Amazon, once an online bookseller, is destroying rare books to train AI models

According to investigations by 404 Media, Amazon has been purchasing rare, out-of-print books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them to acquire training data for large language models. These older texts are particularly valuable because they provide pre-2022 human-written content, which helps technology companies avoid "model collapse" caused by ingesting AI-generated text. While Amazon stated it purchases these books through commercial channels to improve customer products and services, the practice highlights the extreme lengths tech companies are going to secure scarce, high-quality data for artificial intelligence training.

(Source：TechCrunch)