A Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘theft of unprecedented proportions.’
In court documents unredacted Thursday, lawyers for the NYT in its copyright infringement case against Microsoft and OpenAI cited Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, saying that “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.”
TL;DR
- Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, described AI models collecting user content as 'astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.'
- Hecht stated that millions of people will likely view this practice as theft and that creators did not intend for their work to be used without compensation.
- A Microsoft filing reportedly characterized Hecht as someone on the payroll to play a contrarian role.