Microsoft Employees Warned About AI Scraping's 'Unprecedented Theft' of Human Labor

A lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft has revealed internal memos and emails that discuss the companies' use of copyrighted materials to train their large language models. The documents, unsealed on Thursday, show that Microsoft employees were concerned about the potential impact of AI scraping on human labor.

In a 2023 memo, Brent Hecht, a director of applied science at Microsoft, warned that the public would soon see large models 'hoovering up' their work as 'theft of unprecedented proportions.' The same author described AI models as 'a product that destroys its supply chain.'

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that anything paywalled should be licensed by whoever wants to use it, and said he would have made OpenAI retrain its models if he had known they were using copyrighted content.

OpenAI and Microsoft argue that their use of copyrighted materials was fair use, as the AI models transform articles into new work rather than substituting for the originals. However, some employees expressed concerns about the potential consequences of AI scraping on human labor.