Microsoft and OpenAI Workers Worry About ‘Largest Theft of Labor’ in History

Live updates

1. 2h ago

   Microsoft and OpenAI Staff Called AI Scraping Theft

   Newly unsealed court documents reveal that employees and executives at Microsoft and OpenAI privately worried that training large language models on millions of news articles constituted the largest theft of labor in human history. Internal communications show staff warned that scraping copyrighted material without permission risked damaging the publishing industry and trapping systems in a doom loop, even as both companies publicly defended the practice as fair use.

   Why it matters

   The disclosures shed light on the internal friction within major artificial intelligence companies regarding copyright and data acquisition. While publicly maintaining that using web content to build chatbots falls under fair use, private discussions highlighted acute awareness of the existential threat posed to publishers and web content creators.

   What is confirmed

   • Newly unsealed court records show that Microsoft and OpenAI workers privately expressed concern that using millions of news articles to develop AI bots could be the largest theft of labor in human history.
   • Brent Hecht, Microsoft's director of applied science, predicted that people worldwide would view large language models as theft on an unprecedented scale.
   • Internal memos warned of a doom loop that threatened the quality of the very models being built.

   What to watch next

   • Further unsealing of court documents in ongoing legal battles involving Microsoft and OpenAI
   • Judicial rulings regarding whether AI training data scraping qualifies as fair use
   Sources used for this update (11)

   1. Financial Times — OpenAI staff knew the ‘existential threat’ AI posed to publishers, New York Times claims
   2. arstechnica.com — Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
   3. washingtonpost.com — Microsoft exec called AI the ‘largest theft of labor’ in history, court records show
   4. The New York Times — Inside Microsoft and OpenAI, Worry About Damaging the Publishing Industry
   5. 404media.co — ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft
   6. www.yahoo.com — Microsoft’s Own Executive Called AI Training “the Largest Theft of Labor in Human History”
   7. nypost.com — Microsoft, OpenAI workers privately worried their work is ‘largest theft of labor in human history’
   8. decrypt.co — Microsoft Staff Asked If AI Scraping Was 'Largest Theft of Labor in Human History'
   9. www.techspot.com — Microsoft exec says AI training might be the "largest labor theft in human history"
   10. www.theverge.com — OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web
   11. www.thurrott.com — Ask Paul: September 18 ⭐
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