OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times’ case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies’ own documentation warned that it was starting a “doom loop” that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the “largest theft of labor in human history,” and that it made a “complete mockery of the idea of fair use.”

Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht’s assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek told The Verge that “These comments reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views.”

In a separate court filing, Jordan Usdan, GM for Data Strategy and Ops at Microsoft AI, characterized Hecht’s role as adversarial. He said that Hecht “holds divergent, academic, and forward-looking views about how data ecosystems for AI should operate and is employed at Microsoft to bring asymmetrical, futuristic, and academic points of view … nor is he someone who speaks for Microsoft specifically as to his theoretical views on AI’s potential effect on content creators.”