Submission + - We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility (404media.co)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazonâ(TM)s book buying operation, which hasnâ(TM)t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.

Submission + - Culture will become an optimisation problem to our new AI curators

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: We tend to think of AI changing culture by making it easier to produce things: software, music, books, films, games, images. But the more consequential change may happen on the other side of the transaction. AI will increasingly decide what we see, hear, read and experience.

We already live in the early version of this world. Netflix doesn't simply give us a catalogue; its recommendation system predicts what we are likely to enjoy using our viewing history, behavior, similar users and even contextual signals such as time of day. Recent research using Netflix data has gone further, finding measurable “recommendation-induced engagement” — evidence that recommendations themselves influence what people consume. Now combine that with generative AI.

The emerging “TEMU-fication” of digital goods points towards a world in which the marginal cost of producing another song, film, book, game or piece of software approaches zero. The TEMU-fication of Software, Digital Goods & Services.

When culture becomes effectively infinite, selection becomes more valuable than production. And that is where our new AI curators enter.

Imagine Netflix no longer having to choose which 20,000 films to commission. Instead, it has access to an effectively limitless generative studio. You don't necessarily select a film from a catalogue. You describe a mood, and the system creates or assembles an experience designed specifically for you.

You stopped paying attention after 37 minutes? Next time it adjusts. Millions of people doing this simultaneously would mean something extraordinary: culture stops being a fixed collection of things and becomes a continuously optimized service.

The objective function might be “engagement.” Or retention or satisfaction or revenue. Whatever the metric, the system will get very good at maximizing it. And this is where the problem becomes much bigger than AI-generated “slop.” The machine doesn't merely learn what we like. It learns how to make us like things.

AI recommends culture -> humans consume it -> AI learns from the consumption -> AI generates better-performing culture -> humans adapt to it -> AI learns again.

Eventually, who is curating whom? Humanity will not be assimilated by force. It will be optimized by recommendation. This is the genuinely Borg-like possibility.

Submission + - AI Companies Destroying Books At Scale (futurism.com)

Submitted by nightflameauto
nightflameauto writes: AI companies are purchasing books from pre-AI times. The claim is that those books are free from the defects of AI generated text, and therefore more valuable for ingestion into AI datasets. In order to accomplish this, they are tearing the books down to be scanned, then destroying them as the scans are completed. This includes rare and out-of-print books that may be some of the few copies of any given published work left in existence.

Submission + - AI Co's bulk-buying rare books, remove spine, high speed scan and shredding them (x.com) 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

This is irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.

"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026.

Submission + - Inside the dystopian world of Germany's free speech crackdown (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dr Rainer Zitelmann doesn't even remember posting the meme on social media that nearly landed him in prison.

"When I opened the letter from police, I thought it was a misunderstanding," Dr Zitelmann, a German historian and author of about 30 books, told The Telegraph.

Berlin police told Dr Zitelmann he had been accused of violating a post-Second World War law that bans the display of Nazi symbols, slogans and imagery – and could now face three years in prison if found guilty.

The 69-year-old found out the offending social media post was a meme about Adolf Hitler. But it was one in which he criticised the Nazi dictator and compared his invasion of Czechoslovakia to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

"It was crystal clear the post was negative ... I was saying that Putin is so bad he is like Hitler," he explains from his study in Berlin, surrounded by hundreds of books about the rise of fascism, including his own doctoral thesis. "The comparison only works if you think Hitler was evil."

He lets out an ironic chuckle at the absurdity of it all: after decades of excoriating the Nazis in his books, a mere click of a mouse led to accusations of him being one.

Dr Zitelmann is one of thousands of Germans who have been threatened with fines or prison sentences for social media posts that fall foul of the country's political speech laws, which are unusually stringent for an EU member state.

Some of the cases are sinister and farcical in equal measure.

One German had his home raided for calling a minister a "Schwachkopf [dummy]" while another was fined €2,000 for calling Friedrich Merz a "lying Fritz" under a law that, critics claim, makes it effectively illegal to make fun of politicians.

The number of investigations under Section 86a, the Nazi symbols ban that Dr Zitelmann was investigated for, has more than doubled over the past decade according to official police statistics. Investigations into the "political insult" law also reached record levels in 2025.

The surge in cases is so vast that the UN has launched an investigation into free speech violations in Germany, a step typically reserved for dictatorships and banana republics.

Submission + - AI Companies Buying Antique Books To Train Models, Then Destroying Them (futurism.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.

As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds.

“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

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