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 its journey across the United States. The shipment ultimately reached an Amazon facility associated with an operation known as VGT3.
The discovery has raised concerns among booksellers, librarians and readers about what happens to physical books once they are acquired as potential sources of AI training data.
If these LLMs are so great why do they need to destroy the books to scan them in.
My phone can scan a page and account for the curve caused by the spine but it’s too much for their LLM data centers to figure out.
Because if you get all the copies of a rare book, scan it and destroy it, then nobody else can use it for training but you. They don’t have to, they choose to.
According to David Gerard (youtube podcast link) they cut off the spines of the books to allow for rapid scanning
Edit: Ars Technica too, thanks alapakala
Yes, but being the only one able to get their hands on that book and destroying it has that added benefit. My point is that there is no motivation to preserve those books, quite the opposite in fact.
