The Download

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Adobe Stock

TL;DR: It’s the “largest theft of labor in human history.” That’s what a senior Microsoft exec said about AI scraping in newly unsealed filings from The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit. In the same filings, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT warned that the company’s product was an “existential threat” to publishers. This could all lead to more lawsuits—just as courts have been siding with the AI companies.

What happened: Millions of people would consider AI models “hoovering up” their work as an “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht wrote in an internal memo in 2023. This came to light after the NYT sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement later that year.

But what does “unprecedented proportions” look like? Per the lawsuit, more than 91,692 copies of work from the NYT and additional plaintiffs are included in OpenAI’s mid-training datasets (curated sets of high-value data) alone. Project Mango, a joint data-sharing effort between Microsoft and OpenAI, allegedly produced a training set with at least 160,903 unique works from news publishers.

Paywall? No problem: OpenAI employees allegedly devised plans to hop paywalls to get training data. Per the filing, when an OpenAI researcher flagged a hack to get around the Times’ paywall, Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, replied: “ah nice.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified earlier this year that if he’d been made aware OpenAI was scraping behind paywalls, he’d have forced the company to retrain its models: “Anything that is paywalled should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it.”

Fair use: While this could all lead to more lawsuits, AI companies have been winning similar cases on fair use grounds (a law that allows the unlicensed use of copyrighted material under certain circumstances). In a case last year, a judge sided with Anthropic over its digitization and destruction of legally purchased print books to train its models, though the ruling was split—it later paid $1.5 billion in a settlement to authors over millions of pirated books.

OpenAI’s warning of an “existential threat” could also undermine its defense: Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley described the company’s products as “largely substitutive” and said they’d get more so as they improved (in other words, why go to the source when the chatbot told you what you needed?)—cutting against the law’s requirement that the use doesn’t substitute the original work.

Bottom line: Copyright lawsuits against AI companies are piling up—and more are likely on the way. Now, authors and news publishers can use the companies’ own words to make their case. —LC

      

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Here are some things Siri AI can do for you

I’ve been playing around with Siri AI for around three months now, and given it officially launched on Monday and you can sign up for the beta, I wanted to give you a rundown of some things it’s useful for. (You can also read my review of it after a month of use here.)

• I have asked it to find things in my Messages an embarrassing number of times, rather than scrolling for what feels like eternity. This includes everything from product recs and photos my friends sent me to their physical addresses.
• As I mentioned in Tuesday’s edition, I’ve used it to automatically add conference sessions to my Calendar so I don’t forget which ones I was interested in once the day rolls around.
• While it can’t yet search or take action in most third-party apps, if you link your Gmail to your Apple Mail (even if you don’t use it), Siri will then be able to search your inbox for you, too. Just yesterday, I used it to surface the tracking number for a package to see when it would arrive.
• You can use its onscreen awareness to ask it questions about something you’re looking at—like what type of dog is in that Instagram photo—or get it to read text out loud. You can also ask it to take action based on what’s on the screen, such as adding the ingredients for a recipe to your shopping list and adding a link to the recipe in your notes.
• And of course, you can use it for all the usual things you’d ask a chatbot for, from the score of a sports match to local restaurant recs near you.

I’d also love to hear what you’re using Siri AI for—and what you’ve found AI useful for in general. Hit us up here and let us know. —SM

The Zeitbyte

A jury of your billionaire peers

NBC 6 South Florida

Jury duty is something people often spend considerable effort getting out of, from “I really can’t miss work” excuses to implying you’re not of sound mind with the help of a Star Wars costume. But jurors who answered their summons in Miami recently got an unexpected diversion: Jeff Bezos and, apparently, bitcoin billionaire Michael Saylor, sitting in the same jury pool.

It’s not every day you see two wealthy tech magnates rubbing shoulders with the public in a dour waiting room—and we normies were amused: “Imagine getting arrested for stealing Amazon packages in Miami and you show up to your trial and Jeff Bezos is a juror,” one X post reads. Others wondered what Bezos and Saylor gabbed about, with one X user (who posted a picture of the men) claiming he spoke to Bezos after the process was over. But the biggest question we all have: What did the two billionaires spend their meager jury duty stipends on? —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: ☕☕/5

• Oh, how the tables have turned? An independent security research team says it hacked OpenAI in July—with some help from the funniest place possible.
• Watch this baffling video of a Huawei employee allegedly stealing T-Mobile robot parts, shown to jurors this week in the Chinese tech firm’s racketeering trial.
• Anthropic is doing what now? The AI company has built its very own wet lab in the Bay Area for biology work.
• If you didn’t get any money from the big Amazon Prime FTC lawsuit last year, there’s hope yet: More consumers are now eligible for a payout—and you could get up to $200.
• Apple diehards are finally getting Woz merch, with a new storefront full of Steve Wozniak-branded hoodies, mugs, and a punny mouse pad that might make you cringe.
• If you’re sick of all the flight delays lately, just know the FAA is working on it. Though its new $875 million tech strategy might give you pause.
• Pangram’s latest Gmail tool claims it can detect when your grandma or coworker sends you AI slop emails.

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This time last week...

Readers’ most-clicked story was about a term we never thought we’d hear, but here we are: “algorithmic immigrants.”