Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
A Microsoft director called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' per NYT lawsuit legal briefs.
Legal briefs in the New York Times lawsuit reveal an internal memo from Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, dated January 2023, stating that millions would see AI training on their work as 'astonishing theft' and calling it 'the largest theft of labor in human history.' An OpenAI head reportedly called ChatGPT an 'existential threat' to publishers. Microsoft owns a quarter of OpenAI and 20% of its revenue.
What commenters are saying
Commenters largely dismissed the statement as hypocritical, given Microsoft's own data practices and its stake in OpenAI. Many split into camps: some argued scraping isn't theft but a form of building on prior knowledge akin to cultural learning, while others countered that it strips creators of agency, attribution, and future value. One user described how an LLM plagiarized their original terminology, refusing to cite the source, calling it a corruption of truth.