Microsoft's Copilot Cuts Publisher Click-Through Rates by Up to 93%

A Microsoft scientist's internal document from January 2023 described the AI industry as 'the largest theft of labor in human history.'

The real number, however, is 93%. According to a slide in the same presentation, Microsoft's Copilot answer engine cut click-through rates to nytimes.com by up to 93% compared with traditional Bing search.

This internal data was unsealed as part of The New York Times' copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The lawsuit claims that AI models like ChatGPT are stealing the content from publishers without permission or compensation.

The court-supervised price for a work used in training is $3,000 per book, set by the Anthropic settlement. Applying this price to the Project Mango dataset's 160,903 unique works comes to about $483 million.