This week: Meta AI arrives on the Mac desktop with business analytics built in, and 404 Media tracks a rare book straight to an Amazon AI training facility where books are scanned and destroyed. Two stories about who AI is being built for, and who is paying for it.
(00:38) Meta AI launches a dedicated desktop app for Mac Meta's standalone Mac app targets business owners and creators who run on Facebook and Instagram. Meta AI can now tap into its own analytics and advertising tools, and professional accounts can connect Google Workspace to pull in documents and spreadsheets. Meta says users can ask questions about their business and get answers drawn from account engagement and ad performance data, plus publicly available insights on how comparable brands are building their presence.
(01:45) Daniel's take: analytics-aware AI is the real feature Daniel draws the parallel to YouTube's Ask Studio, where you can ask an AI to review your last ten videos and tell you what worked. Being able to ask why a suggestion will work is where the value shows up. His one complaint: no Windows version, at least not yet.
(02:51) Why do AI tools keep launching on Apple first? Ashley points to how the platforms are built from the ground up and the different exploit and remediation timelines. Daniel offers a complementary theory: fewer Apple users means fewer bad actors targeting them. Their conclusion is that it is probably multiple compounding reasons.
(04:08) 404 Media tracks rare books to an Amazon AI training facility Background: booksellers had reported a historic spike in bulk purchases, made anonymously, in seemingly random selections, by buyers who were not price sensitive at all. Printed books are prized training data because the text was never scraped from the web, it is cleanly organized, and anything printed before 2022 is guaranteed free of AI-generated text. Models trained on AI-generated text get worse.
(05:24) Inside the Las Vegas warehouse 404 Media planted a tracking device in a rare book and followed it through multiple stops to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas. Employees describe receiving enormous shipments, cutting the bindings off to scan faster, and destroying the books. Barcodes and serial numbers get scanned, consistent with a methodical effort to work through the world's ISBN list. Many of the books are rare, out of print, or in foreign languages, meaning few people would notice their hard copies disappearing.
(06:37) Ashley's take: history does not look kindly on this Ashley recommends the 404 Media podcast episode on the investigation (linked below). Her position: digitizing is good, destroying is not, and none of this addresses the fact that creators were never paid for the data sets behind today's models.
(07:28) Nobody is paying the authors Daniel agrees that digitization has real preservation value and notes that once a book is sold, the seller loses control of it. The unresolved problem is that the original writer gets nothing while their work trains an LLM.
(08:14) Until regulation forces a change, this continues Ashley's closing point on where this goes next.
Ashley Coffey (00:02)
Hi and welcome back to AI News that you should know about for August twenty-fifth. I'm your host, Ashley Coffey
Daniel Hill (00:08)
And I'm Daniel Hill. There's plenty of AI news happening in the world. We give you a quick digest of the most important things you need to know about. This week on the show, we'll be talking about Meta's new dedicated desktop app for Mac with Meta AI built in. We'll also talk about the news outlet 404, who tracked the shipment of rare books that ended up at an Amazon AI training facility. We'll be covering all of that.
Daniel Hill (00:32)
on our show today, but first here's a quick word from our sponsors.
Ashley Coffey (00:38)
Welcome back. All right, Meta AI now has a dedicated desktop app for Mac.
Ashley Coffey (00:43)
Meta is rolling out a standalone desktop app, and the new Mac app is a part of the company's latest push to provide AI tools for business owners and creators who rely on Facebook and Instagram. Because if anyone who's listening has ever used Meta Business Suite, you will understand why you always want to put ice picks in your eyes. they're also giving Meta AI the ability to tap into more business-friendly features, including its own analytics and advertising tools.
Ashley Coffey (01:08)
And people with professional Facebook and Instagram accounts can now connect Meta AI to Google Workspace and pull in the documents, spreadsheets, and other data relevant to their work. And all of this, according to Meta, will help businesses better manage ad campaigns and get advice tailored to their companies. Quote, you can ask Meta AI questions about your business and get answers drawn from the real context only Meta has, like your own account engagement and ad performance, end quote.
Ashley Coffey (01:31)
Meta explains in a blog post beyond your own accounts, you can get publicly available insights about comparable brands and how they are building their presence on man on Meta. This is an interesting move in a new direction. What are your thoughts, Daniel?
Daniel Hill (01:45)
Two things. First, I was very surprised that there's a Mac version of this, but I couldn't tell whether or not there's a Windows version of this. It seems like there is more of a focus on Apple users. Not 100% sure why. I can guess that maybe Apple users are more likely to spend on the tool, and this is a push toward the premium offering. And second, I really like the ability to discuss with an AI based on your analytics for posts you've made on Facebook and Instagram.
Daniel Hill (02:11)
YouTube has something similar in the Ask Studio tool inside YouTube. And it's great to be able to say, look at my analytics over the past 10 videos I've posted. Tell me what worked the best and where you think I can have the most improvement. And let the AI work and come back to you with some suggestions and then ask why do you think those suggestions will work? So for Meta to have a similar tool is not surprising. It's something I've been hoping for for a while. wish that it was available for Windows users, but
Daniel Hill (02:38)
I really like this level of data that you can get from something that is linked to your account and can understand your analytics based on the work you've been doing so far and then help you to make informed decisions about what you should do next.
Ashley Coffey (02:51)
Yes, and I wanna hone in on one piece that you mentioned because it's come up in our previous episodes before, how applications and things like this are typically rolled out to iOS or iPhone Apple users first versus Windows. And we can have a whole conversation on this, but it's essentially the foundation in which the the the software is built. There's more ability for risk and penetration and liability and bad actors to exploit some of these new tools on a window.
Ashley Coffey (03:20)
Windows machine versus a Mac machine just due to inherently how they are built from the ground up. So I I don't have data to back that up right now, but I know for a fact that is one of the reasons that things are easier to come out on Apple versus Windows, because they just take longer times to fix those exploits.
Daniel Hill (03:37)
I've actually understood exactly what you said, but for a slightly different reason, in that there are less bad actors because there are just less Apple users in general, as opposed to Microsoft users. So I agree with the sentiment and I agree with the point you've made. Just I've understood it as a slightly different reason. But yes, I definitely agree with that.
Ashley Coffey (03:55)
multiple compounding reasons too.
Daniel Hill (03:56)
Yes.
Daniel Hill (03:57)
All right, we are going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll be talking about four four tracking a shipment of rare books that ended up at an Amazon AI training facility.
Daniel Hill (04:08)
Welcome back. Continuing with our stories, the news outlet 404 tracked a shipment of rare books that ended at an Amazon AI training facility. By way of background, in July, 404 published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales over the past year. The booksellers suspected this spike was due to AI companies acquiring any books that they could to use for AI training data.
Daniel Hill (04:33)
Printed books are very valuable as training data for AI because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which means that AI companies haven't scraped it. This data is conveniently organized, and this is a really key point. If the book was printed before 2022, it is guaranteed to be free of AI generated text. Because if AI models are trained on AI generated text, it just gets worse.
Daniel Hill (04:59)
The booksellers suspected that AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases of books because of the high numbers and the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers didn't seem price sensitive at all. But the booksellers weren't sure who was actually buying the books because it was done anonymously. Here is the news: 404 is reporting that Amazon is the one buying these massive quantities of books.
Daniel Hill (05:24)
They're scanning them for AI training data and then destroying them. The investigation revealed Amazon's operation, where in order to uncover this, they placed a tracking device in a rare book that they thought would be acquired by an AI company for training data. And then they followed it along the country multiple stops to its destination, which was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas. Amazon employees who work at this location say they receive massive shipments of printed books.
Daniel Hill (05:52)
They cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly and destroy the book in the process. The employees are scanning the barcodes, the serial numbers. And so it goes to what I mentioned earlier that AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by going through a list of ISBN numbers. They were not willing to reveal the no the titles of the books that were in the shipment that was tracked, but they make the point in this article that those books are very rare.
Daniel Hill (06:17)
Meaning there are not many copies of them because there maybe not weren't a lot of copies that were printed ever in the first place, or because those books are in foreign languages, it means there are not many people in the world who would care if those books were no longer available in hard copy form. This is a really interesting one. Ashley, what is your take on this?
Ashley Coffey (06:37)
so glad you picked this because I actually listened to the 404 media podcast episode about this. So I'll actually link it in our show notes. It's so good. Yeah,
Daniel Hill (06:42)
I didn't get a chance to listen.
Ashley Coffey (06:45)
highly recommend. It goes into depth about this. It's also like really sad because history just doesn't look kindly on anyone that tries to destroy books. And this is what that is. And that that's the that's a one, that's a problem destroying knowledge and destroying books. But two, not being able to pay the original creator of that modality and that story, you know.
Ashley Coffey (07:03)
I still have a problem with nobody getting paid for the initial data sets that were used to build Chat GPT and Claude and Gemini, but here we are. I feel like we're being milked for every single value that we have as humans. And now they've moved on to books and rare books, and we must protect those at all costs. It's good to digitize things, but it's not good to destroy them and not give ownership or recognition to the creator of that content.
Daniel Hill (07:28)
Feel like you're reading my thoughts on this. I think I'm more on the side of digitizing books, right? Because something can happen to a book. It can get burned in a fire, it could get wet. Many things could happen to it. So I think digitizing a book is good. In this case, someone felt comfortable enough to sell that book, right? They didn't care what really happened to it. Once you sell it, maybe you've made a profit, maybe you have it, but you lose rights to what anyone decides to do with the book. That's their, you know, prerogative. But to your point,
Daniel Hill (07:55)
I agree. The original writer didn't get compensated at all. They worked hard on that book. It's being used to train an LLM. No one's hunting down that original author and saying, hey, thank you for giving us data to feed our AI. Here's $20, $100, whatever. They're just taking advantage of that. And I do think that's really unfair that the original author is not compensated at all.
Ashley Coffey (08:14)
And until regulation prevents this from happening and forces companies to stop, it's gonna continue to happen.
Daniel Hill (08:21)
I agree. I agree. That is it for our AI news you should know about this week. Our show notes have links to all the articles we've discussed. and if you want more of this kind of content from us, you can find us on social media. I'm on Instagram, threads, and YouTube at Daniel Hill Media.
Ashley Coffey (08:34)
And I'm Ashley RCoffey89 on Instagram and Threads. Would love to hear from you and hear what you think about the show. We do this for you and we want to hear about the topics that excite you and what you thought about today's episode. So reach out to us.
Daniel Hill (08:48)
Follow the show, send us any feedback on topics you think we should cover, and we'll see you next time for more AI news you should know about. Thanks for listening.