The Aporia
The Aporia
Microsoft and OpenAI, key players in developing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, admitted in unsealed court filings that their AI products are causing significant harm to news publishers and potentially undermining the internet's economic foundations. An internal Microsoft document warned of a "doom loop" where LLMs cannibalize clicks from the very content they rely on, harming both themselves and web businesses simultaneously. Executives like Brent Hecht, director of applied science at Microsoft, noted this unusual situation where an end-product threatens its suppliers' livelihoods. The filings also revealed that OpenAI's AI tools can bypass paywalls to extract information freely, further impacting publishers' revenues without compensation for content usage. This admission comes as part of a broader legal battle with news organizations like the New York Times, challenging whether AI training infringes copyright by substituting actual journalism rather than transforming it into new work.
Microsoft employees debated whether what OpenAI was doing represented the “largest theft of labour in human history” and could create a “doom loop” that could ultimately threaten the quality of the large language models they were building.
