💼 Microsoft and OpenAI Admitted AI Replaces News
Court-ordered unredacted filings in the New York Times lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI revealed: Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, called news scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history" in January 2023, while ChatGPT head Nick Turley called it an "existential threat" to publishers. Clickability of links to plaintiffs' sites in Copilot dropped by 83–93% compared to regular Bing search.
🌍 The substitutive nature of AI products was acknowledged in documents from both companies before their launch — this undermines fair use, which requires that use not replace the original.
👤 If the court supports the publishers, ChatGPT and Copilot news responses may become less complete, with mandatory links and licensing payments.
Source 1: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-scraping-the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history-new-unredacted-filings-reveal/