[24553] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday on
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Sep 22 11:44:13 2026
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:30:22 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
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This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on how newly
unsealed court documents confirm that Big Tech has been making Big
Lies about AI. As always there may have been minor wording variations
from this script as I presented this report live on air.
- - -
Well, many experts consider recent warnings of "AI threats to
humanity's existence" from AI firms to be largely a smokescreen from
Big Tech to try divert attention from real world AI-related damage.
Things like building polluting data centers, spewing misinformation,
error-prone medical and law enforcement AI transcription systems,
chatbots reportedly contributing to suicides, and a long list of other
problems. Just a few days ago the U.S. was reportedly very close to
potentially starting a war with China, when an AI hallucination false
report found its way into official military briefing materials and
almost triggered U.S. military action against China.
But now stunning information is coming out of a court case involving
the New York Times and other publishers against various AI companies.
The AI firms have long argued that their vacuuming up of data from the
Internet and other sources to train their AI models, usually without
asking permission from or paying the sources, is completely legal. The
federal government is currently very supportive of AI and data centers
and has taken the AI firms' side in this dispute, despite widespread
bipartisan, more than 75% public opposition to data centers. But newly
unsealed documents from the case are going public, and they're
maddening.
Because it's apparent that inside various of these firms, employees
and executives knew that some of their AI-related actions were
unethical, sometimes likely illegal, and could virtually destroy much
of the Internet's value. An internal Microsoft document said that
millions of people around the world would soon consider AI models
sucking up their work to be an "astonishing theft of unprecedented
proportions" and could create a "doom loop" that destroyed the very
sources on which AI models were training. At OpenAI, AI development
was said to pose an existential threat to publishers and would
ultimately wipe them out entirely. In another document, OpenAI's
president is quoted as saying "ah nice" when told that staffers had
developed a way to bypass the New York Times paywall.
Documents show internal concerns at Microsoft that large AI models
were a product that "destroys it's supply chain". These quotes go on
and on such as saying "AI substitutes for the labor of people who
define the culture of society". Or AI stepping thoughtlessly into
other parts of life and leaving a mess on the carpet. Or saying that
no matter how prominently the AI firms show links to external sites,
the firms know users aren't going to click on them, and other similar
quotes.
In other words, these documents confirm what critics have been saying
and what the firms have typically denied. There were people in the
firms who knew that their data collecting for training AI was sucking
the life out of Web sites on an enormous scale, sites that so many
people had worked so hard to build. Meanwhile, Google just announced
testing of another new AI feature that publishers fear will steal even
more clicks from their sites.
Of course the firms are now trying to make excuses for these damning
internal quotes, but it's easy to see why many observers feel that
it's now confirmed that Big Tech has been engaging in Big Lies about
AI.
The last remaining vestiges of Big Tech credibility are rapidly
vanishing. It should be no surprise if their ability to get most
people to believe much of anything these firms say going forward will
be nearly impossible -- and Big Tech will have nobody but themselves
to blame for their sordid situation.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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