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Comment by luxuryballs | Hacker News Reader

How is it much different from a search index? it’s just a new interface to get at some info, rather than Google and Firefox, it already pre-browsed the web for you, and is displaying back the content. If the end user gleans some actual copyrighted work from the search they still need permission to use it, but it’s also likely it’s just a derivative, or the end user is just reading an example and learning from it at consumption time. Is a web crawler violating copyright? Or is it the user who sells a copyrighted image?

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> How is it much different from a search index?

A search index usually links to the source. Without that a search index is worthless, you can't use content if you don't even know where it comes from and who holds the rights.

Google search links to sources like Wikipedia in its info boxes, because without that you can't know whether the info is reliable or sourced from my brother's coworker's imaginary flat-earther friend.

It's not displaying back the "content". It's training a model with statistics based on the writing that was either paid for by a site publisher in the hope of earning ad revenue, or contributed to the community for free.

If a model was to add attributions to each of its answers, then perhaps the search engine analogy would hold. But, they don't (and right now, to my understanding, can't.)

The AI art models are scraping imagery made by human effort and skill and then more humans label and tag it so it can be indexed, ( because you can show a computer an image all day long and it still won't 'learn' what it is unless you tag it) and then another human puts in their wishlist of art they want (without any cost or effort to learn skill) and the 'AI' displays back a collage of the content from the wishlist. And then presto all sorts of merchandise are available with this art taken without permission from the people that made it. People do the physical action of creating imagery, AI indexes it.

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