by Dan Moren
Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica runs through recently unsealed documents in the case brought by news organizations led by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft:
Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”
Over at OpenAI, ChatGPT head Nick Turley wrote in an internal message that publishers would face an “existential threat” from commercial products trained on news content that can be used to substitute news providers. One Microsoft document even described a “doom loop,” news orgs said, “that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.”
Truly damning stuff. Anthropic’s settlement with authors—of which, full disclosure, I am one—allowed the company to sidestep the admittance of wrongdoing, but it remains pretty clear that all the people at these companies knew exactly what they were doing. This is emblematic of the worst of the tech industry, the move-fast-and-break-things ethos that doesn’t stop to consider what you lose when you break things—or, if you prefer your lessons in easily digestible pop culture references, I got two for you.