Inside Microsoft and OpenAI, worry about damaging the publishing industry

Publishers argue that the tech companies violated copyright law by scraping millions of their stories off the internet and other databases, and using the text, without approval or pay, to train advanced AI systems.

SAN FRANCISCO - Newly unsealed court documents showed considerable concern within Microsoft and its close partner OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop artificial intelligence systems.

As OpenAI was forging ahead with its 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.