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 newly 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 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, period” and “will get more and more substitutive 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.”
An executive at Microsoft, the lawsuit claims, worried that might be an “accidental cover up” that would result in “people who have a right over the content having less visibility into what was used for training.”
