Microsoft and OpenAI workers privately shared concerns that their use of millions of news articles to develop AI bots could represent the “largest theft of labor in human history,” according to newly unsealed court docs.
One internal Microsoft document from 2023 warned that millions of workers and entrepreneurs in media and publishing would consider LLMs “hoovering up” their work to be “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” according to filings revealed in the New York Times’ case against the two firms.
OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, meanwhile, worried that the company’s products pose an “existential threat” to publishers, according to another internal document.
But publicly, Microsoft and OpenAI have defended their scraping of news stories off the internet, saying they did not violate copyright rules because the articles were turned into completely new content by their AI models.
The New York Times sued the two tech firms in 2023, alleging they had violated copyright laws by using the Gray Lady’s content without pay or permission. The following year, eight other newspapers joined the case, including the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune.
The newspapers are seeking unspecified monetary damages, though the Times argued in its initial lawsuit that Microsoft and OpenAI should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.”
News publishers have been rushing to sign content-licensing agreements with AI firms as traffic to their sites plummets amid the rise of AI search tools – risking their advertising dollars.
Though tech firms have repeatedly defended their use of news and entertainment content in training their AI bots, their employees have been quietly raising concerns behind the scenes.
One filing showed that Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, warned that their AI content strategy “has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.”
He was concerned that news outlets would not be able to survive, saying “LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain.”
A spokesperson for Microsoft told The Post: “These comments reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views.”
“Microsoft’s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright laws and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism,” the spokesperson added.
Microsoft also noticed an 83% to 93% drop in click-through rates – when users actually click into suggested links – for the New York Times and Daily News when comparing its traditional Bing search engine to its new AI version, according to the documents.
At OpenAI, Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, shared similar concerns, writing that AI products “are largely substitutive, period” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better,” according to the legal documents.
In 2020, Jack Clark – who was OpenAI’s policy director at the time, later leaving to co-found rival Anthropic – warned company president Greg Brockman and CEO Sam Altman that their work “is going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society.”
He added that “OpenAI will become the symbol of how Silicon Valley is thoughtlessly stepping into other parts of life and leaving a mess on the carpet,” according to the documents.
The New York Times also accused the companies of developing tools specifically to skirt around its paywall.
In one document, a staffer wrote Brockman about developing “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” and Brockman replied: “ah nice.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified in the case that “anything that is paywalled should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it,” and that if he had been made aware that OpenAI was scraping content, he would have required OpenAI to retrain its models.
“Satya’s testimony and Microsoft’s position in this case are perfectly consistent,” a spokesperson for Microsoft told The Post in a statement.