Podcast: Amazon is Destroying Rare Books to Train AI
404 Media Joseph Cox
Amazon is buying rare books and sending them to an AI training facility. That’s the big story in 404 Media’s new podcast, with more weird AI abuse cases after it.
Based on reporting by 404 Media, Joseph Cox — read the original for the full story.
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404 Media’s latest podcast leads with Emanuel’s investigation into Amazon buying masses of books and then destroying them to train AI. That’s the headline grabber here: not just that books are being used for model training, but that rare ones are ending up in the process too.
The episode doesn’t stop there. After the break, the hosts move through a pair of stranger cases showing how people are already twisting AI for their own ends. One of those examples involves an expert witness who used ChatGPT to help write a report defending a company in a deadly explosion lawsuit. Another features a hidden prompt injection tucked into a legal filing, designed to steer an AI toward one side.
Subscribers get the extra material, and the topic there is Meta’s new smart glasses patent. The company’s filing reportedly points to facial recognition, people-identifying features, and even highlight reels from a dinner party. That’s one patent making a lot of people nervous already.
The bonus section also includes research on how Meta’s so-called “pervert glasses” are being used to harass women. The show is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, with the paid version bundled through Transistor and an unlisted YouTube link for subscribers.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the pattern that keeps repeating: companies call it innovation, then act shocked when the same tools are used for sloppy legal work, surveillance, or plain harassment. The rare-book angle is especially bleak, because it turns cultural loss into training fuel and pretends that’s just the cost of doing business. It isn’t. It’s the bill arriving in the form of wrecked trust.
Read more about this at: 404 Media