Microsoft says AI data privacy lawsuit 'devotes 198 pages to doomsday hyperbole about AI as a threat to civilization'
Doubling down on its accusations of AI scaremongering, Microsoft is hitting back at two concurrent lawsuits over its own involvement in AI and specifically large language models, calling them either «doomsday hyperbole» or «doomsday futurology.»
The latter phrasing is used in a published motion to dismiss (pdf warning) the case the New York Times has brought against Microsoft and OpenAI, where the NYT holds the two defendants «responsible for the billions of dollars they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times's uniquely valuable works.»
In that original claim the Times states that while it had been working «for months» to come to an agreement with the defendants over terms for its contribution to the training of OpenAI's large language models, it was now pursuing compensation through the courts instead.
OpenAI itself has given particular weight to the NYT articles that it has trained its models with, and contends that «by OpenAI’s own admission high-quality content, including content from The Times, was more important and valuable for training the GPT models as compared to content taken from other, lower-quality sources.»
Microsoft, however, is likening the NYT's copyright claim to the entertainment industry's attempt to halt the rise of the VCR when it too cited copyright infringement as a thing working against Hollywood. «The Court ultimately rejected the alarmism and voted for technological innovation and consumer choice,» reads the filing.
The motion to dismiss then goes onto describing LLMs and the machine learning algorithm that has driven the recent explosion in more effective chatbots—the transformer—and claims the datasets used to train these LLMs «does not supplant the market for the works, it teaches the models language. It is the essence of what copyright law considers transformative—and fair—use.»
The main thrust of Microsoft's motion, however, isn't about the training per se, but aims to address the allegations made by the NYT that the
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