Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has raised eyebrows, saying online content is fair game for training AI models.

Content ownership has become one of the most controversial and contentious aspects of AI development. AI models need vast amounts of data for training and most AI firms have used online data as their source, some establishing paid content deals, and others scraping data without paying for it.

According to Suleyman, content found online should be governed by fair use.

“I think that with respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 1990s has been it is fair use,” he said in an interview with CNBC, via The Register. “Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding.”

The one exception Suleyman made is for websites and publishers that explicitly forbid content scraping.

“There’s a separate category where a website or publisher or news organization had explicitly said, ‘do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me,’ so that other people can find that content,” he explained. “But that’s the gray area. And I think that’s going to work its way through the courts.”

Unfortunately, not all AI firms respect ‘do not crawl’ requests. AWS is investigating Perplexity AI over accusations it is scraping websites in violation of their terms, using AWS’ cloud platform to do so.

As Suleyman points out, the legality of the practice will ultimately be decided in the courts but, in the meantime, content ownership will continue to be a hotly debated topic.