Microsoft Executive Called AI Training 'Largest Theft of Labor'

Newly unsealed court files show that what AI companies say behind the scenes doesn't always align with public statements. A Microsoft executive described OpenAI's practice of training AI models on news articles as 'the largest theft of labor in human history.'

The statement from Brent Hecht, Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, emerged in legal filings related to a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI. The newspaper accuses the companies of using its news stories without permission to train artificial intelligence models, alleging that products like ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot are designed to replace their source material.

The lawsuit argues that by mass-ingesting millions of copyrighted articles to train large language models intended to replace newsrooms, the AI companies have violated copyright law. The New York Times accuses Microsoft and OpenAI of seeking a 'free ride,' leveraging the newspaper's investment in journalism to build substitutive products without consent or payment.

While Microsoft and OpenAI maintain that using news stories falls under 'fair use,' the internal statements suggest the AI products were intentionally designed as replacements for the content they were trained on. The newspaper argues this undermines the fair use defense, stating that the outcome of these issues is critical for the future of both journalism and responsible AI development.