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Comment by quantified | Hacker News Reader

Which is more important, the rights of the infringed or of the funded and hyped business?

And don’t forget: ‘if we have to respect copyright law, then CHINA WINS!’

How can China simultaneously be incredibly non-exceptional[weak] and yet strong enough to influence our copyright law across an ocean?

Too big to fail 2: Electric Boogaloo

A new company could buy the bankrupt companies' intellectual property and train a new LLM using the entire internet but only licensed books. This would represent a transfer of funds from investors to publishers.

Perhaps a large publishing company could buy these AI bankrupts…

Nice product you have there, shame if it got sued for copyright infringement.

It's a valid question of if the rights were actually infringed here. Nothing stops you from reading books and then writing based on what you learned. Just because this is done at scale doesn't mean the output is violating the copyright.

An author has the right to choose who can consume their material, it has been like that for a long time, they can and should be able to at least opt out of training. If I don't get anything out of it, why would I let an AI company train their models from my authored material and then profit by selling the output? It doesn't make sense.

classic HN, ignoring the Billions of users who find chatGPT, Gemini, Claude not only useful but life changing, including some of the poorest. So that they can fight for Disney, Record Labels and Trust fund Williamsburg friends

Every author should have the right to have their work remembered and immortalized by AI. We should have the right to influence how AI thinks by publishing our content. AI should remember our names, and the stories of how our work was produced, so it can remember who we are and how we helped it. This is how AI democracy works. The people trying to financially ruin the AI industry by demanding unreasonable amounts of money for themselves, are threatening these fundamental human rights. If the legal risk becomes too large, then the AI labs will respond by training only on synthetic content. That means only AI will get to shape AI's future, and humanity will be erased from the book of life.

> Every author should have the right to have their work remembered and immortalized by AI.

Equally, every author should also have the right to not have their work ingested by AI.

That's what robots.txt does.

However you'd have to delist yourself from search engines to fully prevent AIs from reading the content on your website.

> That's what robots.txt does

It most certainly does not. robots.txt is almost totally worthless against genAI crawlers. Even being unindexed from search engines doesn't keep you safe.

That's a naive statement about robots.txt; nothing about it is binding or enforceable. It is a request that well-behaved crawlers heed. Other crawlers treat the Disallow section as a list of targets.

This is factually false.

There's ample documentation of crawlers straight-up ignoring robots.txt.

It's not a legal control, but a technical one - and a voluntary one, which means that it's trivial to ignore.

And there's obviously nowhere to put a robots.txt for a book that you've published.

The biggest, best, most reputable organizations e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all publicly promised to respect your robots.txt file. You can make them hurt if they lie. So you know they're telling the truth. There's some people out there who don't respect robots.txt like Archive Team. However they're more likely to be treated as folk heroes here on Hacker News than trigger AI training fears.

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