Microsoft Exec Warned AI Web Scraping Makes A Mockery Of Fair Use

Unsealed court documents from a lawsuit filed by The New York Times reveal internal concerns at Microsoft regarding AI training. Brent Hecht, Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, described the practice of training OpenAI models on news articles and human-published content as the largest theft of labor in human history. These documents suggest that internal views on web scraping and fair use conflict with public statements, with one internal record characterizing the process as an astonishing theft.