Microsoft Executive Labels AI Scraping the 'Largest Theft of Labor in Human History'

Newly unsealed court documents from a lawsuit involving The New York Times and other news organizations reveal internal concerns at Microsoft regarding AI training practices. Brent Hecht, a Microsoft Director of Applied Science, reportedly characterized the scraping of news content for AI training as an 'astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and the 'largest theft of labor in human history.' These documents contradict the public stance held by Microsoft and OpenAI, which maintains that using copyrighted news content for training models constitutes fair use. Hecht specifically suggested that the scale of data scraping undermines the legal defense of fair use. The disclosure comes as part of a motion for summary judgment, shedding light on the internal deliberations of tech giants as they face mounting legal pressure from media outlets over copyright infringement and the unauthorized use of intellectual property in the development of tools like ChatGPT and Copilot.