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.

Twitch is going to train Amazon’s AI models on streamers’ content unless they deliberately go into their settings and opt out, potentially sweeping up a wealth of streamers who either don’t hear about the announcement or follow steps stop it.

On Wednesday Twitch announced a new setting that lets streamers opt-out of the training. The announcement confirms rumors that have percolated over the last week: It is using streamers to train Amazon’s AI models. 

The new toggle says, "Allow your channel content to train generative AI content models at Amazon." All users are opted in by default. It's located at the bottom of users' security settings page. 

"If you opt-out and decide to not allow your channel content to train Generative AI content models, your streams, VODs, clips, stream chats, and pictures and text on your channel will not be used in future training of a model developed by Amazon whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video," Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, says in its new FAQ section about generative AI.

"Opting-out of training generative AI content models does not opt you out of all AI or machine learning uses at Twitch," Twitch's support page says. "For example, Twitch will still run AutoMod, which helps keep our community safe, but does not retain your data and use it to produce content. Twitch may also still use your data to run AI-supported features, like captions, which automatically generate captions for your Clips but does not retain your stream or your clips to train a model that can generate new content." 

Twitch is positioning this setting as a favor to users. "We've added a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon," the platform posted on X Wednesday. In practice, Twitch makes this choice for users unless they know about the new setting and proactively turn it off. This was the case on my own Twitch account, and users on social media are reporting the same.

Twitch executives have been talking about using streamers' content to train AI for years. In 2024, Twitch Chief Monetization Officer Mike Minton said Twitch has a “role to play” in training Amazon's generative AI models, adding that Twitch content was already being used “in a prototyping, not in any kind of production scale, capacity.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitch's publicly available press email repeatedly bounced.

If a real court case faced as many delays and as much public scrutiny as Coyote Vs. Acme, any rational judge would call for a mistrial and scrap the whole thing. Thankfully, the world of film is a little more forgiving, even when a Looney Tunes comedy has been kicked around as much as this one. Famously completed, then shelved by Warner Bros. for a tax break, then sold to another company in order to finally see the light of day, Coyote Vs. Acme is fittingly about corporate malpractice, filled with whistleblowers, fine print, and weaselly suits. It’s a Looney Dark Waters, both winningly silly and slyly intelligent about what winning really means, all wrapped into a referential live-action Tune world not unlike our own.

Speedrunning through Wile E. Coyote’s endless, ill-fated, Acme-financing attempts to catch the Road Runner—culminating in the poor animal being bombed by the U.S. military like he was some kind of fisherman—Coyote Vs. Acme quickly builds its case of corporate malfeasance. After hitting all the classic schemes, including “flashback” footage from the duo’s Chuck Jones heyday (which is a little unflattering considering the way the animation looks here), Wile finally hits his limit. Retreating back to his cave, he catches a commercial for ambulance-chaser Kevin Avery (Will Forte, maybe the best he’s been since Nebraska), the pathetic personal injury attorney specializing in cartoon clients.

It’s like they were built in a lab for each other, specifically a lab staffed by far more competent employees than those found at Acme. Even Kevin’s mop of hair and scraggly beard match Wile’s mangy desperation. He and his ragtag legal team—dead-eyed partners Jones (Martha Kelly) and Maltese (Tone Bell), and his not-yet-dead-eyed assistant/niece Paige (Lana Condor)—cobble crappy careers together pursuing three-figure sums for their variously pancaked, blown-up, and mummy-bandaged clientele.

They’re all a perfect match, and imperfectly matched against the personification of Big Money: Acme’s hotshot legal counsel Buddy Crane (John Cena), all muscle and tailoring and country club charm, like how The Rock imagines himself in real life. Pitted against each other in and outside the courtroom, Cena and Forte are hilariously straight-faced and dedicated to the bit—a moment between Cena and Tweety features some all-timer pronunciation—while the Tunes thankfully just get to be themselves.

This is good, because the Tunes (mostly voiced by Eric Bauza, who even provides the film with its own Deep Throat) certainly don’t look their best. Coyote Vs. Acme blends live-action, 2D animation, and oddly bulging semi-3D animation. But though it’s nowhere near the Roger Rabbit ideal for this kind of thing—especially in the character models, which catch the light in more uncanny ways the more conspicuously they’re supposed to move in three dimensions—it all eventually arrives at the same level of enjoyable chaos. 

The VFX is much better when put towards the film’s violently silly slapstick, and it’s here that director Dave Green makes animated cause convincingly meet live-action effect. It’s so enjoyably explosive, painful, and over-the-top that it makes this universe’s dismissive view of cartoon injuries—they’ll recover from explosions and blunt force trauma just by coughing off the resulting ash or pressing down the lump that rises from their skulls—all the more impactful. That last wrinkle is just one savvy little observation from the script, its premise adapted from a New Yorker article by Samy Burch (May December, Late Fame). Burch packs in the gags, most of which work, and classic references, starting from the film’s Albuquerque locale (and the copious bolo ties that entails) and its carrot festival, to a news report on a particularly fast Mexican mouse, to the Looney version of Peter Lorre.

Much of this plays to the cartoon-fluent crowd while remaining as accessible to first-timers as Ketchup Entertainment’s Looney Tunes release from last year. But speaking to its effectiveness as a legal comedy, Coyote Vs. Acme also smuggles in insights about struggle and failure in the face of overwhelming odds and forces you can barely comprehend, and about fighting the long fight in a system stacked against you. Defining Wile as a Sisyphean figure has rarely felt so hopeful. That this message comes from a very funny film whose own journey to the screen mimics its try-and-fail-and-try-and-explode protagonist, not to mention his fight against a massive uncaring corporation, is justice.

Director: Dave Green
Writer: Samy Burch
Starring: Will Forte, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Luis Guzmán, Martha Kelly, P.J. Byrne, and John Cena. Eric Bauza, Kenneth Choi, Candi Milo, Jim Cummings
Release Date: August 28, 2026