Publishers finally have AI buyers for their content yet zero say in the price

In the early days of generative AI, it seemed as if the labs were so heads-down building large language models that they didn’t think much about the raw material they were using. After all, big data sets like Common Crawl already existed, and trawling the open web was how search engines had worked for decades. Chatbots were arguably just a variation on that idea. Who knew that their method for sourcing information would get so controversial? It turns out, everybody. In a brief made public September 17 in The New York Times’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, internal documents show people at both companies saying things that suggest they understood exactly what they were taking, and how it would look. Microsoft’s Brent Hecht, a director of applied science, warned in a memo in early 2023 that “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft,” and called it “the largest theft of labor in human history.” When a researcher described getting around the Times paywall, OpenAI President Greg Brockman replied, “ah nice.” And Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, called chatbots an “existential threat” to publ…