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

Unsealed court documents from a case brought by the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft show that the companies' own employees warned they were creating a "doom loop" that would damage the web through their data scraping practices. Internal documentation characterized the companies' scraping as the "largest theft of labor in human history" and a "complete mockery" of fair use principles. Microsoft has distanced itself from some of these warnings, attributing them to one employee's individual perspective rather than company policy. The documents reveal that despite these internal warnings about posing an existential threat to publishers, the companies proceeded with their practices anyway.