AI companies were stealing, by their own words, "more human labour than anyone in human history"

"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions. Almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will 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 for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain. ...

"[There is a] real risk [that generative AI could] significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained ... LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain."

~ Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, in documents in the just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft case. See: '“An astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”: Court records show what Microsoft and OpenAI actually thought about AI training' and posts by @JasonKint