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 threat to publications.
The unredacted filing is the latest escalation in the three-year-old lawsuit, in which The New York Times at first alleged the firms violated copyright law by training generative AI models on its content.
An internal Microsoft presentation written by Microsoft’s director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, in January 2024 describes the decline as a “doom loop” that would “hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.”
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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 threat to publications.
Per the lawsuit, a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies’ AI training practices as “theft,” and OpenAI’s own leadership said its AI models posed an “existential threat” to the publishers and journalists whose work trained them.
The unsealed material also details how the companies allegedly got and used that content by bypassing paywalls undetected, building training datasets via mass scraping, and deliberately stripping copyright notices from training data.
The unredacted filing is the latest escalation in the three-year-old lawsuit, in which The New York Times at first alleged the firms violated copyright law by training generative AI models on its content.
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. An internal Microsoft presentation written by Microsoft’s director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, in January 2024 describes the decline as a “doom loop” that would “hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.”
Other admissions cut against different pillars of the fair-use test: OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, wrote in internal communication that publishers face an “existential threat” from products like the chatbot, which are “largely substitutive” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”
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