{"id":629288,"date":"2026-09-19T06:06:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T06:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/629288\/"},"modified":"2026-09-19T06:06:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T06:06:23","slug":"doom-loop-openai-and-microsoft-admits-llms-are-destroying-the-web-and-built-on-theft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/629288\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Doom Loop\u2019: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called \u201can astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,\u201d and the \u201clargest theft of labor in human history.\u201d An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a \u201cdoom loop\u201d that is killing \u201cthe entire web.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those statements and a series of other mask-off moments feature heavily in an unredacted court filing that was unsealed Thursday<\/a> in the behemoth New York Times vs OpenAI copyright lawsuit that has been winding its way through the court system for years. In a filing asking for summary judgment (basically, a filing with the court asking it to rule), lawyers for the New York Times laid out a series of admissions made by Microsoft and OpenAI executives in documents and depositions that until now had remained either sealed or redacted at the request of Microsoft and OpenAI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why the AI companies wanted to hide this from the public. The statements, taken together, are some of the most damning indictments of the ways LLMs were trained, how they worked, and the immediate threat they pose to human labor. It is a reminder that even as AI becomes more powerful and companies try to shift the narrative to the supposed existential risk of \u201csuperintelligent\u201d AI, the tools they have already built were created by stealing from human creativity and labor and are by definition existential threats to the human labor market.<\/p>\n

\u201cMillions of people around the world will soon consider large models \u2018hoovering up\u2019 all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,\u201d an internal Microsoft document cited in the case read, adding \u201calmost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.\u201d<\/p>\n

The filing was written by lawyers for the New York Times but is largely comprised of statements and interviews with big tech executives that admit both that LLMs are largely trained on stolen content, that they represent an existential risk for the human writers, artists, and media companies that they stole from, and that their products have started a \u201cdoom loop\u201d that is eating the web and destroying the businesses that these companies stole from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The unredacted filing was found by Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade organization that represents digital media companies. Kint has been closely following and posting about massive AI copyright lawsuits<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The court filing cites an internal Microsoft document that found that AI products steal from human content creators, then cannibalize clicks from the people and websites they\u2019ve stolen from, thereby destroying their business models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOur AI content strategy has started a \u2018doom loop\u2019 that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time: It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its \u2018content supply chain,\u2019\u201d the document said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, testified under oath that after ripping content from the New York Times and other news sites, clicks to those news sites fully cratered, falling by more than 90 percent on Bing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Documents obtained during the court proceedings found that OpenAI created \u201ca hack to get around nytimes paywall,\u201d to which OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman said \u201cah, nice.\u201d Microsoft executive Brent Hecht wrote that LLMs steal content \u201cwithout ways of distributing economic value down the supply chain, [which] necessarily threatens the economic stability of those who create the content.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s policy director Jack Clark wrote that the company was \u201ccreating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the \u2018culture\u2019 of society\u201d and Microsoft, in a policy document, wrote that generative AI could \u201csignificantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained [\u2026] LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain.\u201d OpenAI called itself an \u201cexistential threat\u201d to news publishers, and an OpenAI software engineer testified that \u201cno matter how prominently we show the links, users won\u2019t click.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

None of this is at all surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the development of generative artificial intelligence, but the document, taken in whole, is a real they-admit-it situation. OpenAI\u2019s and Microsoft\u2019s lawyers have been trying to argue that their model training is fair use and transformative under copyright law and that they are building something that is fundamentally different from the human labor that it was trained on. But internally, these executives know that what they have built has been built on stolen content and that the products they\u2019ve made are cannibalizing the sources they\u2019ve stolen from and destroying the internet as we know it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

About the author<\/p>\n

Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.<\/p>\n

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