It’s rare to see these kinds of documents — internal emails and memos from executives at Microsoft and OpenAI candidly discussing how exactly they’re currently stealing labor and killing the internet.
They were forced to release the docs by a massive lawsuit in which the New York Times is accusing them of copyright infringement. And not just any copyright infringement. It’s the largest case of copyright infringement ever. …Like, ever.
If you’re taking this moment to cheer for the New York Times, please put away your pom poms. The Times is still a pro-genocide, pro-empire, pro-war garbage outlet produced by millionaires to defend billionaires. However, in this case, I hope they win.
They probably wouldn’t have much of a case against the largest AI companies in the world if it weren’t for the fact that the top executives of those same companies are unintentionally testifying for the New York Times. As covered by 404 Media:
“Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called ‘an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,’ and the ‘largest theft of labor in human history.’”
Oh, so it’s no big deal. Just the largest theft of labor in human history. (Yeah, but Claude can make up a song and sing it to me!)
Here’s another quote that Microsoft execs never thought you or I would see:
“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions… almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”
Let’s use the example of the New York Times — even though no one should use an issue for anything more than mopping up animal bile. Imagine someone types into ChatGPT “What happened with Iran this week?” ChatGPT then “hoovers up” everything the NY Times has reported about Iran. That reporting took time and work and research and editing. AI don’t care. AI don’t give a shiiiiit. AI steal everything. AI hungry.
ChatGPT then summarizes it all and spits it out for the reader. The Times gets zero clicks, zero subscribers, and zero ad dollars from this transaction. AI then burps. The number of people going to read The Times collapses. In fact, clicks have gone down by over 90% on the search engine Bing.
But it’s not just big media outlets cratering. Imagine you are a small online business that gives people awesome recipes for interesting food items. Your name is Martha. Someone in Poughkeepsie Googles “What’s a good recipe for a cinnamon pumpkin cookie thingy?” In the past, the top link might direct that person straight to Martha’s Rad Cookie Recipes™ website. Once there, Martha (and her annoying-as-shit husband/assistant) would make money from ad dollars or from getting readers to sign up to their weekly Rad Recipe Fan Club™. You get the point.
In our new totally rockin’ AI dystopia, none of that happens. You ask Google for a recipe, and Google’s AI Gemini vomits up a recipe for you. The recipe was secretly stolen from Martha, but that doesn’t matter. (AI hungry.) The Googler never goes to Martha’s site, never clicks on anything, and Martha’s business collapses. (Capitalism is a fine-tuned machine, isn’t it?)
Here’s another quotation from the internal Microsoft docs:
“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ 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 ‘content supply chain…’”
Is everyone excited for our new doom loop??
So AI is not just killing millions of jobs around the world, not just stealing more labor than anything ever has, not just destroying much of the internet, and not just making us all dumber — it’s also setting fire to the very knowledge base the LLMs have used to train themselves. …And we now have the internal discussions showing the top executives know it.
That’s the end of the column. But I have bonus content below for paid subscribers. I have no sponsors of billionaire friends. My work only continues because people like you throw me the cost of a beer per month.
Lee Camp — Daily Dose of Sanity brings you the stories corporate media would rather you didn’t hear, with a healthy dose of satire, activism, and truth-telling along the way.
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