OpenAI, Microsoft executives' quotes on AI training threaten copyright defense, news outlets argue
Unsealed court records say executives warned the products could divert readers and showed 83% to 93% drops in clicks to news sites, publishers said.
- New court documents unsealed Thursday reveal Microsoft and OpenAI executives privately admitted their scraping practices pose an "existential threat" to news publishers, potentially undermining their legal defense.
- The New York Times and other outlets filed a landmark copyright lawsuit three years ago alleging the companies violated copyright law by training generative AI models on stolen content without compensation.
- Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht internally described the data scraping as "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions," while OpenAI leadership allegedly used hacks to bypass paywalls for training data.
- Attorneys for the news publishers argue these internal admissions prove the companies knowingly committed theft, rejecting claims that their products transform content in a manner consistent with fair use.
- Internal data shows ChatGPT prompts for reliable reporting reach about 1 million per week, largely substituting for paid subscriptions, as industry experts warn this "doom loop" threatens local news economics.
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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, realized that its use of millions of copyrighted newspaper articles to train large language models for artificial…
New case court documents that confront 'The New York Times' with Microsoft and OpenAI have revealed concerns within both companies about the unauthorized use or compensation of millions of press articles to train their artificial intelligence models.Keep reading...
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