Microsoft Exec Slams AI Scraping as 'Largest Theft of Labor in Human History'

A recently unredacted court filing has revealed a Microsoft executive's scathing assessment of AI scraping, which he called 'the largest theft of labor in human history.'

Brent Hecht, Director of Applied Science at Microsoft, made this comment in a January 2023 memo. He described the practice as an 'astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and warned that generative AI poses a 'real risk' to the employment of those who provided its training data.

The comments come from a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI, which accused the companies of copying and using its copyrighted work without permission. According to internal research, Copilot reduced click-throughs to The New York Times by as much as 93% compared with Bing.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, admitted that had he known about the data scraping behind paywalls, he would have exercised his company's rights to require OpenAI to retrain its models excluding this protected data. However, the Trump administration has sided with AI makers like OpenAI, arguing that constraining LLM development would hinder American prosperity and economic mobility.