Unsealed Filing: Microsoft Exec Called AI Scraping 'Largest Theft of Labor in Human History'
Recently unredacted court documents from The New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft disclose that the scraping of AI training data constitutes theft and poses a significant risk to the viability of publishers. Brent Hecht from Microsoft characterized this issue in a January 2023 memo as "an astonishing theft." Evidence indicated that Microsoft's Copilot led to a decrease in click-through rates to nytimes.com by as much as 93%. CEO Satya Nadella stated that content behind paywalls ought to be licensed, while OpenAI's Nick Turley cautioned about an "existential threat" to publishers. The claims include bypassing paywalls and the inclusion of over 91,692 copies of NYT materials in training datasets. The Trump administration recently backed OpenAI's unlicensed training as fair use. Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft provided comments.
Key facts
- Unredacted filings in The New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft lawsuit reveal internal admissions about AI training data scraping.
- Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history' in a January 2023 memo.
- Microsoft data shows Copilot reduced click-through rates to nytimes.com by up to 93% compared to Bing search.
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed and that he would have required OpenAI to retrain models if aware of paywall scraping.
- OpenAI Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley described an 'existential threat' to publishers from substitutive chatbot products.
- OpenAI's mid-training datasets contained over 91,692 copies of works from The New York Times, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting.
- A Common Crawl-derived dataset included more than 2 million documents from nytimes.com.
- The filing alleges deliberate paywall circumvention and stripping of copyright notices from training data.
Entities
Artists
- Brent Hecht
- Satya Nadella
- Nick Turley
- Greg Brockman
- Nick Ryder
- Donald Trump
Institutions
- Microsoft
- OpenAI
- The New York Times
- Daily News
- Center for Investigative Reporting
- Common Crawl
- Trump administration
- Bing
- Copilot
- ChatGPT
- News Orgs
Locations
- United States