Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training
Amazon's Las Vegas VGT3 warehouse destructively scans thousands of books, cutting spines and discarding pages, to build AI training data.
404 Media interviewed an anonymous Amazon employee at the VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, part of the same complex as the LAS8 print-on-demand facility. Workers receive shipments of books including library liquidations and University of London materials, scan them, cut the spines off with machines, and discard the loose pages irreversibly. The operation was discovered by placing a tracking device in a shipment of rare books a bookseller suspected was being acquired by an anonymous AI company. Employees described scanning barcodes to weed out duplicates and an often disorganized process that changed daily.
- Employee describes cutting book spines, scanning pages and discarding them irreversibly
- Shipments included library liquidations, University of London and government documents
- Operation discovered by tracking a rare-book shipment to the VGT3 warehouse
- Workers say the process was disorganized and changed daily
- Vendors
- Amazon
- Organizations
- 404 Media
- Countries
- United States
From the original article
6 min read at 404media.co
Last week we published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data . The following is an interview with one of the Amazon employees at this warehouse. We granted this employee anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
By Emanuel Maiberg · 404media.co
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.