Microsoft Director Warned The Public Would See AI Training As ‘Astonishing Theft,’ Unsealed Filing Shows

OpenAI and Microsoft employees privately acknowledged their artificial intelligence products compete with the news outlets whose articles trained them, an unsealed court filing alleges.

OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT Nick Turley wrote that the company’s products “are largely substitutive, period” and will become even more so as the technology improves, according to a brief The New York Times and other news publishers made public Thursday in their Manhattan copyright case against the tech companies. Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht warned that “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” the brief stated in part.

The Department of Justice previously told a federal judge that AI training is fair use because models learn patterns from text rather than duplicate it, an argument the companies’ internal messages seemingly undercut.

Turley also wrote that publishers face an “existential threat” from those products, according to the brief.

The brief also cites a document describing the practice as potentially the “largest theft of labor in human history,” and says Hecht recognized that a fair use win for the companies would arguably “make a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.'” 

Microsoft and OpenAI each did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

A tech policy expert said the statements cut against the companies’ legal defense.

“These companies admit in their own internal communications to things that completely contradict their legal defense and their theory of fair use,” Evan Swarztrauber, principal at CorePoint Strategies and a former adviser to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairs Ajit Pai and Brendan Carr, told the DCNF. “[O]ne of the key tests for fair use is whether original product that was copied is going to be competed against and substituted for, and they literally say … [i]t’s substitution.'”

Microsoft’s own documents mentioned similar concerns about AI’s effect on publishers.