Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'largest theft of labor' — SkimNews
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- Microsoft Applied Science director Brent Hecht wrote in a January 2023 internal memo that AI scraping was 'the largest theft of labor in human history' and, in a separate January 2024 presentation, called click-through decline a 'doom loop' that would 'hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time'
- OpenAI head of ChatGPT Nick Turley wrote internally that publishers face an 'existential threat' from products that are 'largely substitutive' and 'will get more and more substitutive as they get better'
- Microsoft's own data showed its Copilot caused click-through rates to the New York Times domain to drop as much as 93% compared to traditional Bing search, per the unsealed filing
- Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content 'should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it' and said he would have invoked Microsoft's contract to force OpenAI to retrain its models had he known it scraped paywalled material
- OpenAI researcher Nick Ryder told President Greg Brockman about a 'hack to get around nytimes paywall,' to which Brockman replied 'ah nice,' according to the filings
- OpenAI's mid-training datasets contain more than 91,692 copies of works from The New York Times, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting, with a Common Crawl-derived set holding more than 2 million nytimes.com documents
- The Trump administration filed a brief earlier this month defending OpenAI's unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its models, undercutting the plaintiffs' position while the unsealed filings undermine the defendants' fair use argument
Why it matters: The unsealed filings hand The Times internal admissions that undercut OpenAI and Microsoft's fair use defense: executives privately called the practice 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while company data showed Copilot cut NYT click-throughs by up to 93%. With Microsoft's own documents describing an 'existential threat' to publishers and a paywall-circumvention scheme approved with an 'ah nice,' the case now turns on whether judges treat those admissions as outweighing the Trump administration's brief backing unlicensed training.
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