OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

Don’t be fooled by OpenAI or Microsoft’s claims of altruistic intent. OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman is more interested in the “gazillions” of dollars it he could potentially make through commercial AI.

Despite Nadella later being quoted as saying, “anything that is paywalled should be licensed,” An OpenAI representative admitted that he was “unaware” of any effort to detect or remove paywalled content from training data.

Internally, it seems that OpenAI was well aware of ChatGPT’s tendency to simply reproduce copyrighted material “verbatim.” Even though it acknowledged that the “prevention of memorization” was important to “minimize copyright violations,” employees admitted that GPT-4 “memorized a ton of data and therefore will be insanely good at regurgitation.”

The filing then goes on to cite several examples of ChatGPT outputting long strings of copy straight from articles in the Times , Mercury News , The Denver Post , LifeHacker , and Eurogamer in response to queries.

Microsoft knew how its wholesale scraping of the internet would be perceived and admitted that “almost no one intended for they [sic] content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”

OpenAI Policy Director Jack Clark saw the writing on the wall, saying that it was “creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society.” Internal documents described ChatGPT as “the modern newsstand.” OpenAI’s Nick Turley is later quoted as saying that once you get an answer from its chatbot, there is “no good reason to click” on a link to the source.

Microsoft is quoted as admitting that “LLMs are a product that destroys its own supply chain” because it’s a substitute for its own training data in many cases.

OpenAI’s own media and economic experts attributed the drop in referral traffic for sites like the Times directly to AI summaries like Google’s AI Overviews. They’ve speculated that search referrals may be down as much as 60 percent.

Microsoft spokesperson Haurek cautioned that “Satya’s testimony and Microsoft’s position in this case are perfectly consistent. He spoke to broad principles and changes underway in how people find and consume information. Those observations should not be confused with conclusions about copyright questions before the Court, which Microsoft addresses in its filings.”

But it seems pretty clear based on this newly unsealed document that both Microsoft and OpenAI knew they were going to irreparably harm the publishing industry, the “millions of people” it employs, and, by extension, damage their own product, but carried forward anyway in pursuit of “gazillions” of dollars — doom loop be damned.