Tech Companies’ Staff Knew Their AI Tools Posed ‘Existential Threat’ to Publishers

Executives, others at OpenAI and Microsoft acknowledge they could undermine their content sources, according to filing in New York Times’ copyright lawsuit Top staff at OpenAI and Microsoft knew that scraping news websites to train their artificial intelligence models may eventually damage or even destroy those publications. They did it anyway, according to a legal filing unsealed Thursday in a high-stakes copyright infringement case. “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,” Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, wrote in an internal...