The court documents made public this week show that Brent Hecht, Microsoft's director of applied science, had cautioned that people could view large language models as involving a form of theft on an unprecedented scale.
He stated that generative AI might represent the largest instance of labor theft in human history. These remarks appear to go against the official position taken by both Microsoft and OpenAI in their legal response to the action brought by the news organizations.
The document also contains internal comments from OpenAI, in which executive Greg Brockman admitted that ChatGPT is able to reproduce sentences from New York Times articles word for word.
The comments came out during the copyright lawsuit that The New York Times filed in late 2023.