Technology
Unsealed court filing reveals Microsoft executive privately criticized AI web scraping
Internal records disclosed in a copyright dispute show an applied science director questioned training practices.
The short version
- Unsealed filings from a copyright lawsuit led by The New York Times reveal that Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht described AI scraping of news content as the largest theft of labor in human history.[TechCrunch · Engadget · Ars Technica]
- Court records indicate that OpenAI's mid-training datasets included over 91,000 copies of works from publisher plaintiffs, while a Common Crawl-derived dataset held more than 2 million documents from nytimes.com alone.[TechCrunch]
- Internal Microsoft presentations warned that traffic declines from AI answers could create a damaging loop affecting web publishers and AI models.[TechCrunch]
- Microsoft has disavowed employee remarks cited in the filings as litigation over training data continues.[Engadget]
Key facts
- Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht characterized AI scraping of news content as the largest theft of labor in human history in a January 2023 memo.[TechCrunch]
- The remarks came to light in unsealed filings from a copyright lawsuit filed against Microsoft and OpenAI by news publishers.[TechCrunch · Engadget · Ars Technica]
- OpenAI's mid-training datasets contained over 91,692 copies of works from the New York Times, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting.[TechCrunch]
- A dataset derived from Common Crawl included more than 2 million documents from nytimes.com alone.[TechCrunch]
- A January 2024 Microsoft presentation authored by Hecht described the impact of AI on web traffic as a doom loop.[TechCrunch]
- Microsoft disavowed the statements made by its personnel in the unsealed records.[Engadget]
What remains uncertain
- The legal impact of internal employee statements on the court's final ruling remains undetermined.[TechCrunch · Engadget]
Sources
Outlet counts describe coverage, not independent confirmation. Reports may share a wire service or original source.
- Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”Ars Technica
- Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings revealTechCrunch
- Microsoft executive called OpenAI's web scraping the 'largest theft of labor in human history'Engadget