cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/15293059

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50899444

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/51623256

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/65464310

Crossposted from https://lemmy.today/post/58642043

Crossposted from https://sh.itjust.works/post/65342708

Crossposted from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/74144681

The symbol for Amazon's VGT3, the Las Vegas facility where it scans book for AI training data.

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 Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’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.

“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.

The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.

In July, I published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales starting in the past year. They suspected this spike in sales was due to AI companies acquiring any books they can in search of new training data. Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped. The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called “model collapse.”

📖 Do you know work at a facility where you scan books? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].

These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.

In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order. 404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.

Crossposted from https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/46783815

Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/50807832

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/69459039

Archive: [ https://archive.is/zarQO ]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50672944

And after those laws are fixed, we need to completely dismantle those 6 companies, from top to bottom.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/58413259

Full title: Companies are now using your credit history, past-due accounts, browsing data, and social media accounts to figure out the absolute lowest salary you'll accept. Algorithmic wage suppression is being weaponized against workers to destroy wages.

cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/38646896

Crossposted from https://sopuli.xyz/post/50018032

The research team’s conclusion was blunt: “No tested version of ChatGPT can reliably generate appropriate responses to psychotic content.”

...

“Is a mental health AI better than a chatbot?” Torous said. “Is it better than Tetris? I think we have to prove their benefit in a rigorous way.”

Reminder -> check out the Arstechnica comments, they are always interesting and give more usually expert perspective.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/27803982

Crossposted from https://beehaw.org/post/27762406