Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/52443941
Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI's data practices "theft" while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-scraping-the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history-new-unredacted-filings-reveal/Open linkView original on lemmus.org
16 replies
microslop
Remember kids, if you see someone who willingly works for a large company working on generative AI, be sure to give them their favorite salute: Sieg Heil!
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person
Chattel slavery is the worst evil on a very, very long scale of evils inflicted on working people. It is so evil it stands apart. But it doesn't make all the other labor abuses unimportant.
The plantation owners buy chattel slaves if you let them. You take them away and they import indentured labour. Take that away and they want convicts. Or illegal immigrants who can't go to the authorities. Non-union labor. Wage theft. Casual workers on commission. Self employed contractors with no labor rights. Unpaid interns.
Stealing every word written, every note played, every picture painted by every human to exist shouldn't be a surprise. The fact that this was done in lawful democratic societies under our noses is crazy. It should be causing an outrage. People are becoming worryingly disconnected and distracted.
The worst thing I think is that for so long we were told that working people could escape poverty and gain some control of their lives through education. Not much you could do for yourself working in a mine or factory but if your kids focus at school they can go to college and get a career. Don't have to struggle like their parents. Buy a nice house. Raise a family. And the rug has been pulled out. The house isn't happening. The family is on hold. Nobody is worried that AI has copied fine arts and literature from dead people. The problem is the impact on the living. It is another betrayal.
More impactful and incalculably more evil for sure but I actually don't know if in terms of number of human lifetimes stolen it would be larger. Probably if we count secondary effects caused by the slave trade and ongoing marginalisation though (like if your life falls apart because you got attacked by slavers then the labour you would have done for yourself/your community is stolen in a sense).
Kinda silly and bizarre maths to do anyway. Chattel slavery vvv bad, slavery in general v bad, Looting and enclosing commons also bad. Rich people exploiting others is bad and they should be punished for doing what they knew was wrong.
I would agree with that, although until recent history many more people (as a percentage of concurrently existing people) were less under the thumb of others. Now virtually everyone has some tyrant large or small taking their labour (or as a Marxist would say surplus labour value).
I'm not really interested in ranking stuff, there are just a lot of people now is all.
The taking of the information as training data does not in itself harm people it is true, however the regurgitation of this at a scale to overwhelm human endevour does.
For example stackexchange is dead. Because who is interested in asking questions and getting slop, and who is interested in competing with slop answers produced at multiple times the speed. This resource, previously maintained by a community of volunteers to mentor people in their craft.
The fruit of this commons is now a resource you need to pay for, or will very shortly. This is just one paltry example. The commons of the internet is being enclosed and if the project is successful then it will have a similarly deleterious effect in human online freedom and craft as the enclosing of the physical commons did.
It’s just slavery with extra steps.
MS: Wait! That's our job! That's our fucking job!
--George Carlin
Won’t the courts step in and serve justice! Ya,
Ideas aren't property, ass-hat.
You can't steal publicly available information.
What? Ideas absolutely can be property. Hence copyright and patents.
I'm pretty sure if I wrote a book called the "Adventures of Harry Potter," I would get sued immediately.
Just call it Perry Hotter. Disrupting the female world of sorcery with his magic wand of love.
Perry Hotter with his Platypus familiar?
And if a slave wanted to leave work, they could be murdered. Because at one time, we considered people could be property
There's a difference between what is right and what is legal.
If what you actually mean is that ideas can't be copyrighted, then yes, you are right.
Content, or simply works, is different: in most jurisdictions, whenever you create anything, you own its copyright whether you like it or not. In Europe, IIRC, there is not even a way of waiving that right.
The point here is that AS crawlers not only use but also reproduce information (sometimes verbatim) they don't own the copyright for and is therefore not theirs to publish. As anyone who went to the university knows, presenting the work of others as yours is the one thing you're not allowed to do.