Internal documents revealed during court proceedings have brought to light serious concerns within Microsoft and OpenAI regarding the impact of artificial intelligence on the news industry. Brent Hecht, the Applied Sciences Lead at Microsoft, has labeled the scraping of news content for AI training as "a stunning theft of unprecedented scale," and potentially "the largest theft of labor in human history." Hecht further criticized the notion of fair use in this context, calling it a "complete mockery" of the legal doctrine.
Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, expressed in internal communications that commercial products trained on news content pose an "existential threat to publishers." Microsoft documents described a "death spiral" scenario where diminishing revenues for news organizations lead to a decline in the quality of content available to chatbots, ultimately degrading the models and the internet as a whole.
Data from these companies corroborate the dire situation, showing that click-through rates for some suing publishers have plummeted by 83–93%, while others experienced decreases between 51–94%. Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella testified under oath that chatbots are functioning as substitutes for news platforms, delivering information directly within the AI interface rather than directing users to original sources.
In a controversial incident, OpenAI employee Nick Ryder informed President Greg Brockman about a method to bypass The New York Times' paywall, to which Brockman reportedly responded with enthusiasm. Additionally, it is alleged that Microsoft sold data acquired for Bing to OpenAI without publishers' consent. To demonstrate this market disruption, attorneys for the publishers requested that chatbots assess article biases, and the bots complied by providing verbatim excerpts of copyrighted texts.
In response to the revelations, a Microsoft representative noted that the comments reflect the views of an individual employee and do not represent the company's official stance. However, attorney Steven Lieberman from the New York Daily News countered that these documents reveal the true intentions of OpenAI and Microsoft regarding their ethical considerations.
The implications of these developments are significant for both the news industry and competitors in the AI space, as they highlight the potential for AI technologies to disrupt traditional content distribution and revenue models.
Informational material. 18+.
