Mustafa Suleyman, AI chief, Microsoft, believes in free use of online content to train AI models, and rules out consent or compensation to do so. He expressed this opinion while speaking to Aspen Ideas Festival. He feels that since the 1990s, the social contract of online content on the open web permits its reproduction as it constitutes fair use. The online content is freeware.

His comments have come in the midst of the copyright suits against OpenAI.

Suleyman points out some constraints. There are websites or publishers or news agencies who explicitly declare that scraping or crawling them (for any reason except indexing) is not allowed. Here comes the grey area.

Of course, what Suleyman interprets as fair use is flawed according to the critics. This is especially so when the content is used for commercial AI training. It is a profit-driven activity. It falls outside the realm of fair use doctrine.

AI is here to revolutionize the organizational work and operations. It has to allay the fears of content creators.