A Microsoft memo called AI scraping history's largest labour theft.
Court filings unsealed this week quote a January 2023 memo by the Microsoft researcher Brent Hecht. He wrote that harvesting the web to train AI was the largest theft of labour in human history. The memo surfaced in the New York Times copyright case against Microsoft and OpenAI.
Why it mattersCopyright cases turn on what a company knew, and here someone inside said it plainly. The same filings describe bypassed paywalls and copyright notices stripped from training data.
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