I watched this entire interview just to make sure the missing context wasn't affecting his words in some way I couldn't fathom.

Here's the direct quote from Mustafa Suleyman (also on video at Twitter):

I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like. That’s been the understanding.

It came as a relief to find at least a few others online finding this almost unbelievable coming not from a short-sighted teenager, but from a leader at Microsoft. Attention was probably raised by the concise Sean Hollister for The Verge:

I am not a lawyer, but even I can tell you that the moment you create a work, it’s automatically protected by copyright in the US. You don’t even need to apply for it, and you certainly don’t void your rights just by publishing it on the web.

And here's Ruben Schade at Rubenerd:

This is the same company behind this famous letter in 1976.

(The "famous letter" is a physically typewritten appeal from Bill Gates to software-developing hobbyists, asking how they expect quality software tools should exist if the authors' wishes about how it's copied are not respected.)

Suleyman was speaking at a convention about the future of "AI." He also did a recent TED Talk and published a book on the subject. I'll believe he's an expert on it.

So, if we're trying to be charitable to Suleyman, we might muster a defense like "he was speaking in the context of AI." Well, the topic does relate to "AI," which does read the public Web for information to interpret and summarize. If humans can legally do this, can automations legally do it? That's its own question, worthy of some debate by virtue of its newness.

But while this quote came while discussing that topic, the point was that something called "the understanding" has been that copying all public Web content has been okay with everyone since the 1990s. Were neural networks and large language models accessing the Web in the 1990s? If that technology, which wouldn't enter public consciousness for three more decades, had secretly been invented and executed that early on, would its existence have been part of a worldwide "social contract"? The interpretational charity doesn't survive. Suleyman is telling us what he thinks about the Web historically and generally, not merely with respect to AI.

He really is unambiguously and directly implying that, for example, if an independent musician generously decided to offer downloads of their copywritten music album for free on the Web, it would be totally okay for Paramount to feature it beneath the opening credits of their latest Tom Hanks flick without even asking, owing to this perceived "social contract" or "understanding."

In reality, would the artist be okay with that use of their music? They might be deeply honoured and love it. Or they might be deeply offended and move to legal action if the studio didn't negotiate compensation. The real answer is that you'd have to ask. The notion of some pervasive "understanding" constituting full endorsement to copy and use anyone's work – across a pluralistic and open virtual space containing practically every human perspective – isn't just insufficient, it's hallucinatory.

And that's what staggers me about Suleyman. Seemingly without even noticing, he revealed his lack of even the most basic human respect for people's creative work.

For comparison, I'm trying to imagine an Apple executive, like Tim Cook or Craig Federighi, casually mentioning that it's fine for anyone to copy the work of any Web publisher from the 1990s through the present. It just wouldn't happen.

But what's even more staggering is that I couldn't imagine it happening with Microsoft either. Microsoft is one of the first great personal computing companies. I don't think they've ever been the most original, the most impressive, or the most graceful. But I've always taken Microsoft as sort of endearingly bumbling at worst. I've known them to lack insight or taste, but not to lack the most basic regard for human creativity.

So I've found myself asking what's going to happen. Is Suleyman going to publicly apologize? Is Microsoft going to issue a corrective statement? Will Suleyman be fired? Well, it's been a week, and no such news.

What do I conclude from all this? The looming fear is that I must consider that Microsoft is slightly less the Microsoft of old, even at its heart. And that's a little dispiriting.

But perhaps more foreboding: "AI" is a technology in its infancy, as impressive as it is fraught with uncertainty. If there's one quality needed in the world's most well-positioned expert developers of the technology, it's a deep respect for humanity.