Newly unsealed court documents showed considerable concern within Microsoft and its close partner OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop artificial intelligence systems.
As OpenAI was forging ahead with its work, Microsoft employees debated whether what OpenAI was doing represented the “largest theft of labor in human history” and could create a “doom loop” that could ultimately threaten the quality of the large language models they were building.
“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” said one internal Microsoft document from 2023.
Inside OpenAI, there was also worry that its ChatGPT chatbot could lead people away from reading news elsewhere. In a June 2023 memo, Nick Turley, who led the team developing ChatGPT, wrote that A.I. posed an “existential threat” to publishers. And in February 2024, he wrote that A.I. products “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”
Snippets of those discussions were made public on Thursday as part of a closely watched lawsuit The New York Times filed against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023. Eleven other publishers have joined the suit. Judge Sidney H. Stein of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is considering motions for a summary judgment. Documents related to the case are slowly being unsealed as the judge considers those motions.
The publishers argue that the tech companies violated copyright law by scraping millions of their stories off the internet and other databases, and using the text, without approval or pay, to train advanced A.I. systems.
Microsoft and OpenAI contend their work was covered under legal protections for “fair use” of copyrighted material. They say the articles were sufficiently transformed into entirely new work by A.I., and were not substitutes that harm the value of the original work.
A Microsoft spokesman, Alex Haurek, said in a statement that internal memos, written by Brent Hecht, Microsoft director of applied science, did not represent the company’s views.
“Microsoft’s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism,” he said, referring to Microsoft’s A.I. assistant.
OpenAI did not return requests to comment.
In a separate filing, Microsoft said Dr. Hecht was a research academic who also worked at Northwestern University. It said he was not a decision maker and was employed by Microsoft “to present divergent and asymmetric perspectives.”
“The world can see what OpenAI and Microsoft thought all along about the fairness of their own behavior,” Steven Lieberman, who represents the New York Daily News and seven other newspapers in the case, said in a statement. The New York Times declined to comment.
The news companies said OpenAI deployed tools specifically to evade the paywalls set up by publishers. According to the documents, when a staffer wrote Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, and told him about developing “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” Mr. Brockman responded “ah nice.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, also said in a deposition with lawyers that “anything that is paywalled should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it.” He said that if he “had been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” he would have invoked Microsoft’s right to require OpenAI to retrain its models.
Microsoft’s Mr. Haurek said that Mr. Nadella “spoke to broad principles and changes underway in how people find and consume information.”
The documents show concern within the companies that the news industry could not survive if its work was taken. Large A.I. models “are a product that destroys its supply chain,” Dr. Hecht wrote.
Some inside OpenAI also had concerns about copying the news articles, according to the unsealed documents. In 2020 Jack Clark, who was OpenAI’s policy director, wrote a memo to Mr. Brockman and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive. Mr. Clark, who later left to co-found Anthropic, wrote that the start-up’s work “is going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society.”
Mr. Clark warned “OpenAI will become the symbol of how Silicon Valley is thoughtlessly stepping into other parts of life and leaving a mess on the carpet.”
(Anthropic referred a request for comment to OpenAI.)
There were also signs that ChatGPT was not directing users to read relevant stories as they were written by publishers, according to the documents. In February 2023, an OpenAI software engineer wrote to colleagues that, “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.”
A.I. “products are largely substitutive, period,” OpenAI’s Mr. Turley wrote.
