An AirTag revealed what Amazon is really doing with the rare books it buys
A new investigation using an AirTag has revealed that Amazon is purchasing rare books to destroy them. The company uses the scanned content to train its AI models, as high-quality human-written text is considered a valuable resource.
Image processing: Geektime
Think your AirTag is only meant to find the suitcase your airline lost again? Think again. A new investigation made creative use of Apple's tracking tag to crack a mystery regarding a huge shipment of rare books, and along the way exposed Amazon's secret.
Coast-to-coast journey
It all started when an anonymous seller, who used a marketplace called Biblio to sell rare books, received an unusually large order for 1,000 rare books. To understand where the goods were going, a reporter for the site 404Media, Emmanuel Maiberg, planted an AirTag inside the shipment and set out to follow it.
The AirTag's location data showed that the intriguing shipment left California by flight and landed in Wisconsin, where it waited for about two weeks at a logistics center. From there, it set out by truck, crossed Colorado, until it reached its final destination: Amazon warehouses in Las Vegas.
This stop initially confused Maiberg. It is a warehouse where Amazon prints books and sends them to customers. The answer began to become clear when the tag was located in the northern area of the warehouse. There, as it turned out from internal messages of Amazon employees, a mysterious facility called VGT3 is located.
Arms race
The investigation reveals that, unlike the adjacent complex, which includes machines for printing books, the work of the employees in the VGT3 complex is completely different: they are actually destroying rare books.
In the first stage, employees dismantle the books; in the second stage, they prepare them for scanning; and finally, they perform the scanning process itself, which includes OCR, meaning the conversion of physically written text into digital text.
The reason for destroying the books? The artificial intelligence arms race. It turns out that Amazon uses the scanned content to train its AI models, because books, unlike the "AI Slop" that floods the network, are content written by humans and have undergone careful editing and proofreading, making them text of exceptionally high quality for training language models.
Thus, it turns out that the technology giant founded by Jeff Bezos, which ironically started three decades ago as a website for selling books, is now trying to close the gap against huge players in the AI field like Anthropic and OpenAI by destroying books.
Amazon did not really respond directly to the claims arising from the report, and provided a series of American media outlets with the exact same response:
"Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services we offer our customers."
