Amazon caught destroying rare books to escape AI model collapse
amazon is physically destroying rare books to scan data for model training. this confirms that internet data is depleted and companies are destroying physical culture to feed models.
investigators tracked a rare book sold to amazon, finding it was sent to a facility where its spine was cut and pages scanned for ai training. amazon confirmed it purchases books through commercial channels to improve products. rare books offer high-value training data free from ai-generated content, helping prevent model collapse where performance degrades from recursive training on synthetic outputs. this practice demonstrates the extreme lengths data-hungry labs will go to, including destroying physical culture, to secure unique training corpora.