GoKawiilis the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.
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Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times’ case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies’ own documentation warned that it was starting a “doom loop” that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the “largest theft of labor in human history,” and that it made a “complete mockery of the idea of fair use.”
Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht’s assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek told The Verge that “These comments reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views.”
In a separate court filing, Jordan Usdan, GM for Data Strategy and Ops at Microsoft AI, characterized Hecht’s role as adversarial. He said that Hecht “holds divergent, academic, and forward-looking views about how data ecosystems for AI should operate and is employed at Microsoft to bring asymmetrical, futuristic, and academic points of view … nor is he someone who speaks for Microsoft specifically as to his theoretical views on AI’s potential effect on content creators.”
But whether or not Microsoft wants to own these comments, it’s clear that this came true. Google Zero is real! AI is eating the web!
There are plenty more wild statements in NYT’s filing from a variety of figures, including Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, and other OpenAI employees. Here are some highlights from the 92 page document.
“An astonishing theft”
The introduction quotes Hecht and OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT (presumably Nick Turley) in a way that seems to show the companies knew they posed an “existential threat” to publishers like the New York Times. Hecht calls ChatGPT and Copilot’s harvesting of data the “largest theft of labor in human history” and says that Microsoft’s defense makes a “complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”
It’s a “doom loop”
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