Microsoft and OpenAI Knew Their AI Models Would Harm the Web, Court Documents Reveal

Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times' case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies' own documentation warned that it was starting a 'doom loop' that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' and that it made a 'complete mockery of the idea of fair use.'

Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht's assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek told The Verge that 'These comments reflect one employee's individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company's views.'

In a separate court filing, Jordan Usdan, GM for Data Strategy and Ops at Microsoft AI, characterized Hecht's role as adversarial. He said that Hecht 'holds divergent, academic, and forward-looking views about how data ecosystems for AI should operate and is employed at Microsoft to bring asymmetrical, futuristic, and academic points of view … nor is he someone who speaks for Microsoft specifically as to his theoretical views on AI's potential effect on content creators.'

Internal Documents Reveal Concerns About AI's Impact on the Web

Internal documents described ChatGPT as 'the modern newsstand.' OpenAI's Nick Turley is later quoted as saying that once you get an answer from its chatbot, there is 'no good reason to click' on a link to the source. Microsoft is quoted as admitting that 'LLMs are a product that destroys its own supply chain' because it's a substitute for its own training data in many cases.

OpenAI knows its killing referral traffic. OpenAI's own media and economic experts attributed the drop in referral traffic for sites like the Times directly to AI summaries like Google's AI Overviews. They've speculated that search referrals may be down as much as 60 percent.

Companies Knew They Were Starting a 'Doom Loop'

Microsoft knew how its wholesale scraping of the internet would be perceived and admitted that 'almost no one intended for they [sic] content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.'

OpenAI Policy Director Jack Clark saw the writing on the wall, saying that it was 'creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the 'culture' of society.'

Internal documents described the situation as a 'doom loop' that would hurt the performance of their models and the entire web at the same time.

Companies' Altruistic Intent Questioned

Don't be fooled by OpenAI or Microsoft's claims of altruistic intent. OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman is more interested in the 'gazillions' of dollars it he could potentially make through commercial AI.

Despite Nadella later being quoted as saying, 'anything that is paywalled should be licensed,' An OpenAI representative admitted that he was 'unaware' of any effort to detect or remove paywalled content from training data.

It seems pretty clear based on this newly unsealed document that both Microsoft and OpenAI knew they were going to irreparably harm the publishing industry, the 'millions of people' it employs, and, by extension, damage their own product, but carried forward anyway in pursuit of 'gazillions' of dollars — doom loop be damned.