“Our AI content strategy has started a doom loop that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time. It is highly unusual that an end product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its content supply chain.”

Yeah, so they say this in a couple different places. There's this quote, basically, like the training of LLMs is quote, an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions. And they also said that it's the largest theft of labor in human history. This quote came from Microsoft's director of applied science, who it's basically like a Microsoft executive that came from a deposition. And kind of like throughout the case or throughout these quotes, the executives at these AI companies are admitting that one, they were trained on copyrighted material, which we've known forever, but it's still notable that they are kind of saying it in court. And then the other thing that they're saying is that this is a competitive product with the New York Times and with journalists in general. They're trying to make a fair use argument. And the fair use argument, like some of the things that you consider when something is potentially fair use under copyright law is whether it's transformative, meaning whether it's like substantially different from the original source, which these AI companies have argued that LLM training is. And then also whether it competes with that original source, like whether it destroys the market for that original thing that you're stealing or taking or using or remixing. And what these executives are saying is that, yes, ChatGPT and LLMs and AI in general is making work that is substantially similar to what the New York Times is doing, that people are using ChatGPT in a way that they used to use the New York Times, meaning they're getting their news from it. And then interestingly, like there's a ChatGPT engineer in here saying that they have tried adding links to the output from ChatGPT and people don't click. Like people don't go to the original source. Satya Nadella was in here. The CEO of Microsoft was in here saying that it's a competitive product. And also Microsoft did this study that after they started adding AI to their search results, clicks to news sites and the New York Times fell by more than 90%. So, I mean, just like a huge, huge decrease. And all this aligns with what we've seen in real life. News sites are not getting clicks from Google anymore because of AI overviews, like that traffic has created, so on and so forth.

As you allude to, it's different to hear them say and they're milling it. And of course, this isn't a deposition of, you know, Google, but the same would apply most likely to Google AI summaries as well. And we've seen other reporting on that as well. So they definitely know that they are sabotaging the news industry, which ironically is the thing that they are pulling all the reporting from to then present to their own users, right? I guess just on that briefly, because you brought up sort of the media stuff, there's a bit where OpenAI admits to getting around the New York Times paywall. Now, I don't think this is probably going to be the most sophisticated thing in the world. I think anybody on the internet probably knows how to get around, you know, certain paywalls and that sort of thing. But what did they say and sort of what is the significance of that?

Is there a date for those?

There's not a date. I mean, a lot of this stuff was happening around like GPT-3. GPT-3 was like many at this point, generations ago, but that's kind of the moment that ChatGPT was like became a thing and where it had this amazing growth and people started using it. And then the depositions have taken place over the last like year. So a lot of this was said within the last year, but then a lot of the court case has to do with the initial training of these models like years ago. But this sort of like nods at the idea of like, I guess, model collapse or the idea that like you destroy all the journalists, you destroy all the writers, you destroy all the human labor. Then you just have AI training on AI or AI training on really low quality stuff. And, you know, that hasn't happened yet, but it sort of is. As in, if you go search for stuff on Chat GPT or on some like Gemini, et cetera, like a lot of high-quality websites won't provide information to those models. And so you end up with like really shitty content and shitty, low-quality websites being cited in these models. And that's part of the whole like generative engine optimization game where it's like, we'll just create our own websites that will then be cited by AI and so on and so forth. And it's like, that is definitely starting to happen. The entire collapse of the system isn't happening, although, you know, there's like all these papers about how it might and how in like more controlled situations it is, like that, that sort of thing. But it's pretty, pretty bleak.

Yeah. So, I mean, listeners and viewers of this podcast probably kind of already know of this, right? And we obviously know it and other people in the media industry do, other people who just follow AI are like none of these are new ideas to them. But it is obviously significant that we're hearing this from Microsoft and Open AI people just around us out. Like, why do you think it is significant that we're now learning that they actually had internalized a lot of these criticisms as well? It's only now that we're learning them, even though they tried to not have it come out.