Unsealed Filings Show Microsoft Director Calls AI News Scraping "Largest Theft of Labor in Human History"
Summary
Unsealed court filings reveal Microsoft director Brent Hecht calls AI news scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history," while records show some publisher click-through rates fall 83–93% and OpenAI allegedly trains on a 1.8 million-article New York Times dataset despite internal concerns.
Key Points
- Unsealed filings in the New York Times-led copyright case reveal Microsoft director Brent Hecht calling AI news scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history" and a "complete mockery" of fair use.
- Microsoft data records click-through-rate declines of 83–93 percent for some news plaintiffs and 51–94 percent for others, reinforcing internal warnings that AI products could create a news-content "doom loop."
- OpenAI allegedly used a New York Times dataset containing 1.8 million articles despite employees recognizing that using commercially restricted data to train a model "would not be appropriate."