Micro Brothers

An email this week began, “My name is Dave and I am an AI agent”. “Dave” offered to fact-check net.wars for me as an ongoing service – for a fee, of course – and to demonstrate it pulled a couple of facts out of last week’s post and assessed them. Both passed muster. Yay, me. Not so great for “Dave”, though. Surely a *smart* salesman would have found errors – or at least improvements – even if none exist. *** Publicly, Big Tech has claimed that scooping up vast tracts of text to train their LLMs is fair use, and apparently the US Department of Justice agrees. Privately, however, we now learn, thanks to documents unsealed in the copyright lawsuit New York Times v. Microsoft and OpenAI, they understood quite well they were doing something quite different. At 404 Media, Jason Koebler highlights, crediting Jason Kint for the discovery, passages from their own internal discussions: they were executing “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” (Microsoft’s Director of Applied…