Court Documents Reveal Microsoft and OpenAI Executives' Concerns Over AI Training on News Content

Newly unsealed court documents in The New York Times' 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show that executives at both companies raised alarms about AI training that scraped millions of news articles, according to reporting by Engadget.

Microsoft's director of Applied Science, Dr. Brent Hecht, described OpenAI's web scraping as the "largest theft of labor in human history" and warned of a potential "doom loop." OpenAI executive Nick Turley called it an "existential threat to publishers." The documents also indicate that training content was obtained by bypassing paywalls and that copyright notices were erased from training data.

When an employee told OpenAI president Greg Brockman about a new paywall hack, he responded "ah nice," per the documents. A 2023 internal Microsoft document stated that millions would soon view large models "hoovering up" all their work as "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions." Dr. Hecht added that large AI models "are a product that destroys its supply chain."

Microsoft disavowed its employees' statements. Spokesperson Alex Haurek said the company's position is set out in court filings, which argue these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and that Copilot is not a substitute for publishers' journalism. The lawsuit is considered key to determining whether AI companies can access such data under "fair use" doctrines.

Source: Engadget