Massive lawsuits from companies that have enterprise data protection contracts with them?
I tried talking to an LLM about it and sure and enough, it had scraped it and learned to use that terminology and explanation that I made up. I asked the LLM, "Where did that concept/term come from, who made it up?" It did a bunch of searching and tried to site a whole bunch of other sources which did NOT contain the terms of the explanation I had written. It simply would not cite or mention my source. It kept parroting my material semi-correctly and hiding the source. By any other actor that would be an egregious act of sloppiness, dishonesty, and plagiarism.
Generative AI is speed-running a widespread corruption of truth. I do not believe any of the gains are worth this.
More countries should debatably follow what Japan is doing[1], where they are creating new laws to force AI companies to show their training data and how they collected it.
[1]: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/08/19/japan/ai-traini...
That may already have been obvious, and central to the complaint, but I was just knee-jerking to the anthropomorphic language.
Congrats, brother. That's the issue TFA and GP are bringing up. And I do agree it is unfair and equivalent to (intellectual) theft.
Yes, that bell curve meme, he wrote about it. It’s not explained anywhere because of the language and culture separation between french and english. But if you ask enough questions to AI, the AI will eventually find about Blaise Pascal and tell you about this unknown link. It’s magic.
You are authoring original work.. the Baron in the Castle collected your work and uses it. Who becomes wealthy and how?
For me the issue is more about the loss of truth than the loss of my IP.
By the same logic if Baron bought her baroness masterful dress to enjoy her look in that dress, and you when walked past the Castle saw the baroness in that dress, should you compensate to the Baron or not?
1789690028 | Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49748529 | 4 comments
1789690711 | Inside Microsoft and OpenAI, Worry About Damaging the Publishing Industry | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/technology/microsoft-open... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49748613 | 0 comments
1789712928 | 'Doom Loop': OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web | https://www.404media.co/doom-loop-openai-and-microsoft-admit... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750788 | 0 comments
1789724707 | Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history' | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752056 | 838 comments
1789741304 | OpenAI's latest AI revelation is a 'serious situation,' says Microsoft | https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/18/microsoft-ai-ceo-openais-lat... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754831 | 2 comments
1789796968 | Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K | https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/09/18/microsoft-agen... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763701 | 2 comments
It never ceases to amaze me how people affirm the concept of intellectual property, enforced by states, while maintaining "exceptions" that are fundamentally incompatible with the very concept of what they are upholding.
Disney (big corp!) copies a small artist's work? The law shall strike them down!
A small artists uses some symbol of Disney, which claims copyright infringement? So mean! They are abusing the law!
Maybe the discontent people feel with AI companies is a more fundamental one: Corporations compete to cut costs and increase profits. You cannot outperform other corporations on the long-term by sourcing cheaper materials; the cost-cutting is mainly targeted towards the human labour; the commodity of human labour bears a cost, but you can also command them to perform more work, increasing the "performance"; so companies naturally want high-output employees that cost as little as possible, to compete and exist on the market.
AI companies now claim to be developing a product which can replace cognitive human labour on a massive scale; companies find the advent of hiring less humans that perform more work very advantageous, skyrocketing the expected returns of said AI companies. Capital flows en masse into these companies because they may be integrated into the value chain of virtually all companies.
This calculation is the ruling concept of the entire "free world". To exist in said world you must prove some utility to this societal process of turning money into more money, in some way or the other.
Many people that managed to score a "good" job, cognitive work, now feel threatened by the AI companies that are poised to develop models that enables their employers to fire them/reduce their salary.
Your material life (housing, food) depend on jobs, which only exist as a cost factor in the profit calculation of your employer. All research and development serves this principle, to recoup the spent funds.
When Andreessen claimed that "software will eat the world", he said that software companies will replace many/most other industries like manufacturing, real estate, taxi drivers.
Many HN'ers bought into the hype, loved "Big Data", millions started university degrees in something with "Data". They may have dreamed of that FAANG salary, six figures, live in SF, home office etc.
The entire promise of that silicon valley hype cycle was that they will be putting millions of people out of work, casting their daily work into inherently superior software applications, and gaining a advantage over all other competitors by "harnessing data". That did not work too well, see Zillow, now the tech industry eat's itself: The transformer will think for you, and therefore you must hire fewer thinkers.
If you refuse to criticize or even acknowledge that your job, that many people cling to, is only a product of competition that inherently produces winners and losers.
If you don't find that bad in any way shape or form, if you only complain about ending up with the losers (the permanent undercaste), I'll say: "No crying in the casino."
... yeah, sure.
And slavery is probably what inspires the perm under class fantasy AI people have. That’s said, if they work hard enough, AI being bigger than slavery is still possible.
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Matthew%207%3A5
Whether religious or not, the verse applies to anyone and everyone making such statements from the position of companies like Microsoft. I'll quite the KJV version 'cause that one lends itself well to situations like these. Read it with a booming thunder-loaded voice:
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
I'm pretty sure any of the eras of slavery throughout human history is more of an actual theft of labor.
the choice was stolen as well.
the agency was stolen as well.
Culture has always had a kind of violence to it, but not FROM the THIEF: you HAVE to speak the language that was already made; you have to understand and participate in their song-structures, their plot devices, their ways of attesting.
The "IP owners" should be paying ME!!!
> A huge chunk of the content that was scraped was most likely provided voluntarily rather than being waged labour.
People committing work get rewards in different ways, waged labour could be one, attributions, acknowledgements, future job opportunities and more. Stripping those from the rightful owners can hardly be justified in the name of progress.
> The brief cited an internal memo dated January 2023 by Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, where he allegedly said, “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and also called it “the largest theft of labor in human history.”
No need to add religion into this. Let MS employees write their emails. If anything, what he said a month after ChatGPT's release was prophetic.
Take the Hebrew return to the promise land, its strange how the non believers are always rich and their gold, cattle and virgin numbers are listed as gifts for doing gods will.
It literally is meant as a beam, a bit of exaggeration for emphasis.
So we are meant to assess and help others but first must correct our own selves.
Of course that accusation sounds outrageous as it should. All human knowledge and progress has come by building on the works of those who came before us, as it should. Turning this on its head and calling it "theft of labor" is insane, as is asking others not to build on today's knowledge.
Or to steal some more human labor: "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."