An investigation by 404 Media found that Amazon bought a shipment of rare books so it could scan and destroy them to train AI.

“I work at VGT3 here in Vegas, and all we do is scan books,” an Amazon employee wrote on a forum for Amazon workers, as quoted by 404. “Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the barcodes. We didn’t have rates, but now we do, but it’s not stressful.”

Despite Amazon clearly trying to keep this practice under wraps, the logo for the part of the warehouse the book scanners work in, called VGT3, is so on the nose that it borders on farce: a T-Rex holding a book in its hand that it’s about to eat — which, we have to say, kind of looks AI-generated.

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
    14·
    2 days ago

    In an investigation by 404 Media, a bookseller suspected that an order they received for 1,000 books on Biblio, a marketplace where buyers can remain anonymous, was for an AI company. So to get to the bottom of the mystery, they agreed to place an Apple AirTag between the pages of one of the volumes.

    They tracked the shipment to a site at a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off of books they receive so they can quickly scan their pages, destroying them in the process.

    • hneerqe@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 days ago

      They know full well they’re the baddies. They’re trying everyday to outbad themselves. They’re not lazy and procrastinating about that either.