ai training data3 articles
Microsoft's Own Exec Called AI News Scraping the Biggest Theft in Human History. Turns Out They Knew.
Unsealed court documents from a lawsuit led by the New York Times reveal that senior Microsoft and OpenAI employees privately acknowledged that scraping news content for AI training was potentially unlawful and harmful. A Microsoft director described the practice as possibly "the largest theft of labor in human history" and a "mockery of fair use," while OpenAI's ChatGPT head warned that AI products posed an "existential threat" to news publishers by substituting for them. News organizations argue this internal evidence, combined with data showing significant drops in website traffic and instances of chatbots reproducing articles verbatim, undermines the companies' fair use defence and demonstrates they knowingly harmed the news industry.
Lawsuit Claims xAI Trained Grok on Child Sexual Abuse Material
A lawsuit filed against Elon Musk's xAI alleges that its Grok AI models were trained on child sexual abuse material (CSAM), including images of the plaintiff, "Jane Doe," who was repeatedly raped as a preschooler to produce such material. Doe claims that xAI not only trained Grok on her original abuse images but also that AI-generated CSAM depicting her has been created using the platform and fed back into Grok's training data. The proposed class action seeks financial damages, the destruction of all Grok-generated CSAM stored by xAI, and measures to prevent the platform from generating such content in the future.
Zuckerberg Defends Employee Keystroke Monitoring in Leaked Audio: 'Smart People Using Computers'
In a leaked audio recording, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly defended the company's practice of monitoring employees' keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screenshots, arguing the data is needed to train Meta's AI models and give the company a competitive edge over rivals. He claimed the surveillance tool, called the Model Capability Initiative, is not used for performance tracking or employee oversight, but solely to teach AI systems how skilled engineers use computers. Meta is not alone in this approach, as Microsoft and xAI are also reportedly using their own workforces to generate AI training data.