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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.
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Amazon launches Alexa+ in India with Hindi support
Amazon launched its generative AI Alexa+ assistant in India with Hindi support in Early Access, free for Prime customers after testing.
Amazon announced that Alexa+, its generative AI-powered conversational assistant, is now available in India in Early Access with Hindi and English support, including mid-sentence language switching and long-form context retention. The assistant handles multi-step tasks such as ordering groceries via Amazon Now and controlling smart home devices, with integrations including Swiggy, District, MakeMyTrip, EazyDiner, Amazon Music, and JioSaavn. It will be free for Prime members after the testing period and cost about $20.85 per month for non-Prime customers. Amazon is targeting India's 600 million-plus Hindi speakers, and says smart device adoption grew 20% year over year.
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Podcast: We Spoke to an Amazon Worker Destroying Books for AI
404 Media podcast covers Amazon destroying scanned books for AI training, recurring AI names in academic papers, and ICE voter-data spending.
404 Media's podcast follows up on its investigation of an Amazon warehouse where books are scanned and destroyed for AI training data, including an interview with a warehouse worker. The hosts also discuss how the same few names repeatedly surface in LLM outputs and AI-generated academic papers. The episode additionally covers ICE's plans to spend millions on voter fraud data and Boston Dynamics robot dogs.
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We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
Investigation reveals Amazon buys and destroys massive quantities of printed books, cutting bindings to scan them for AI training data at a Las Vegas warehouse.
A 404 Media investigation tracked a rare book with a GPS device to Amazon's VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, revealing an unreported operation buying large volumes of printed books for AI training data. Employees there report cutting bindings off shipments to scan the books quickly, destroying the printed copies in the process. The finding offers rare visibility into how major AI companies acquire print material for training corpora.
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Podcast: Amazon is Destroying Rare Books to Train AI
404 Media podcast covers Amazon buying and destroying rare books for AI training, AI misuse in court cases, and Meta's glasses patent.
404 Media's podcast discusses its investigation tracing a shipment of rare books to an Amazon AI training facility where they were destroyed, alongside reporting on AI misuse in courts: an expert witness who used ChatGPT to write a report defending 3M in a deadly explosion lawsuit, and a prompt injection hidden in a legal filing instructing AI to side with one party. It also covers Meta's new patent for AI smart glasses with facial recognition and research into the glasses being used to harass women.
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Twitch is Mining Peoples' Streams to Train Amazon's AI
Twitch will train Amazon's AI models on streamers' content by default, requiring users to manually opt out in security settings.
Twitch announced a setting that lets streamers opt out of having their channel content train Amazon's generative AI models, confirming about a week of rumors. The toggle, labeled 'Allow your channel content to train generative AI content models at Amazon,' is opt-out rather than opt-in and sits at the bottom of the security settings page. Critics note many streamers may never learn of the change or find the buried setting, sweeping their content into Amazon's training data by default.
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Amazon Prime Video’s new AI tech matches lips to dubbed audio
Amazon Prime Video launched AI lip-sync dubbing aligning actors' mouth movements with human-dubbed audio, starting with the English dub of Maxton Hall.
Prime Video's new feature combines AI and visual effects technologies to make lip movements match translated speech, currently available for seasons 1-2 of the German series Maxton Hall worldwide and planned for additional titles, with season 3 arriving December 9. Amazon previously piloted AI-aided dubbing in English and Spanish across 12 movies and shows last year. Meta and YouTube have recently launched similar AI auto-dubbing features with optional lip sync for creators.
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