{"id":629142,"date":"2026-09-19T02:30:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T02:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/629142\/"},"modified":"2026-09-19T02:30:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T02:30:25","slug":"microsoft-exec-called-ai-scraping-the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/629142\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft exec called AI scraping the \u201clargest theft of labor in human history\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

News groups are also upset that instead of listening to insiders warning that scraping news was theft, Microsoft and OpenAI never chose to license content, allegedly usurping them in another market in ways they couldn\u2019t anticipate.<\/p>\n

Specifically, their motion accused Microsoft of violating \u201cindustry norms\u201d by selling a dataset purchased for Bing as training data for OpenAI, allegedly doing so without consulting news groups that would not have approved of that repurposing of their consent to basic search engine crawling. Further, OpenAI allegedly \u201cacted improperly\u201d by obtaining a NYT dataset with 1.8 million articles from a third party that was bound to an agreement that the data wouldn\u2019t be used for commercial purposes. OpenAI\u2019s employees knew it \u201cwould not be appropriate\u201d to use that data \u201cto train a model,\u201d but they did it anyway, news groups alleged.<\/p>\n

For news groups, the problem isn\u2019t just Microsoft and OpenAI, but all the AI firms that are following their lead in \u201cfree-riding\u201d on their content, the motion said. Most notably, after ChatGPT\u2019s launch, Google\u2019s AI Overviews was quickly introduced and started absorbing even more traffic that previously went to news sites.<\/p>\n

If courts don\u2019t clarify that AI firms must license news content, both news publishers and AI firms could be doomed, news plaintiffs argued. One Microsoft internal document agreed that \u201cthere is a \u2018real risk\u2019 that GenAI could \u2018significantly disrupt\u2019\u201d the \u201cemployment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained,\u201d they noted. Microsoft even included a cartoon illustrating the problem of LLMs destroying their own supply chains, they said:<\/p>\n


\n \"\"
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Cartoon in a Microsoft internal document.<\/p>\n

Cartoon in a Microsoft internal document.<\/p>\n

Credit:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

via News Plaintiffs<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAI companies remain powerless to break out of this \u2018doom loop,\u2019 because, while the industry as a whole would benefit if every company paid to sustain the continued production of the creative works their technology depends on, each individual company is better off taking content for free while others pay,\u201d news groups argued.<\/p>\n

As evidence of this blind greed, their motion emphasized that Brockman wrote that he was \u201cdeeply motivated by the gazillions\u201d that could be gained by commercializing OpenAI\u2019s technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cFinding that copying news for AI is not fair use would solve this prisoners\u2019 dilemma by putting all AI companies, OpenAI and Microsoft included, on an even footing,\u201d news organizations said.<\/p>\n

This story was updated with a quote from New York Daily News counsel Steven Lieberman.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News groups are also upset that instead of listening to insiders warning that scraping news was theft, Microsoft…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629143,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-629142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}