Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

New unredacted documents from the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal a shocking admission: AI scraping can be considered theft on a massive scale, threatening the very existence of publications. According to the lawsuit, top Microsoft executives privately labeled the company's AI training practices as "theft," and OpenAI's leadership called its AI models an "existential threat" to journalists and publishers whose work was used to train them.

The documents detail how the companies obtained and used this content by bypassing paywalls, building training datasets through mass scraping, and removing copyright notices. A top Microsoft document compares the situation to a "doom loop" that would harm both the performance of their models and the entire web. More than 91,692 copies of works published by NYT, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting were found in OpenAI's mid-training datasets alone.

An internal memo by Microsoft's director of Applied Science called it "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and "the largest theft of labor in human history." The admissions contradict OpenAI's fair use defense, particularly the requirement that use doesn't substitute or harm the market for the original work. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed for grounding or training, and he would have required OpenAI to retrain models if he knew about the scraping.

OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, wrote that publishers face an "existential threat" from AI products. Microsoft documents state that there is a "real risk" that generative AI could significantly disrupt the employment of the people who generated the data on which the models were trained.