Amazon Warehouse Employee Details Destructive Book Scanning for AI Training

An anonymous Amazon employee has provided a firsthand account of the company's VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada, where books are destructively scanned to train AI models. The employee, granted anonymity for unauthorized speaking, described receiving shipments of books, cutting off their spines, and scanning pages before discarding the loose sheets into large containers. The operation, which shares a facility with Amazon's print-on-demand business LAS8, was previously exposed by 404 Media through a tracking device placed in a shipment of rare books. The employee noted the books include new, used, and library-discarded volumes, with some from the University of London and government documents presented to Parliament. The process involves at least 20 to 25 scanners that rapidly flip pages, and duplicates or unwanted books are thrown into shuttles, possibly for disposal. The employee expressed concern over the destruction of potentially rare books and the reduction of available copies, questioning the practice despite initial claims that it was for Kindle. The interview sheds light on the scale and methods of Amazon's AI data collection, raising ethical questions about the use of copyrighted material and the loss of physical books.