Microsoft's AI CEO: Web Content (Without a Robots.txt File) is 'Freeware' for AI Training

Slashdot reader joshuark shared this report from Windows Central

Microsoft may have opened a can of worms with recent comments made by the tech giant's CEO of AI Mustafa Suleyman. The CEO spoke with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this week. In his remarks, Suleyman claimed that all content shared on the web is available to be used for AI training unless a content producer says otherwise specifically.
The whole discussion was interesting — but this particular question was very direct. CNBC's interviewer specifically said, 'There are a number of authors here... and a number of journalists as well. And it appears that a lot of the information that has been trained on over the years has come from the web — and some of it's the open web, and some of it's not, and we've heard stories about how OpenAI was turning YouTube videos into transcripts and then training on the transcripts.'
The question becomes 'Who is supposed to own the IP, who is supposed to get value from the IP, and whether, to put it in very blunt terms, whether the AI companies have effectively stolen the world's IP.'
Suleyman begins his answer — at the 14:40 mark — with 'Yeah, I think — look, it's a very fair argument.'

SULEYMAN: 'I think that with respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding.

'There's a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, 'Do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts.'

Q: And what does that mean, when you say 'It's a gray area'?

SULEYMAN: 'Well, if — so far, some people have taken that information... but that's going to get litigated, and I think that's rightly so...

'You know, look, the economics of information are about to radically change, because we're going to reduce the cost of production of knowledge to zero marginal cost. And this is just a very difficult thing for people to intuit — but in 15 or 20 years time, we will be producing new scientific cultural knowledge at almost zero marginal cost. It will be widely open sourced and available to everybody. And I think that is going to be, you know, a true inflection point in the history of our species. Because what are we, collectively, as an organism of humans, other than an intellectual production engine. We produce knowledge. Our science makes us better. And so what we really want in the world, in my opinion, are new engines that can turbocharge discovery and invention.'

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