Microsoft exec called AI scraping a theft of labor
Unsealed filings in the New York Times case show a Microsoft executive called AI scraping the largest theft of labor in history in 2023.
What came out
On September 17, newly unredacted filings surfaced in the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, a case the New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting have joined.
The internal memo
According to the filings, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht wrote in a January 2023 internal memo that AI scraping was an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions and the largest theft of labor in human history. In public, both companies defend the practice as fair use.
The allegations
The plaintiffs say content was gathered by quietly bypassing paywalls and scraping the Bing index, and that copyright notices were deliberately stripped from training data. A dataset called Project Mango allegedly holds copies of at least 160,903 unique works from the publishers. These are the plaintiffs' claims; the court has not ruled.