A Microsoft executive called OpenAI's web scraping the 'largest theft of labor in human history', Anthropic says Claude 'leads' 26 percent of its AI R&D work, and the FAA says laser strikes on aircraft fell again

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A Microsoft executive called OpenAI's web scraping the largest theft of labor in human history.

Anthropic says Claude leads 26 percent of its AI R&D work, and the FAA says laser strikes on aircraft fell for the third consecutive year. It's Friday, September 18th, and here's a quick look at some of the news happening in the sphere of tech this morning from Engadget.

Executives from OpenAI and Microsoft were reportedly worried about the training of ChatGPT that scraped millions of news articles. That's according to reporting by the New York Times. Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Dr. Brent Hecht, said OpenAI's work was akin to the quote, largest theft of labor in human history that could create a doom loop, end quote. While OpenAI exec Nick Turley said it represented an existential threat to publishers. Now those comments came out of newly unsealed court documents as part of a lawsuit launched by the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 Only snippets from the documents were made public without the context around them. Along with the quotes, the unredacted materials also show how OpenAI and its partners obtained training content by bypassing paywalls and built training datasets by scraping millions of documents and erasing copyright notices from training data. Now this release is the latest salvo in the copyright lawsuit originally launched by the New York Times alongside five other writers. Now, they argue that big tech companies have broken copyright law by scraping millions of their stories off the internet and using the text without approval or compensation to train advanced large language model systems. Several such lawsuits have already swung in favor of AI companies, but judges have pointedly stated that their rulings were made because the law around AI use has yet to be set on. The New York Times lawsuit is considered to be of prime importance in determining whether AI companies can access this data as part of fair use legal doctrines that allow copyrighted work to be used without permission in cases like parody or journalism. That makes the comments from Microsoft and OpenAI executives particularly interesting, though Microsoft disavowed its own employees' statements. Though less dramatic, other comments are equally damning when an employee wrote to OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, and told him about a new paywall hack. Brockman responded, nice.

One internal Microsoft document from 2023 stated that millions of people around the world will soon consider large language models hoovering up their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions. Executives distinctly recognized the potential danger to news gathering and journalism, and another comment, Dr. Hecht, said that large AI models are a product that destroys its supply chain. And another, an OpenAI software engineer told colleagues in 2023 that no matter how prominently we show the links, users will not click. OpenAI's Turley confirmed that, saying AI products are largely substitutive to journalism.