Microsoft executive called AI training the ‘largest theft of labour in human history’

A Microsoft executive once described the mass collection of online content to train artificial intelligence as the “largest theft of labour in human history”, according to newly unsealed court documents.

The comments were made by Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, in internal documents that have emerged in the copyright battle between The New York Times, Microsoft and OpenAI. Hecht warned that millions of people could see AI systems “hoovering up” their work as an unprecedented form of theft.

The disclosure is significant because Microsoft and OpenAI are defending their use of copyrighted material to train AI models, arguing that the practice can qualify as fair use under US copyright law. Microsoft has stressed that Hecht’s comments represented his individual perspective and were not the company's legal position.

Why did Microsoft executive raise the alarm?

In a 2023 internal document, Hecht wrote that content creators had generally not intended for their work to be used in this way and were not being compensated for it.

He also warned of a potential “doom loop”.

The concern was simple: AI models depend on a constant supply of high-quality information from the internet. But if AI products reduce the money publishers and other creators make, fewer people may be able to produce the original work that future AI systems depend on. In another Microsoft document, Hecht reportedly described the situation as one in which an AI product could threaten the economic foundations of its own “content supply chain”.

Chatbots could also take readers away from news websites

The documents reveal another problem for publishers. ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot can provide information directly to users, potentially reducing the need to visit the original websites.

Microsoft data cited in the court filings showed that click-through rates to The New York Times and Daily News were 83 to 93 per cent lower on Copilot's “answer engine” than on traditional Bing Search.

OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, also described AI products as “largely substitutive” and said they would become increasingly so as the technology improved. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged in a deposition that chatbots can effectively give users information on an AI platform instead of sending them to the underlying website.

The bigger battle over AI and copyright

The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in 2023, alleging that their AI systems were trained on its copyrighted journalism without permission. Other publishers, including the New York Daily News, The Intercept and the Center for Investigative Reporting, later joined the litigation. The publishers argue that using their work to train AI harms their businesses and allows technology companies to compete with the very organisations producing the information. Microsoft and OpenAI maintain that AI training is protected by fair use because the systems transform the material rather than simply republishing it.

The court has yet to resolve the broader dispute.

But the newly unsealed documents have exposed an uncomfortable question for the AI industry: if AI companies rely on the internet for the information that makes their models useful, what happens if those same systems make it harder for the people producing that information to survive?