Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
Ars Technica Ashley Belanger ● Covered by 3 sources
Microsoft’s own AI scientist called news scraping a giant theft. That’s awkward, because the company is fighting news outlets over exactly that.
Based on reporting by Ars Technica, Ashley Belanger — read the original for the full story.
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Microsoft and OpenAI have spent years trying to keep some of their internal thinking out of public view while they fight news organizations over copyright. Those publishers say the two companies teamed up to take news content and use it to train AI without permission. Now, some of the documents they tried to keep sealed are slipping into the record.
A motion for summary judgment unsealed Thursday in the case brought by news plaintiffs led by The New York Times surfaced internal material that publishers say shows how Microsoft and OpenAI thought about the risk to news before launching products like ChatGPT and Copilot. The timing matters. These are not stray comments made after the fact, but apparently warnings written before the systems were rolled out.
The sharpest line came from Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, who repeatedly described scraping news for AI training as “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.” Publishers say he even called it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history.” That is an unusually blunt description to find inside a company that has been defending the practice in court.
Hecht also appears to have undercut the company’s own fair use argument. In another document, he said the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’” That phrasing lands like a hammer, because Microsoft and OpenAI have argued that training AI on news content is legally protected. The new filings suggest at least one senior Microsoft scientist saw the matter very differently.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of the AI business that keeps getting filed under “later,” right up until the internal emails leak. Closed models love secrecy when it protects the revenue line; open culture suddenly disappears when the lawyers show up. Europe will keep asking the same annoying question: if the training really needs that much borrowed work, who exactly gets paid?
Read more about this at: Ars Technica