Amazon is Destroying Rare Books to Train AI

0:28This episode is brought to you by Accenture. Most of the money and most of the incentives are from AI companies whose goal is to scan the books and destroy the books because it's legally advantageous for them. Because every piece of data that I have in scan and you don't have gives me a small edge.

0:52Hello and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founding company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. Also, do remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch all of these episodes, including this one. Subscribe at youtube.com slash at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the other 404 Media co-founders.

1:35The first being Sam Cole. Hello. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hello, hello. All right, let's get straight into this story because it's absolutely crazy. I think we've all been looking forward to talking about this one on the podcast. Emmanuel, this is one you wrote. And the headline is, We tracked a shipment of rare books. It ended at an Amazon AI training facility. Straight up, I'm just going to read the lead so people know what this story is and what the takeaway is. And then how we got to this is what we'll get into. But the lead says, Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data and destroying them in the process.

2:23So, Emmanuel, we've had this problem that we've spoken about on the podcast before, in that we suspected AI companies were buying these massive quantities of books for training data. There was the early anthropic stuff, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But more recently, you've been speaking to booksellers who have seen this huge spike in sales. And they suspected, like, this is probably AI companies or something. But we didn't know who was buying it. That was going to be really hard to figure out. You then came up with an idea. What was the idea? The idea was pretty simple. And that was to put a tracking device, specifically an AirTag, in a book that belongs to one of these booksellers that we think might be sold or might be bought by an AI company.

3:18And then just see where it goes. And that's what we did. And it did, in fact, end up at an AI company. yeah and we've seen other journalists do stuff like this before right and i think it was a reuters one looking at a recycling facility and then there was another one from another outlet so it's a really interesting tactic to figure out where stuff went before we get to the journey how did that sort of idea come about in execution as in you've been speaking to a bookseller right and they agreed to place the tag in? What was that conversation? While obviously keeping it somewhat vague because we are trying to protect this bookseller.

4:00Yeah, so the last story I wrote was based on conversations with booksellers. One of them had reached out to me and they said that they have a very strong feeling that these massive, sudden sales are... The only client that makes sense is an AI company and there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that suggests it's an AI company. But the issue is that the marketplaces where the booksellers sell this stuff keeps the buyers anonymous. And it's just something that we really wanted to know and seemed like a solvable problem. I thought about the same story you thought, which somebody put a tracking device in order to see what was actually happening to materials we thought were going to be recycled.

4:53I floated that idea to a bookseller and they agreed. We had to wait a little bit for an order to come in that we suspected might be an AI company. One of them quickly came in because there's many of these bulk buys happening right now. It was a pretty massive buy, almost a thousand books, which is basically unheard of in this bookseller's business. So we had a very good feeling that it would be an AI company. There was a book where the tag would fit in the time it worked out where I was able to get the tag to them. They were able to participate in this experiment. So you have a suspicion this order is going to be from an AI company because who else is buying like a thousand books or something?

5:44Overnight. I think one challenge, we had is, and I found out a little bit more about this since publishing this story, is the purchases are so big and the turnaround requirement on them is so tight. It's not just that the purchase is being made. The purchase is, we want a thousand books and we want them shipped out tomorrow. And a lot of sellers can't even make that, right? Some people are not making the sales because they can't get their hundreds of books together in time. So one of those came and we had to rush and get everything organized. Then just the turnaround time was another tell. Yes.

6:25Yeah, that makes sense. So describe this journey. Where does it start approximately? And then where does it go after that? Just run us through where this air tag and obviously the book it is attached to and the shipment that book is in. Where does it start and where does it go? So the book ships out of California. we are confident that it leaves via an airplane because the last time we see it in California it's at the airport we are not being more specific about where the book originates in order to protect the bookseller so it leaves from California it arrives at an airport international airport Kenosha I believe it is in Wisconsin it stays there for a couple of days then it travels 30 miles south to a warehouse outside of another airport in Wisconsin, and it stays there, I think, for a couple of weeks.

7:26This is all to be expected. The warehouse where it sits for a couple of weeks is the destination that the bookseller had. That's where he shipped the book to. And that address happens to belong to a logistics and shipping company called Trufinity. they were probably hired by the book selling marketplace which is called biblio and part of the service that biblio offers is they collect all the books sort through them make sure that they have the right inventory put it all in one big convenient package and then send it to the client so that's what was happening there it sat there for two weeks probably other books are arriving right it's like this bookseller shipped around a thousand books that's what the order was for, but he's probably not the only bookseller included in this shipment.

8:17It's very likely that other booksellers are being bundled into this one shipment that then after two weeks, we can see is starting to travel via the highway, almost definitely on a truck, which I know because it stops overnight in Colorado at a trucking stop. I don't know if you guys have ever been to one of those on a road trip, but there's these trucking stops where truckers can shower and sleep and stuff. So it stops at one of those. And then the next day, it arrives in an Amazon facility on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The Amazon facility is called LAS-8. It is one building in one of those huge complexes where there's a bunch of different Amazon operations.

9:05So LAS-8 is a print-on-demand warehouse. Print-on-demand is this business that Amazon has where they don't have an inventory of books on a shelf that they then ship out when somebody buys it. They have digital files of the books. You buy the book, they print it out and ship it to you. That's where they do that. Like t-shirts, like Redbubble, but for books, basically. Yeah, actually, I think they might also do t-shirts at this facility. Right. Yeah, they do print-on-demand, which I found confusing. I was like, okay, why are the books being sent to a print-on-demand facility. There's a fulfillment center nearby called LAS-7.

9:41But a little bit more searching, I found out that LAS-8 is this giant warehouse. There's another facility at the Northern Ed called VGT-3. And it's unclear to me initially what is happening there. Well, can I just ask on that? So the tag arrives at this Amazon warehouse, as you say. And as you mentioned, there's sort of unanswered questions about, well, why is it here exactly? What did you do when the tag arrived there? What was the next step in figuring out, well, what the hell is the tag doing here? When I saw the tag start to move west, my initial thought was, oh, it's making its way back to California where it started out.

10:25And probably it's heading to, I don't know, some facility in Menlo Park or something where the AI companies are. And I saw it stop in Las Vegas. And it didn't move for a while. So I was like, wait, where is this? And then I saw that it was an Amazon facility. I looked into this facility. I saw that its business was print-on-demand, which is book-related, but didn't make sense. Why would you send a massive cache of old, rare books to this facility? We were kind of speculating, oh, maybe they scan them in order to create digital files that they then can begin to also do print-on-demand for them.

11:06And that didn't really make sense. No, no, no. Though I think that is something that happens, but it doesn't make sense for thousands of books to be shipped overnight to do it right now. It just didn't make sense for that kind of business. So I just started searching. We've done a lot of Amazon reporting, Amazon warehouse reporting, labor issues there, both here and at Vice, where we worked previously. And the convenient thing about reporting on Amazon is that it's such a huge employer. Like thousands and thousands of people in the country work for Amazon and they talk about what it's like to work there and what's a good warehouse, what's a bad warehouse, what's a good job, what's a good shift.

11:52And I started looking around in those places to see if anybody had any information on VGT3. and that's when I found out that people were talking about how it is a kind of boring but easy job because all you do is scan books. There's a few teams in the building. Some of them handle receiving where they get the books, they scan the barcode or the ISBN in the back of the book. Another team scans the book and another team cuts the book in order to make it easier to scan. And that's when it started to become clear that they are scanning the books, most likely for AI. But then Amazon confirmed that this was at least one of the reasons of why they were scanning books at this warehouse.

12:39They say that there's other products and services that benefit from this book scanning. We can kind of speculate if you want about what that is. But yeah, it's an Amazon AI training facility. Yeah, that makes sense. And you even found this little logo, which belongs to the operation. Just describe what the logo is and where did you happen to find that? I just saw a couple of people post it on social media. It is something that is, at least at one point, was on the glass door entrance to the VGT3 part of the warehouse. and it's a T-Rex I would say generously a T-Rex holding a book, roaring over a book.

13:26If you want to be less generous, maybe he's ripping the book apart or eating it or something like that. It really did look like ripping to me at first and then when I was editing this piece I was like, I don't think we can fully say it's ripping apart but it has its teeth out and it's going through this book. He's not reading the book. I'll say that. Dinosaurs with peanut brains, famously very voracious readers. They use their claws to thumb through the pages lovingly without destroying. I will say this about the dinosaur is there's some sort of park nearby in Nevada that's like a site for where we retrieve various dinosaur bones and such.

14:09Yeah, Jurassic Park. Yeah, Jurassic Park is there. It's an homage to that. I think there's also a racetrack nearby. And the LAS-8 logo, the part of the warehouse that does print-on-demand, I believe their equivalent, their symbol on their door is a dinosaur driving a race car or something like that. So those are some of the influences, I think, in the area that explain why they chose a T-Rex. Yeah. But the end result is that we put this tank into this rare book. We follow it weirdly halfway across the country. Then it comes back. The route is like really convoluted and silly. But then it arrives at this Las Vegas Amazon facility.

14:55And then you figure out that this is where Amazon employees receive books, scan them, destroy them. And it's for AI training data. Obviously, that is a hugely significant story. and people are really, really mad about AI companies doing this. I feel like people know this, but just for those who are coming to this story now, first of all, why are AI companies buying, scanning, and destroying books like this? What is the value in sourcing these books? Yeah, AI models, large language models, are trained on vast quantities of human written text. these AI companies have already scraped the entire internet that is why the models work as well as they do now that that resource has been exhausted because people have already scraped the internet and now there's the added risk of if you're scraping the internet continuously you're also getting a bunch of AI generated content which is bad for AI training because there's a recursive problem called model collapse, where if AI is trained on AI output, it becomes worse.

16:12You have to go find other training data that is human-generated. The next logical steps are doing it to books. AI companies were sued for pirating, essentially, a ton of books. And after you have that information, you go to physical books. And that's what they're doing. It appears that they are methodically going through ISBNs, these barcodes on the back of books, as comprehensive a list you can have of printed books in existence, and just acquiring them and scanning them. And the reason they cut them is because it's cheaper and faster to cut books before you scan them. You cut off the spine and then you feed the individual pages into the scanner.

17:00Otherwise, you have to turn the page, scan, turn the page, scan. That's a tedious, longer, more expensive process. And as we saw in the anthropic case, technically, by this legal judgment, destroying the book sort of creates a fair use situation. Whereas if they had just copied the book, it's like, well, you're making an unauthorized copy of this. you have the physical version, now you have the digital version, and maybe that is eating into the publisher's business. But if you destroy the physical one and you only have the digital, that is seen as fair use, at least according to the court. So there's almost a legal protection mechanism to destroying the books as well.

17:42It's not the only argument, but it is an argument. So I can imagine just from a lawyer's perspective, it's better to do it than not. Yeah. So why are people really, really mad about this? And because this was a huge topic of conversation before this article came out, you did the earlier coverage and then people were very, very mad about just the idea of AI companies buying these books and destroying them. It feels like an obvious question, but why are people mad about this from your read? I don't know that it's an obvious question. I've been thinking about it a lot since I've published the story and the previous one because people are very emotional about it.

18:24And the primary emotion is anger and disgust. And I think that is, and everybody makes this comparison, whether you think it's fair or not, right? But historically, in our civilization, when people destroy books, those are the bad guys, right? to take knowledge to take printed knowledge and to set it on fire as like the the the nazi party did in germany uh you are symbolically saying that this knowledge is forbidden or bad and you're trying to expel it from the culture and uh that's not the first time or the last time that happened And people have that connotation. So I think that is a big reason.

19:14I think it gets really complicated because it is a fact that the books that these AI companies are seeking now are rare. And that is because the books that are not rare, they have already scraped or scanned or pirated. Because that's easy. If you want a copy of 1984, that has been pirated a million times. That's available for free. That's already something that they have. If you're trying to expand the training data further and further, you're going to reach out to more rare, not as easily available texts. And that's what the booksellers are offering. the confusion comes from the the the word rare because it's like when you say rare what people i think imagine is a first edition of a beloved book that means something to the culture like an oliver twist or something like that to think about like a rare book as artifact being cut and destroyed is a tragedy.

20:35It's like destroying a painting or another work of art, a historical artifact, an antique, whatever, a pot from the Roman Empire or something like that. That is not what is happening. The culturally significant texts are already in the training data because they're easily available in many forms. What is not easily available are books that not many copies of were printed in the first place because they're a niche topic, because it is what is called in publishing a vanity published book, right? Like, I don't know. You're publishing an autobiography and you're printing 5 ,000 copies of it and nobody buys it, right?

21:22That's rare. An instruction manual for a forklift that had a short production cycle. Things like this, right? And when people... And sort of by definition, books that people don't care about are going to be more rare because there's less incentive to produce more copies of them. and this is where some of the controversy about the story comes in because i call the books rare because they literally are but people imagine that it is something that is emotionally and culturally significant which they are not right now by definition because of the reason that i explained the rare nobody cares about it not many copies that doesn't mean that they're not important i have the perspective of someone who has written a lot and all of us have done it because we're interested in internet ephemera and the fact that the internet forgets things easily so we've written a lot of stories about like really famous forums that shut down all the messages disappear or tv show tv episodes that have gone missing and things like this it's like it's very easy to lose things it's very easy to lose history and it's very hard to to kind of rediscover it?

22:40I think to interject here, I mean, I don't want to talk exactly about books, but just about archiving in general, which is like the Internet Archive archives everything. It saves things, it scans them as much as they can get their hands on. And there's entire communities of people that save advertisements from the 1960s, defunct computer magazines from the 80s, Literally anything, things that you find in people's basements and attics and all of this sort of thing. And it is both a heroic effort, this scanning of these documents, which are usually not done in a destructive way as far as I know.

23:28but also you never know when something is going to be useful or when you might need something. It's like I have been doing many articles about over the course of my career where I'm like, oh, I need an article that was published in a newspaper in 1973. Where am I going to find that article? And sometimes you can find it at the library or sometimes someone has scanned it, But sometimes you need to buy a copy of a book. And that book might not be fine prose. You might need to know, here's a random book about a random topic. There was 300 of them ever made. And there's one copy of them on eBay. And you can buy it.

24:12And maybe that's useful. And maybe it leads to an article or whatever. And I think that the idea that I've seen people attacking your article, not very many, but when I have seen people attacking your article, they're saying, oh, they won't name the book. It's probably not that rare. and it's like it is not up to any individual person to say this book is valuable or not valuable or rare or not rare because literally we have a saying in English one person's trash another person's treasure and it's like that has been the case for me zillions of times and I will stop ranting but it's like I've been looking for a very specific computer part or apart from my Resigraph printer for literally over a year, almost a year now.

25:03And there has been one of them that has ever gone on eBay over the last year. This is a thing that probably 99.9 % of people, if they encountered, would throw in the trash or would recycle. Yeah, we see this all the time with technology because it ages so fast. The example in the same vein that comes to mind is CRTs. There was a period of 10 years where you couldn't walk outside without seeing a tube TV on the sidewalk that somebody's throwing away. Today, you can probably sell one for$400 at least because nobody's making them anymore and you need them in order to display certain video games authentically.

25:40Another example that comes to mind is just talk to any historian. if you want like a really thorough understanding of any period in history it's going to be easy to get like the perspective of heads of states of kings of dignitaries of royalty whatever right but it's like when you watch a ken burns documentary most of the value of it is not by learning what abraham lincoln said during the civil war because that has been documented very thoroughly and has existed in the record for a long time it's like letters that random people wrote to their families right that's how you like you get a rich understanding of a moment in history and that is the type of stuff that is being sold scanned and and and shredded um and i think even without making a value judgment, I think it's important to report on because people deserve to know that that is what is happening.

26:50For better or worse, books, just as a commodity, as a resource, it's a marketplace like any other. And the marketplace used to be people buy books, and then there are institutions that buy books like libraries and schools and the incentive for libraries and schools is to hold on to those books as long as they can because their mission is to preserve and provide knowledge as many people have pointed out and as anybody who has worked in a library knows libraries pulp books all the time right it's like a library gets to a point where they have stock that nobody is using. They need the shelf space.

27:33They can't afford to build another facility to store the books. And they destroy books. That's completely accurate and fair. But the logic of the market now has shifted from those institutions whose primary incentive is to preserve knowledge and to preserve it for the public to a marketplace where the biggest motivation and most of the money and most of the incentives are from AI companies with infinite money whose goal is to scan the books and destroy the books because it's legally advantageous for them and it is competitively with other AI companies advantageous to them because every piece of data that I have in scan and you don't have gives me a small edge.

28:24You can think that's bad. You can think that's good. You can think it's not a big deal. it is important to understand that that is how the economy of books is changing. Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it. And besides, in a way, the reason we don't name the books is the same reason that we give the bookseller anonymity. It's because they were worried that sharing this information is going to harm their business. So it's a source protection reason at the end of the day anyway, right? Sam, just briefly, I just wanted to hear you mention the story you did because I do think it's relevant here about Twitch using streamers, streams to train its AI and how that was, you know, opt-in by default.

29:09And of course, Amazon owns Twitch. I'm just wondering what you think about this story and sort of that Twitch story put together. Like, what does that show us, Sam? Yeah, I mean, so with the Twitch thing, just for context, in case people didn't hear about this, Twitch introduced a new feature setting, quote-unquote, where if you're streaming or even in chat, and if you're creating any kind of content on Twitch, you're opted in automatically to have that content be used by Amazon, which owns Twitch, to train their AI models. And they launched this and they were like, oh, it's a new setting. Isn't that exciting?

29:50You can now opt out of AI training, but it's opt-in by default. It's opted in automatically. So unless you know about the setting, you won't be able to know how to do it. And I think it's interesting because, and I'm sure this is kind of what you were thinking also, they had like a Twitch stream with one of their like executives at Twitch was on stream and talked about the announcement. and he said, if it was opt-out, if it was opt-in, no one would opt-in. He said that verbatim, which I think is so... I'm sure as he said it, he was probably like, how do I get these words back in my mouth? But yeah, it just shows that nobody really...

30:44If people have control over the content that they're making and where it goes and what is done with it. They overwhelmingly don't want it to be used in this way. Obviously, church streams are not the same as like pulping books. But if you give people the choice, they right now, as of today, will choose not to have it used for these purposes. So yeah, and I mean, I'm also just thinking about like, talking about like rare books. I ordered a bunch of like, quote unquote, rare books for writing my own book because I was writing about like the history of the internet. And so many of those books are actually functionally useless, but they were so important for my research because it showed what people were doing at the time with what they had, which was the 80s and 90s, early 90s World Wide Web.

31:33I had one book that was like internet porn for dummies or something like that. It was like in the four dummies vein slash style. And it was just a bunch of hyperlinks typed imprinted, which was so unbelievably funny and also just useless for my purposes today. But it showed what people were doing, what they were interested in, what they were making at the time. and a lot of those links actually were still findable at least like in archive but i yeah i think that this mindset that like if it's not like first edition oliver twist it can go to the trash pile is it's i don't know it's pretty narrow minded as to what people are actually buying and using these books for so i don't know i mean yeah my book is probably going to be a rare book one day and in the terms of like no one gives a shit but also maybe someone out there will want to have a copy so yeah i was just like i was like i should go through my old book stack and and see all these like quote unquote rare books yeah because they are that's literally what they are um all right we'll leave that there when we come back after the break we're going to talk about a couple of stories about what is happening in the courts of ai there's some really really crazy stuff going on.

33:00We'll be right back after this.