Recently unredacted legal documents and depositions in the New York Times‘ lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI revealed something extraordinary: executives knew full well of the destructive powers of AI when they rushed to launch products featuring the tech in the wake of the explosive success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Internal Microsoft documents quoted by the newspaper’s lawyers warned of an ugly reality now playing out across the entire economy: “doom loops,” in which AI monetizes the work of human creatives while undermining the economic systems that funded their work in the first place.
“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” one internal Microsoft document reads. “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.’”
The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere. Journalists, for example, used to publish work under the assumption that online platforms would drive readership to them. But now, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini simply summarize their articles without sending readers to their sites, sparking a crisis that seems poised to wipe out the independent media.
