Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs.
For years, Microsoft and OpenAI have battled accusations from news organizations that the AI companies conspired to infringe copyright laws by gathering vast amounts of news content to train their artificial intelligence systems. Recently, the previously confidential details of this dispute have begun to surface. On Thursday, documents were unsealed from a legal motion for summary judgment filed by news plaintiffs, including The New York Times.
These previously confidential internal documents reveal the extent to which Microsoft and OpenAI viewed the threat to news organizations before launching new AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot. Most significantly, Microsoft's Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht's warnings about the potential impact of scraping news for AI training emerged as particularly striking.
Hecht described the act of scraping news as "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions," and even went so far as to call it "the largest theft of labor in human history," according to news organizations. In a separate document, Hecht directly challenged Microsoft and OpenAI's assertion that using news content to train AI was a valid application of fair use, arguing that the plan to extensively scrape news "mocked the very concept of fair use."
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