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Newly unsealed court documents reveal that employees at Microsoft and OpenAI expressed alarm that AI systems they were jointly developing could lead to an “existential threat” to the publishing industry.
The court document in question is part of a joint filing from news organizations, including The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and 10 other publications that are suing Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement. Within the document, the publishers showcase comments and memoranda from Microsoft and OpenAI workers and senior executives, demonstrating that they recognize the dangers that their own work poses to the future of journalism.
Individuals within those companies noted that their AI models could lead to employment theft as a result of developing large language models (LLMs) for their products. Microsoft and OpenAI, which are listed in the court filing as the “Defendants” in the case, “do not dispute that the reason ChatGPT and Copilot are ‘good at news’ is because they trained on stolen news content,” .
The document puts on display how OpenAI obtained past New York Times pieces that were published between 1987 and 2007, submitting over 1.8 million articles to the AI model. Those articles were part of The New York Times Annotated Corpus, whose user license agreement stipulates that its utilization is limited to “non-commercial” use for tech development.
In using the Annotated Corpus, Microsoft recognized that “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” admitting that “no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion.”
“Nor are they compensated for its use,” Microsoft added in its assessment.
The consequences of Microsoft’s and OpenAI’s actions were noted by the companies themselves. In one memo, Nick Turley, who led the team that developed ChatGPT, said that AI posed an “existential threat” to publishers. In another, a senior Microsoft employee and perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history.”
One memo from Microsoft recognized that there is “a ‘real risk’” that AI models “could ‘significantly disrupt[] the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained.’” The use of journalists’ work in their AI systems “has started a ‘doom loop,’” another memo stated, one that will ironically “hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.”
“It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created,” .
Despite these concerns, the filing from the publishing companies details how they went forward with developing these models anyway, motivated by the enormous financial returns they’d generate.
Although the filing notes that OpenAI had been founded with a goal of “benefit[ing] humanity as a whole,” within just a couple of years, the company’s founders were seeking to commercialize the product in major ways. “No later than 2017, co-founder and CEO Sam Altman began planning for ‘the possibility of forming a for-profit entity to carry on AI-related activities,’ and OpenAI had ‘concluded’ it would need to take that step,” the filing says.
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Indeed, the filing shows that OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman admitted .
“Throughout this case, defendants insisted that these documents be treated as confidential so that the public could not see them,” read a statement from attorney Steven Lieberman, who is representing The New York Daily News in the lawsuit. “Well, now the cat is out of the bag. Finally, the world can see what OpenAI and Microsoft thought all along about the fairness of their own behavior.”
The filing from the news organizations against OpenAI and Microsoft demonstrates how AI products could diminish journalists’ work in the future, with the aftereffect being that the quality of journalism, in general, could decline. But AI is already hurting the industry in other ways, including by limiting access to independent journalism and progressive voices.
In a joint op-ed published earlier this month by Maya Schenwar, board president for Truthout and director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism; Negin Owliaei, Truthout’s editor-in-chief; and Ziggy West Jeffery, Truthout’s executive director, the trio noted that Google’s AI model, Gemini, is now prioritizing summaries of news articles at the top of its searches, leading to dramatic drop-offs in viewership for independent media websites.
“We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight,” the op-ed writers said. “This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.”
Independent media like Truthout largely rely on donations from readers, who are asked to consider donating when they visit these sites. However, when Gemini summarizes these articles (or prioritizes corporate media instead in its summaries), the loss in revenue is noticeable.
“At Truthout, we anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone,” the op-ed said.
The trio added:
Journalism has always been a crucial node of democratic practice; after all, how can we make decisions about what our society should look like if we don’t actually know the facts of what’s happening around us? The AI-ification of news is making that increasingly clear. When AI “news outlets” and AI summaries are not busy plagiarizing real journalists, they are often instead regurgitating information from company press releases.
The op-ed from Schenwar, Owliaei, and West Jeffery called on readers to be part of the solution.
“If we all recognize that we have a stake in the looming threats to independent journalism’s very existence, it shouldn’t only affect our individual reading choices; it should also drive us toward collective action,” the three wrote, adding, “Every week brings a new encroachment of AI into our lives.”
“This is terrifying, but it should also be motivating: We all have a stake in this struggle. Don’t let AI take over our search results or our lives without a fight,” they wrote.
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