Newly unsealed court documents in The New York Times’ 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show executives worried about ChatGPT training that scraped millions of news articles, according to The New York Times. Microsoft’s director of Applied Science, Dr. Brent Hecht, called OpenAI’s work akin to the “largest theft of labor in human history” that could create a “doom loop,” while OpenAI exec Nick Turley said it represented an “existential threat to publishers.” The unredacted materials also show OpenAI and its partners obtained training content by bypassing paywalls, built training datasets by scrapping millions of documents, and erased copyright notices from training data. The NYT and five other writers argue big tech companies broke copyright law by scraping millions of their stories and using the text without approval or compensation to train advanced large language model systems. Microsoft disavowed its employees’ statements; spokesperson Alex Haurek said Microsoft’s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism. The documents also show Greg Brockman responded “ah nice” to a paywall hack, and a 2023 internal Microsoft document said millions of people will soon consider large models “hoovering up” all their work an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.