Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
Unredacted filings in the New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft copyright case reveal internal admissions calling AI training data scraping 'theft'.
Newly unsealed material in the three-year-old NYT copyright lawsuit quotes Microsoft's Brent Hecht calling AI scraping 'an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and 'the largest theft of labor in human history.' Internal data showed Microsoft's Copilot answer engine cut NYT click-through rates by up to 93% versus Bing, and OpenAI datasets reportedly contained 91,692 copies of the plaintiffs' works plus over 2 million nytimes.com documents. Employees allegedly bypassed NYT paywalls and stripped copyright notices from training data, while Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed for training. The admissions cut against OpenAI's fair-use defense, which the Trump administration recently supported in a brief.
- Microsoft internal memo called AI scraping 'an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' in January 2023
- Copilot answer engine dropped NYT click-through rates by up to 93% versus Bing search
- OpenAI datasets held 91,692 copies of plaintiffs' works; Project Mango held 160,903 unique works
- Employees allegedly circumvented NYT paywalls and stripped copyright notices from training data
- Nadella testified paywalled content should be licensed for grounding or training
- Organizations
- The New York Times
- Countries
- United States
- AI models
- GPT-3
From the original article
4 min read at techcrunch.com
Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI's data practices "theft" while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.
By Rebecca Bellan · techcrunch.com
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