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TechCrunch: Microsoft and OpenAI Workers Worry About 'Largest Theft of Labor
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In Short: Documents in a copyright lawsuit reveal that AI companies may be harming the market for original work.
Documents unsealed in a copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI reveal admissions that AI scraping could be considered theft and pose a significant threat to publications.
The documents also show that OpenAI’s mid-training datasets contain more than 91,692 copies of works, Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
A Microsoft executive described the companies’ AI training practices as “theft,” and OpenAI’s leadership acknowledged that its AI models could pose an “existential threat” to publishers and journalists.
The Trump administration recently filed a brief in support of OpenAI’s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its large language models, despite new admissions that contradict OpenAI’s fair use defense.
The scale of the copying is alarming, with a Microsoft document stating there is a “real risk” that generative AI could significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained.
What's still developing
- For example, Microsoft’s own data shows its Copilot “answer engine” caused click-through rates for The New York Times’ domain to drop as much as 93% compared to traditional Bing search.
- “OpenAI delivered the entire GPT-3 training dataset to Microsoft, which Microsoft used to evaluate how to implement OpenAI’s models within its own commercial products,” the filing reads.
- Disrupt 2026: OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, and more take over 6 industry stages.
- 25% off tickets now Back by popular demand: Save up to $300 on Disrupt New unredacted information in the copyright lawsuit The New York Times brought against OpenAI and Microsoft three years ago reveals an admission that AI scraping was tantamount to theft, and that AI products pose a major threat to publications.
- Several of the new admissions, however, run counter to OpenAI’s fair use defense, particularly the rule’s requirement that use doesn’t substitute or harm the market for the original work.
Sources
- TechCrunchlink