这篇 Hacker News 的讨论聚焦于微软总监 Brent Hecht 在 2023 年 1 月发布的一份内部备忘录，文中将 AI 数据抓取描述为“人类历史上最大规模的劳动剽窃”。
参与者就生成式 AI 的伦理展开了辩论，许多人对大型科技公司的“数据吸尘”行为表示不满。批评者认为，AI 模型在未经归属或许可的情况下通过训练原创作品来剥削人类劳动，且往往产出扭曲、抄袭或不准确的内容。一些用户强调了“真相的流失”，指出大型语言模型（LLM）经常曲解原创概念或无法注明出处，这可能导致信息生态系统的腐化。
反方观点则认为，基于现有知识构建是人类进步的基本组成部分，“剽窃”论调在行业历史上对开放数据的依赖面前显得虚伪。另一些人则指出，微软高管在批评此类行为的同时，公司却在重金投资 OpenAI 和 Copilot，这具有讽刺意味。总的来说，该讨论反映了人们对企业整合、认知劳动贬值，以及 AI 可能取代其赖以发展的原始创作者的深层焦虑。
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原文
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in late 2023, with the case apparently still ongoing almost three years later. Now, the publication’s legal team has asked the court for a summary judgment after it filed a revealing legal brief based on statements and documents from the defendants. According to 404 Media, these documents remain sealed or redacted at the request of both companies, with the revelations showing potentially damaging statements from their leadership, including claims AI scraping is the biggest theft of labor in human history and an existential threat to publishers.
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(Image credit: Microsoft)
The brief cited an internal memo dated January 2023 by Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, where he allegedly said, “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and also called it “the largest theft of labor in human history.” Another Microsoft document was cited saying, “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”
As ChatGPT surged in popularity throughout 2023, the software giant’s own data revealed that Copilot dropped click-through rates for The New York Times by as much as 93% compared to Bing search. Another memo by the Applied Science director called it a “doom loop” and said it would “hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.” The NYT brief quoted Hecht from the document, saying, “It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.’”
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OpenAI Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley said in internal communications that the AI chatbot is an “existential threat” to publishers as they are “largely substitutive” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better,” while another OpenAI engineer testified that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.” Nick Ryder, another OpenAI researcher, told company president Greg Brockman about a “hack to get around nytimes paywall,” to which he replied, “ah nice.”
AI companies argue that scraping the internet for data to feed to their models is “fair use,” with one court agreeing that Anthropic’s use of published material falls under this category. The law defines this as “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.” Some of the factors that determine whether a particular use falls under “fair use” include “(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”
However, all these revelations in NYT’s brief could complicate OpenAI’s fair use defense, especially as it shows that the leadership of both companies are aware of the possible market repercussions of AI scraping. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a deposition from earlier this year that “anything that is paywalled should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it…for grounding or training” and that if he “had been made aware that OpenAI has scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” the company would have required OpenAI “to retrain its models.”
