Amazon, once an online bookseller, is destroying rare books to train AI models
Amazon is reportedly purchasing and destroying rare books to scan them for training data for its large language models. This practice aims to secure high-quality, human-written text to avoid the 'model collapse' associated with training on AI-generated content.
Why it matters
It highlights the growing ethical and legal tensions between tech giants and intellectual property owners regarding the hunger for high-quality training data.
Amazon is buying tons of rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to 404 Media , which placed a tracking device in a rare book that ultimately arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas.
The facility, known as VGT3, identifies itself with a symbol of a dinosaur holding a book in its claws. Amazon told 404 Media in a statement that it “purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use.”
Companies like Amazon need unfathomably large amounts of text to train their LLMs, which have already ingested what they can from the internet (and, in Anthropic’s case, illegally pirated books). Rare books, especially ones that are out of print or impossible to find on the internet, offer a new source of coveted training data.
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