Microsoft Executive Calls AI Scraping 'Largest Theft of Labor in History'

A top Microsoft executive has called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history', according to internal documents unsealed in a lawsuit against the company and OpenAI. Brent Hecht, director of Applied Science at Microsoft, wrote that the automated collection of content from the web to train artificial intelligence models is an 'astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions'. The documents also reveal that Copilot's use of AI has led to a 93% drop in click-through rates for news sites like the New York Times.

The memo was written in January 2023, and Hecht described the practice as a 'doom loop' where future models end up with less original content to learn from. The documents also contain figures showing that OpenAI's training datasets contained over 91,692 copies of New York Times articles.

Maryland-based lawyer Alex Haurek distanced Microsoft from Hecht's words, calling them 'an individual employee's perspective' rather than the company's official position. However, this defense has been used before by AI companies and may not hold up in court.