them, and Destroys Them for AI Training

BlockBeats News, August 18th. According to a recent survey, Amazon is purchasing physical books, dismantling the book bindings, scanning the pages for AI training, and then destroying the original books. The investigation tracked an order of about 1000 books, eventually finding these books were sent to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas.

404 Media collaborated with a bookseller who received this order through the second-hand and rare books online platform Biblio. They placed an AirTag inside one of the books and tracked it all the way to Amazon's LAS8 warehouse located in North Las Vegas. It is reported that a team named VGT3 in this warehouse is responsible for scanning the books for AI training purposes.

An Amazon spokesperson told Inc., "Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services used by customers."

Amazon did not respond to questions about how many books they have purchased, when the project started, what the scanned content is being used for, whether the company will filter out rare or scarce editions before destroying the books, and other related inquiries.

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