Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Unsealed lawsuit filings reveal Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'largest theft of labor in human history.'
New unredacted filings in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show a Microsoft executive privately described the companies' AI training practices as 'the largest theft of labor in human history.' OpenAI's internal communications acknowledged its models posed an 'existential threat' to publishers. Microsoft's data shows its Copilot caused click-through rates for NYT to drop up to 93%. OpenAI allegedly used a 'hack to get around nytimes paywall.' OpenAI's mid-training datasets contained over 91,000 copies of works from NYT, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting.
What commenters are saying
Commenters largely agree the scraping constitutes massive theft, with one calling it 'the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up.' A split emerges on whether regulation would help: some argue it would only lock out small players, while others suggest laws could force open-source releases. Several commenters note the hypocrisy of companies that once railed against piracy now engaging in it at scale. One commenter distinguishes between scraping the open internet and bypassing paywalls, calling the latter 'automation of crime at scale.'