Court documents declassified in The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI show internal acknowledgment by executives at Microsoft and OpenAI of the nature of large-scale language patterns. Case documents state that using other people’s content to train neural networks has been called “the greatest labor theft in human history,” creating products that set off a “doom loop” that undermined content creators’ business models and significantly reduced traffic to news sites.
Despite public attempts to protect the technology under fair use doctrine, in private discussions, developers acknowledged that generative AI destroyed authors’ jobs and cannibalized their own sources of material supply. Sati Nadella and other executives have confirmed that outsourcing has dropped by more than 90%, threatening the economic foundation of the entire digital ecosystem.