OpenAI And Microsoft Knew Their Sh*t Would Kill Newspapers Like Big Tobacco Knew About Lung Cancer And Big Oil Knew About Climate Change

I’m the Joker now.

This is me because I am the Joker. (Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash)

I may not be able to write this one coherently because wow am I ever mad about it!

So there’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence this week and right in the middle of it some files from a New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft were unsealed and unredacted and if you hear some popping noises over the next day or two it’s probably time to check on your journalist besties because their heads might be exploding!

The unredacted filing is the latest twist in a three-year-old lawsuit in which the New York Times has said that the firms violated copyright law by training AI models on its publications. OpenAI has been saying that their scraping of news organizations constitutes fair use, which lets others use original work without compensation if they are doing journalism, or criticism, or parody, or in some cases (modestly points to self) all three!

Or give us any amount of your choosing, one-time or monthly, the Paypal way.

However, fair use doctrine depends on a very important detail: that it does not substitute or harm the market for the original work, which companies like OpenAI have been claiming is the case, even as newsrooms suffered through so many new cuts this year alone that newsrooms, the ones that still exist anyway, are even more like ghost towns than ever.

These documents put the lie to all of that nonsense though. It’s got quotes from Microsoft executives saying they knew what they were doing all along.

Microsoft’s own data shows its Copilot “answer engine” caused click-through rates for The New York Times’ domain to drop as much as 93% compared to traditional Bing search. An internal Microsoft presentation written by Microsoft’s director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, in January 2024 describes the decline as a “doom loop” that would “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,’” reads the Microsoft document, as quoted in the filing.

Listen, everything is total shit in journalism and has been since I started all the way back in 1995, which was a year that took place in the last century. When I first rolled up to my first journalism job at a radio station (shout-out to KOGO, which still exists, somehow!), I got to meet all my new coworkers, who were all crestfallen because half the newsroom had been laid off less than two weeks before I arrived to do scut work and answer phones. Bet they all appreciated having my dumb 18-year-old ass acting all chipper and asking a bunch of dumbshit questions!

Anyway, there were about fifty people left in that newsroom between the board ops and the reporters and the producers and the people who just seemed to live at the radio station with no real role (I was one of these). They called it a “skeleton crew.” Friends, I went back to that same station for a visit about five years ago and found the same newsroom and the same desks and equipment and a cool four people were sitting there, in this massive newsroom, surrounded by all this equipment that never got used any more.

It was terribly depressing, especially since radio was my first and best love and I still dream of running a station, someday, after securing a lot of money somehow! But my point is, news media, or at least the outlets that aren’t tonguing the far Right’s balls, is really suffering and there are a lot of journalists out there who have no idea what to do with themselves. Additionally, there are a lot of really, really important stories going under-covered or not covered at all as a result, because there are no working journalists left to cover them, and doing journalism work can sometimes be expensive, so it’s not exactly something people do as a hobby unless they already have money or just hate themselves!

It’s been a long career filled with creepers and gropers and extremely sweaty bosses coming in while I was working alone just to take photos of my naked feet, but despite all of that I was able to get some journalism done as well. I covered lots of important things and wrote about them in many places, including on social media, because I love communication, and of course now it’s all getting fed into the maw of the AI machine, just so that ChatGPT can sound human while it tells vulnerable people to kill all their family members!

And that is the infuriating part. They knew all this and they fucking did it anyway. These files, which were unsealed this week, say as much.

Fuck them.

This is my pledge to you that I will never, ever use any sort of generative AI.

For one thing, those fuckers don’t get to justify their theft by pointing to people like me. For another, even with all this money and leverage and alleged brainpower, even with this huge labor theft that they did knowingly, they still can’t create anything that writes better than I do, or better than any human does. And they never will.