AI executives allegedly knew their products could unlawfully harm businesses, flood the market with inferior work, and damage human society’s creative capacity as a whole, according to communications recently revealed in a lawsuit.

Those internal documents were cited in a lawsuit brought by The New York Times, Mother Jones, and other news outlets alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI tools stole their work and are harming their bottom lines.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” one Microsoft document said, according to a legal filing first reported by Mother Jones on Sept. 22.

The ‘Doom Loop’

One Microsoft document also allegedly indicated that the company was aware that the AI model outputs would result in fewer clicks on websites—including its own. Fewer clicks means less money, which disincentivizes creativity and leads to less, and maybe lower-quality, work.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” the document said.

In evaluating the suits, courts will look at how the new material produced by AI models affects the source material’s moneymaking capabilities.

According to the filing, Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, wrote that the company’s AI products pose an “existential threat” to publishers, are largely substitutive, and will get more so as they get better.

Those statements kill the AI companies’ fair use claim, attorneys for the news publishers wrote in their filing.

“The AI-generated outputs provide substitutive answers that reduce the need for users to visit Plaintiffs’ websites and flood the market with low-quality material that undermines the business model of news publishers,” the complaint reads.

One employee told OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman that he’d developed “a hack” to get around The New York Times’ paywall, allowing ChatGPT to scrape up more stories.

“Ah, nice,” Brockman allegedly responded.

After the companies filed suit, the lawsuit says, OpenAI also developed a filter to stop ChatGPT from outputting from sources involved in the litigation.

“OpenAI did not suppress the output of content from any entity that had not sued it,” the lawsuit alleges. The filter was created “not to prevent OpenAI’s models from infringing copyrights, but to stop Plaintiffs from gathering evidence of OpenAI’s copying for use in litigation.”

Lawsuit One of Many

The publishers’ cases have been consolidated into one federal multidistrict litigation in the Southern District of New York. The newspapers have filed for summary judgment, asking the sitting judge to decide the case without a trial.

This lawsuit is one of many that have cropped up in recent years, as AI companies have sought to train their models by feeding them existing texts and images from copyrighted sources.

In these lawsuits, the AI firms have defended themselves by citing the fair use doctrine under Section 107 of the federal Copyright Act.

That portion of the law gives an exception when copyrighted material is used under certain circumstances, such as teaching or criticism. Courts have ruled that it applies when the copyrighted material is used in a “transformative” way, and the end product is vastly different from the original.

The AI firms have argued that the model has simply substituted its own product for the source material on which it was based.

In July, a federal judge approved a historic $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a group of plaintiff authors who alleged that the company used pirated copies of their work—illegally downloaded from the internet—to train its model, Claude.

In the Anthropic case, the judge said using the books to train AI models was fair use; the violation was in using the pirated copies.

—Stacy Robinson

BOOKMARKS

The Department of State on Wednesday announced it has launched a portal to allow people to report visa fraud as part of a crackdown on the practice. “Many of the tens of thousands of visa fraudsters the department has identified and held accountable during President Trump’s second term were discovered thanks to tips provided by upstanding and concerned members of the public,” the State Department said.

Some $100 billion in loans given for COVID-19 programs are suspected of being fraudulent by tax authorities. The alleged fraud pertains to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) initiatives.

The U.S. Senate rejected a war powers resolution that would have directed President Trump to end the U.S. military action against Iran. The vote was 49–50, with GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rand Paul (Ky.), and Thom Tillis (N.C.) joining the Democrats.

A shooting outside a Canadian synagogue that left the alleged attacker dead and a police officer wounded has been confirmed as a hate crime by the local police force. Check out Jennifer Cowan’s report for more.

Civil unrest is rising in Ceuta, Spain, after the exclave was overrun by young men from Morocco earlier this year. The Epoch Times’ Etienne Fauchaire was on the ground for his latest report.

—Stacy Robinson