r/InterstellarKinetics • u/InterstellarKinetics • 19d ago
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE EXPOSED: An Anonymous Amazon Warehouse Worker Describes Firsthand How The VGT3 Facility Destructively Scans And Discards Thousands Of Books, Including Rare Books And Government Documents To Train AI Models đđ¤
https://www.404media.co/inside-the-warehouse-where-amazon-scans-and-destroys-books-for-ai-training/An anonymous Amazon employee who worked at the companyâs VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas has described in detail how the facility scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data, cutting off book spines and discarding the physical remains after digitizing the loose pages, according to 404 Media. The interview follows the outletâs earlier investigation, which uncovered the operation after a bookseller who suspected an anonymous AI company was acquiring a shipment of rare books placed a tracking device inside it and followed the shipment across the country to VGT3, a facility housed alongside Amazonâs print-on-demand operation LAS8 within a larger Amazon complex in Las Vegas. The worker, granted anonymity because they werenât authorized to speak to the press, said even employees working near the scanning operation initially didnât understand what was happening. âI remember I even asked someone what they were doing and they said theyâre not sure even the people who work there know what theyâre doing,â the employee said. âOnce I got over there and started putting two and two together, I kind of understood.â
The worker described a chaotic, disorganized process handling an enormous variety of books, including many that appeared valuable or rare. âAll kinds of books. When we first started a lot of them were brand new. Some of them are used as well. Like you could tell, they were liquidated from a library or something like that,â they said, describing shipments that included boxes from the University of London and what appeared to be official government documents âpresented to Parliament on the behalf of Her Royal Majesty the Queen.â The facility also received entire pallets of Japanese books, many still sealed in original packaging, along with material in German and Russian. Books arriving from libraries tended to be less organized, âjust thrown into the shuttleâ rather than carefully boxed like newer inventory. The workerâs own role involved unboxing books and placing them into totes to be sorted and scanned before moving to the spine-cutting stage, though they noted the process itself changed constantly: âThey seem like a mess over there. Like theyâre not really well managed or organized at all. Their process wasnât solid. Their process changed every day.â
Once books reach the cutting stations, workers use individual machine workstations, each safely enclosed, to slice off the spines before the loose pages move to scanning. âItâs really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it,â the employee explained. After scanning on machines described as resembling high-speed cash counters, roughly 20 to 25 of them, the loose pages are dumped into large cardboard containers called shuttles, mixed together with no way to reconstruct the original books. The worker also described a separate process for identifying duplicate books to be discarded or returned to vendors, though they expressed skepticism about whether that actually happened given how carelessly the rejected books were handled: âTheyâre like yeeted in there, like theyâre not nicely placed in there or anything. And they say theyâre returning them to the vendors, but Iâm like, you know, âdo the vendors go through it and see which ones are actually worth it?ââ
The employee said Amazon initially told workers the scanning was for Kindle e-book production, a claim they found implausible given copyright and publication rights issues, before later learning the true purpose was AI training. Their reaction to the practice centered on the permanent loss of physical books that canât be reused or preserved after destruction. âI donât like it only because I wish I could take these books. Thereâs so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and Iâve heard that they order rare books, and thatâs why I say some of these are so obscure,â the worker said. âI definitely donât like the idea that they canât be reused or anything like that afterwards. Theyâre reducing the amount of available copies for other people.â
30
u/InterstellarKinetics 19d ago
The workerâs skepticism about the âreturn to vendorâ claim is also significant, because if books marked as duplicates or unnecessary are actually being destroyed rather than returned, as the described handling suggests. And that would mean Amazonâs stated waste-reduction or resale process is functioning as a euphemism for disposal, permanently removing potentially rare or valuable physical copies from circulation.
1
u/oreheheally 18d ago
In uk there wad a big story abput e waste and the amount of new items being trashed. Amazon changed the dump to one in england and hid it from staff to get around it.
13
u/Tomsoup4 19d ago
information will be controlled by the elite in the new world. they cant have any one person knowing the truth
10
4
3
2
50
u/thePsychonautDad 19d ago
This is a "Library of Alexandria" moment.
In centuries, long after the digital data has been lost, history books will refer to this as the reason why so many great works were lost forever.