Amazon’s Rare Book Destruction for AI Training Raises Ethical Concerns

Amazon is purchasing 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.' Rare books, especially those out of print or hard to find online, offer a valuable new source of training data for large language models (LLMs). These texts are particularly valuable because there’s no risk that anything published before 2022 was written by an LLM. When LLMs train on AI-generated text, they risk 'model collapse,' which can occur when the quality of an LLM’s outputs degrades after ingesting too much AI-generated text.

This practice raises significant ethical concerns about the digitization of cultural heritage. While the need for data to advance AI is clear, the physical destruction of rare books for training purposes creates a tension between technological progress and the preservation of cultural legacy. The implications for future generations' access to these texts could be profound.