Tea at Trianon: AI Training as ‘Astonishing Theft'

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

AI Training as ‘Astonishing Theft'

From Bo Snerdley:

OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT Nick Turley wrote that the company’s products “are largely substitutive, period” and will become even more so as the technology improves, according to a brief The New York Times and other news publishers made public Thursday in their Manhattan copyright case against the tech companies. Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht warned that “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” the brief stated in part.

The Department of Justice previously told a federal judge that AI training is fair use because models learn patterns from text rather than duplicate it, an argument the companies’ internal messages seemingly undercut.

Turley also wrote that publishers face an “existential threat” from those products, according to the brief.

The brief also cites a document describing the practice as potentially the “largest theft of labor in human history,” and says Hecht recognized that a fair use win for the companies would arguably “make a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’” (Read more.)