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Comment by danlitt | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what you mean exactly. If Perplexity is actually doing something with your article in-band (e.g. downloading it, processing it, and present that processed article to the user) then they're just breaking the law.

I've never used that tool (and don't plan to) so I don't know. If they just embed the content in an iframe or something then there's no issue (but then there's no need or point in scraping). If they're just scraping to train then I think you also imply there's no issue. If they're just copying your content (even if the prompt is "Hey Perplexity, summarise this article <ARTICLE_TEXT>") then that's vanilla infringement, whether they lie about their UA or not.

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> If they're just scraping to train then I think you also imply there's no issue. If they're just copying your content (even if the prompt is "Hey Perplexity, summarise this article <ARTICLE_TEXT>") then that's vanilla infringement, whether they lie about their UA or not.

Except, it can't possibly be like that - that would kill the Internet as you know it. It makes sense to consider scrapping for purposes of training as infringement - I personally disagree, I'm totally on the side of AI companies on this one, but there's a reasonable argument there. But in terms of me requesting a summary, and the AI tool doing it server-side before sending it to me, without also adding it to the pile of its own training data? Banning that would mean banning all user-generated content websites, all web viewing or editing tools, web preview tools, optimizing proxies, malware scanners, corporate proxies, hell, maybe even desktop viewers and editing tools.

There are always multiple programs between your website and your user's eyeballs. Most of them do some transformations. Most of them are third-party, usually commercial software. That's how everything works. Software made by "AI company" isn't special here. Trying to make it otherwise is some really weird form of prejudice-driven discrimination.

This is not accurate, and it would not. As much as I would like it to be the case, you are not free to use public internet content for arbitrary purposes. In general (as you probably know), you rely on the idea that a court would consider your processing fair use.

It's not transformative, it uses the entire work, the work copied is not a summary of facts, and insofar as their is a market at all, it circumvents that market. It fails every test.

(training OTOH is inherently transformative, and I suspect likely to turn out to be a fair use)

Sure it is, but which of the many small websites are going to be able to fight them legally? Most companies would go broke before getting a ruling.

Reality is, the law doesn't matter if you're big enough. As long as they're not stealing content from the big ones, they're going to be fine.

Well, I guess what I mean is if the situation is as I describe in my previous comment, then anyone who did have the money to fight it would be a shoe-in. It's a much stronger case than, for example, the ongoing lawsuits by Matthew Butterick and others (https://llmlitigation.com/).

Thanks for the link, that's fantastic to hear!

I'm seriously sick of that whole "laundering copyright via AI"-grift - and the destruction of the creative industry is already pretty noticable. All the creatives who brought us all those wonderful masterworks with lots of thought and talent behind, they're all going bankrupt and getting fired right now.

It's truly a tragedy - the loss of art is so much more serious than people seem to think it is, considering how integral all kinds of creative works are to a modern human live. Just imagine all of that being without any thought, just statistically optimized for enjoyment... ugh.

> destruction of the creative industry is already pretty noticable.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I’d be interested to know what jobs have been lost to AI (or if you are talking about something else)

Sorry for the late reply, was way too tired yesterday.

The most extreme situation is concept artists right now. Essentially, the entire profession has lost their jobs in the last year. Or casual artists making drawings for commission - they can't compete with AI and mostly had to stop selling their art. Similar is happening to professional translators - with AI, the translations are close enough to native that nobody needs them anymore.

The book market is getting flooded with AI-crap, so is of course the web. Authors are losing their jobs.

Currently, it seems to be creeping into the music market - not sure if people are going to notice/accept AI-made music. All the fantastic artists creating dubs are starting to go away as well, after all you can just synthesize their voices now.

It's quite sad, all considered.

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