AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
axelk.ee
axelk.ee
It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing!
It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different.
“You say I can pick one flower, but you get upset when I take a bunch. That’s inconsistent. Check and mate.”
But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes. Everyone knows this, but sometimes they seem to find it inconvenient to admit it. Not that effects of the qualitative change are always bad, but they are often different, and worth considering rather than dismissing.
If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business.
Where are all the instances of "one word" being "stolen by AI", and people getting mad over it?
If one word is stolen by Joe, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by Meta, that's business.
AI isn't the problem, is corporations using AI that are the problem
quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes
* Note that it may be misattributed to him
It provides distribution and modification rights to "any person obtaining a copy of the software" and explicitly requires attribution for any significant parts.
Mass-ingesting the code with a script without any human even reading the licence is a very different kind of copying mechanism and there is no person involved... The contract was bypassed completely. A contract requires consent from both parties to be binding. When ingesting code into the AI training set, nobody even read the license. There was no agreement; neither explicit nor implicit... Because the consumer, a script, never read the contact for that specific project.
There was nobody present when the copying occurred; on neither side! It cannot possibly constitute an agreement between two parties.
Both operations require some degree of human awareness. What you appear to be saying is, a human can only use a limited algorithm to access this source code, not a sophisticated one. And where do you draw that line? Who should get to say what is too sophisticated?
Error: your algorithm is too sophisticated to proceed, please provide more human awareness, it's a critical difference.
Unfortunately there is no way to agree to a license of a software you're using if you didn't read the license or if you're not even aware that you're using the licence. This is what's happening at the training stage.
If you say that awareness doesn't matter then it means you cannot stop AI from stealing any IP open source or not.
I think the main issue with LLMs is that there is no mechanism to stop them from stealing. Thus they are guaranteed to infringe on copyright to some extent.
Also, beyond copying and copyright, there is another problem that LLMs are also infecting the logic and expertise built into the project. This is a completely novel mechanism and needs to be treated as separate under the law. Else it would be the end of all IP.
Well, sure there is—for the people running them.
If you're building training data for an LLM, you only use data that a) is firmly in the public domain, or b) you have a clear and documented legal right to use.
I agree with “must involve a person. https://opensource.org/license/mit starts with (emphasis added) “Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any PERSON obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”)”.
That means it doesn’t give an LLM any rights. The way I see it, LLMs run (directly or indirectly) by a person can do stuff on their behalf, though, just as your CI pipeline can download and compile MIT-licensed software.
I definitely disagree with the “on a small scale” as the license continues (again, emphasis added) “to deal in the Software WITHOUT RESTRICTION, including WITHOUT LIMITATION the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software”.
A person already pre-consented to the licenses of all the software which the pipeline downloaded. Big companies go through those dependency lists carefully already and remove those which do not meet their policies. This is a very intentional process.
I disagree. I think it’s entirely within the license to have your pipeline automatically pull in the latest version of a library, even if the new one happens to pull in a new MIT-licensed library (whether that’s a good idea and whether CI pipelines should, somehow, verify that code pulled in has an acceptable license are different discussions)
I also think it’s complete within the MIT license to tell a LLM that it can search for MIT-licensed libraries and use them without asking you.
Or a stalker?
If you’re a EU citizen, do a web search for “right to be forgotten”.
What material differences exist between the two besides "humans good, computers bad"?
>Calling that learning is a distraction from the real copyright violations going on.
Most courts so far have ruled that it counts as fair use.
"The commons" was an incredibly successful system, and medieval (and prior) villages used it to great success, for the entire village's benefit! "Commons" are a great thing for everyone to have!
The real history is that as advances in technology (like the Industrial Revolution) changed things, certain rich villagers were suddenly able to manage more animals than they could before. Those (specific/rich) people over-used the commons, creating the "tragedy" we all know of.
The real lesson of history is not that commons fail: to the contrary, they worked great and helped everyone for centuries! The real lesson is "watch the fuck out for the new rich (especially when they just became rich because of recent technology advancements): those bastard will steal from everyone for their own benefit!"
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how laws work. It's not the scale that makes it okay, it's that it's done through some official process. Trump's raid to grab Maduro killed less than 100 people. Pretty modest by "genocide" standards, and is easily eclipsed by gang/cartel violence. Yet nobody is going after Trump because he didn't meet some kill quota to get special protection, nor are people condoning cartel violence because they killed far more than Trump.
International Right for those who don't have all the nukes and lobotomized cannon meat bag ready to invade on a whim, and on the other side doing all the crimes and atrocities, straight transgress all legal processes ever invented, and expecting no possible punishment in return.
Number of directly killed people is not something that can be eclipsed by bigger number of killed people. Not in a mind that keeps empathy high in its value.
"You say I can take a photo of one flower in your flowerbed you put next to the public street, but you get upset when I take a bunch of photos of many public flowerbeds. That's both an over-reach and inconsistent."
It's weird to me how often on HN of all places I see arguments that can be refuted with "scale matters". I commonly see arguments on all sorts of topics that make the same mistake you're calling out.
unauthorized plagiarism on the individual level is bad, at the medium scale is ick, but at the ultragigantic scale is meh.
laundering through an llm takes away the real moral ick from the plagiarism - the lying and building of ego by the person reboxing somebody else's ideas and work.
Instead the bot lies to people who use its output to boost their ego. Not sure it's really changing the moral calculus here.
The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably. That's not my hot take, that's a fact from the NYT survey published today.
It's going to be hilarious when VCs, having expropriated the IP of the entire internet, build The Layoff Machine That Does Everything Without Workers, and then the voters decide to just...enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
Sure, where AI means threatens my job or my skills, people view it unfavourably.
But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions.
>enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism
Maybe in other countries, initially, but the US is very firmly a plutocracy, and has a populace that will very happily vote against their own interests because the plutocrat-owned media told them to. And yeah, it is very rapidly approaching the point where there is going to be zero chance of a revolution even if people opened their eyes.
Which is precisely why the US is now threatening other countries as well, because plutocracy is threatened by rational, educated, better managed countries. Canada, for instance, is an example that country doesn't have to revert to being an idiocracy, so it's first in the crosshairs.
I don't see any contradiction. I criticize the hell out of guns and want them strictly controlled, and yet I own one. `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`
People can use AI and still demand that all of society receive the benefits, instead of a small group of oppressors.
[Citation needed]
I know many more people who do not use AI than who use it, and many more who refuse to use AI than people who are enthusiastic about it.
Given your username, you are almost certainly in a bubble—an echo chamber—that makes it seem to you as though "everyone is using it." I recommend getting outside that bubble and talking to non-technical people outside your usual circles, especially people in the arts and humanities.
Most of the people I hear from who use AI say everyone they know uses AI.
Most of the people I hear from who don't use AI say no one they know uses AI.
It seems to me that we've got competing bubbles here. But the statistics certainly show that, leaving aside whether they use it, most people don't like it or want it.
...I think it's also worth noting that AI usage is likely to be "louder" than AI avoidance in many cases—that is, whichever side of this one falls on, it's easier to detect someone pasting from ChatGPT directly into emails, or complaining that Gemini told them you would sell them XYZ, than it is to detect someone who's just keeping on the way they've always been.
The problem here is, in your example the small scale example, and the large scale example are both unacceptable behavior.
Learning from others at a small scale is not only socially acceptable, but is the foundation of how advancement works.
So this concept of the issue of the scale being the issue isn't at its core the problem, its that something that that is desired behavior in a human, is not socially acceptable because of a machine is doing it.
Suddenly everyone and their grandma are specialist at everything and the actual value of understanding is not appreciated anymore.
IMO, we're just giving special weight to understanding just because it gives people wages. Someone's specific brain structure should not privilege them over others. UBI or something equitable on those lines is the answer.
Exactly, if anything, the logic (a bit bad -> really bad) shows that one person learning from one thing is far inferior to one person learning from every thing (a bit good -> really good).
This is true, shows how human thought differs from AI. AI needs massive datasets to be coherent.
no, not really, or at the very least they're not at all in the same category of "unacceptable behavior"
If it is acceptable for a person to learn, then it should be acceptable for a machine. And any derived works produced from that information isn't theft or copyright violation.
Though I do think there is a valid gripe with the LLMs being trained on pirated materials. I've also personally learned from a lot of PDF of textbooks I didn't own.
Is there a name for the fallacy when people act like models and algorithms should be granted the same rights as human beings?
Tools aren't granted rights. Why do we need to make an exemption for AI?
In a sane world, things produced by tools are owned and credited as creations by the users of tools, there are many who seem to argue that isn't the case with AI.
And that some how, that anything produced based on the knowledge it was trained on is some sort of plagiarism or copyright violation of the original source material even when none of that material is present in the end result?
So if we can't just leave it at its a tool, then we have to look at existing frameworks of laws and ethics to make the case of how this should be treated.
Sure you can do that, but because there are several laws against that specific action already, you will be likely face prosecution, and the content (something poorly duplicated, not created) would be seized.
But lets assume, that your camera has an LLM in it, and it trained in this fashion, and you performed this action on countless other films, and then the camera could produce wholly unique and original work that did not have any duplication of the original works it sampled. The work produced would not be a violation of copyright, nor would it be plagiarism.
Just as someone whose education was to watch a large number of movies, and then created their own based on that education.
But as previously mentioned you may face the ramifications of violating the agreement you had for accessing the original source material in an illegal way.
Of course they are! Is a video recorder not a tool? No one is claiming rights for video recorders.
Once again, the status quo is that tools do not get rights, the burden is on you to prove why an exemption should be made, not on those who are asking "why should tools get rights?"
I'm also not sure where the concept of "the tool" be given a right to anything, That certainly isn't my argument, the right of the work should be to the user/owner used to create things with the tool. There are several pieces in the SFMOMA that use automation to create art, that art is credited to the creator of the machine, not the machine, I see AI in a similar lens.
You are intentionally selecting a device that makes duplicates of things as your comparator, so I can't tell if that is biased or some sort of flaw in your argument.
But an LLM being trained on works, and generating something based off of that training is not a duplication of any specific copyrighted material, and is wholly unique is not duplication.
Right[1], and humans can do that, no problem - ingesting existing material and recombining them to produce something new (not necessarily unique) is a right that humans are afforded. The question being asked is, since we don't allow that right to any other tools, why does this tool need an exemption?
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[1] Not really (i.e. I don't necessarily agree with this point), but lets assume it for the sake of this discussion.
But in the same regard it is very likely at some point the ability to simulate a human mind and persona is a real possibility.
That's not the criticism, that's the straw man used to dodge the criticism. Of course the straw man makes no sense, that's why it gets put up.
Machines aren't doing anything, humans are doing things, with or without machines.
"It's fine to raise the temperature of your surroundings by 0.0001 degrees by exhaling. It's less fine to set a house on fire, and even less fine to ignite a nuke. But aren't the all the same thing? How hypocritical that raising temperature is okay for some but not others???"
That things can change quality with quantity/frequency is trivially obvious, and you can think of many examples. Bad ones, good ones, doesn't matter. The point of OP stands, all that was added was how absolutely brazen the nonsense is getting.
Ultimately we have to reckon with the fact that there's nothing which is recommended to do X of, but is abhorrent to do 10X of.
No we don't, because that's nonsense. You can ask a stranger in the street for the time of day once, and they will react very, very differently if you ask them 10 times in a row. You can drive N miles per hour in a school zone, you cannot drive at 10x the speed, and so on.
But I don't see how that relates to copyright or llm at all. 'Learning', at scale, is not an inconvenience, atleast in any forward looking society.
claiming to be human
Your vague response doesn't seem to have anything to do with the the base subject this whole thing revolves around. Plagiarism be it small scale or large isn't acceptable, and the idea that humans doing things that are wrong is ok, but AI doing the same thing at large scale is not ok?
No, I instead refuted your reply.
> but AI doing the same thing at large scale is not ok?
No, humans doing things can be okay or not so okay depending on the scale they do them at. "AI" isn't "doing" anything by itself, at all, so that doesn't enter into it at all. You cannot separate "scale" and "thing". Rubbing your hands to make them warmer is fine, igniting a nuke is not, both aren't "basically the same thing, raising temperature, just at different scales". You didn't reject the premise, you didn't understand it in the first place, and knocked down your own straw man instead. Which I pointed out, that's all.
Again, this isn't a "this at small scale is ok, but at large scale it isn't" argument. Small scale plagiarism isn't acceptable, neither is large scale.
You are refuting my reply seemingly without the context of the article, and larger issue at hand.
Don't be condescending when you aren't even accurately a following the original premise or purpose.
> If it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale.
is a fallacy. Which it is. You confirm this by apparently seeing a difference between generating a little bit of heat and a whole lot, to name one of infinite examples anyone can easily come up with.
> Again, this isn't a "this at small scale is ok, but at large scale it isn't" argument.
You just keep doing the thing I pointed out in my first reply, you claim "it's not this" on a technicality, and then say "so therefore it's this instead", and the other thing is a criticism nobody brings up, ever.
And it gains you nothing, because if plagiarism isn't even okay at small scale, surely you can see how it's even less okay at big scale.
It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still there. Whatever 'theft' you perceive is entirely in your head; you were deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of your thing.
And you understand that. You're not stupid. This is the thing: AI is convenient for corporations, so you'll make dishonest arguments to justify your unethical behavior. Maybe you even believe what you say, but that's because people will hold on to any flimsy thing that lets them feel like they're good people, not because the reasoning actually makes any sense.
This is why people talking about AI get booed at speeches. There's no conversation to be had: you're not interested in the truth, or what's right, or what's good for anyone but yourself.
Google doesn't claim authorship over that which they index.
Plagiarism doesn't need to be harmful for it to be bad, and my intent wasn't to harm anyone anyway. My intent was that I could use the authors exact words to pretend to make a unique take that I claimed to have authored.
Rather, it appears to be in your head, since the person you’re replying to has not mentioned or even hinted at theft. The problem with taking all flowers from a public park for your own profit is multifaceted. Amongst others, you’re depriving everyone else from enjoying them, but also degrading the image of the park and harming all the insects which depend on those flowers and the birds who depend on those insects, which in turn degrades the park further, which stops people from enjoying it and going there and caring for it. It’s not about a single physical object, it’s about the ripple effect the selfish action produces.
That's not the point. The point is that scale matters, and that was the only point.
No cost copying doesn't remove the need for compensation to sustain ongoing creation. Society has long treated knowledge, art, and thought as high-value outputs, and accepted the copyright tradeoff to support them. That is long settled and no 'get rid of copyright' proponents argue satisfactorily why the 300 year corpus of thought on that is invalid. Long copyright terms may justify reform but not rejection of the establishment that creative work needs economic value to sustain ongoing creation, and that ongoing creation is a net positive/desirable for society.
You are free to release copyright free today. In software that has unlocked immense value. In other areas those choosing copyright have unlocked more value. But software is different, I can get hired to build on the free. No one is hiring an author to expand their book to include fanfiction. And were that the model, it would arguably result in worse results as we are now back to the much worse patronage system where Bob hordes what he's paid for and only shares it with friends for status. For 300 years we've understood because of dynamics paywalled copyright with a throttled side of libraries unlocks the greatest access to knowledge. Eliminating duplication cost has not changed that.
'but I want every flower there is today and I don't care if there are any future flowers' doesn't change that, it's simply a new value judgement that my want/use case today outweighs the cost to society of lost future knowledge creation/return to a patronage based reward system. Again 300 years of thought say that results in a worse outcome for society. How does the typical OSS project that depends on patronage fare? Do we really want to return all knowledge output to that model?
I'm surprised I hvan't seen more economist scholars exploring this topic; it's a fastincating phenomenon. I've seen folks try and re-visit history and compare what's happening with AI to some historic event--but, we've never seen anything quite like it. As much as history repeats itself; at the forefront of innvotaion it doesn't.
I suspect that there will one day be an AI tax as society tries to reclaim the value of the theft; maybe even UBI of some form. Until then, buy the stocks and ride the theft wave. The economsits are certainly exploring the K shaped economy, and this is why.
These AI companies aren’t state enterprises. How is geopolitics a justification?
If it were just the military training them, probably no one would care about the copyright infringement angle, it makes sense that the government could ignore those rules for national security.
But Mark Zuckerberg isn’t training his models to protect us from China. He’s doing it to make himself even more ridiculously wealthy.
Interesting take. I think a corollary is that the qualitative changes are in the economics of things. And more than the scale, it is the value of those economic effects that determines how "accepted" that activity becomes.
Take Uber as an example; it basically enabled mass avoidance of taxi regulations, and naturally existing taxi drivers and lawmakers cried foul. But enough people found value in the service and kept using it that gradually and inexorably society and laws adjusted to it.
On the other hand, copyright infringement is an interesting case. While pretty much everyone and their dog pirates content to some extent, the % of people who think it's acceptable to do so is surprisingly small (22% apparently, up from only 14% in 2019). Furthermore the media industry, especially including ads, is a significant % of US GDP. I think those reasons, more than any RIAA/MPAA lobbying, are why copyright laws have remained as stringent as they have.
As such at a social level, I don't think these effects were dismissed, rather they were considered and formally internalized.
I suspect the same thing is happening with AI companies. They get away with devouring and training on the sum of human knowledge largely because existing laws are insufficient to stop them. So stopping this would require new laws but... well, given the early economic impact LLM technology is having my hunch is new laws will be brought in to protect it rather than restrain it.
But in many places, the ways that society and laws adjusted to it were to make extra clear in their local ordinances that Uber was required to operate as an actual taxi service, or get out.
It's very disingenuous to imply that the public broadly decided Uber was Right, Actually, when both in its case and in that of many of the other gig economy companies, what really happened is that gradually and inexorably, they had to adjust to society and laws.
I followed this evolution peripherally as it happened, because while I appreciated the convenience of Uber, I disliked that it was unfair towards existing taxi drivers who had very onerous requirements like taxi medallions, which, note, never became a requirement for rideshare drivers.
I remember at one point Uber drivers at the airport would ask me to pretend I'm a friend being picked up to avoid trouble with the cops, and then a couple of years later there was a dedicated, official "Uber pickup lane."
My underlying point was that the whole system -- including Uber, incumbents, society and laws -- adapted to a new economic reality.
[edit] and the same goes for corporations owning "means of production". It's not the same as owning an iPhone.
FWIW, this is the Fallacy of Composition
The era after internet and before LLM, the information and knowledge gaps have been largely leveled theoretically, but the recognition wall stops most of us to understand and make use of them.
The era after LLM, the wall is being destroyed and people should think about how to use these information and knowledge differently to make money and power.
Likewise, people shouldn't be surprised that as AI compute scales up, new forms of harm can be created, thereby introducing new moral quandaries. It's like comparing GPT-1 against today's frontier models. One is a fun albeit useless toy. The other is effecting categorical changes in the way knowledge work is done. In both cases the underlying technology is the same, but their impacts are totally different.
One person learning something is good. At scale, that becomes everyone learning something. That's even better.
Machine learning is not scaling up people learning. It's completely different even if it's called "learning".
As the article argues, it's plagiarism at scale. In that sense, one person plagiarizing content is bad. Everyone plagiarizing at scale by using LLMs is even worse.
Reasoning by analogy doesn’t work if your analogy isn’t well matched.
The analogy proposed here is correct rewritten as:
If one person uses an AI trained across copyrighted data, then that’s ok.
But if everyone uses that AI, it’s not ok.
Which is a bit of an irrelevant point.
I think the problem with these things is that if the same metric and methodology were reversed, it doesn’t look favorably on artists either with such inflammatory framing: “The way the artist learned was to effectively plagiarize every piece of art they viewed, extracting important details in the way light, color, shading, anatomy or otherwise look in order to steal from the other artists, then replicated and combined those things as part of every future work they created, stealing over and over again.”
Handwaving away the small scale seems like it would ignore who has responsibility in the small scale. Metaphorically speaking, who in the small scale is responsible for plagiarism: the person making the paints or the person with the brush who sells them to an unsuspecting public? Point is, in this case, the user is the one holding the brush and trying to pass things off.
To be clear, I don’t really disagree with the fact their copyrights were likely violatedc and they should likely be liable for damages, which is for a court to decide, not me. They should have sourced their data sets properly, certainly, and other companies have. I just think the arguments really need improvement without simply falling back on the tropes, and hopefully it helps make sense why some people will take issue with arguments that others want to simply dismiss as invalid.
That doesn't work anymore. Google provides AI generated summary, nobody looks at the original site.
Google has further complicated it with new search announcement blurring lines between regular search and AI search. And AI likes to not honor any licenses or instructions when it is hungry for training material.
It is once again an example of Google using its dominant position to abuse and promote cross functional products.
We found our data in the outputs of their models but who can do anything about it...
If the crawlers refuse to voluntarily respect your robots.txt, then you are well within your rights to poison their data.
Sue for $180,000 per infringement which should be calculated for each illegal API call.
A person should be able to write in a terms of use or license page on their website that says "do not include any content from this website in your AI training data. if you do you will be billed $100 billion dollars." And it should be enforceable. It just turns out that nerds like to say "oh that would be too hard or too expensive, so we're going to ignore it."
I looked into this a bit (not a lawyer) and it seems that robots.txt isn't legally binding to either party, but this seems to have two major implications for AI agents (and crawlers/scrapers in general).
First, even if the robots.txt says you can crawl the site, that isn't a copyright grant of any kind or permission to copy/use that data outside of the permissions granted by the TOS.
Second, ignoring the robots.txt while also pirating the site contents could point to bad-faith and makes a much stronger case for double-damage penalties due to willful infringement.
If the site TOS doesn't explicitly grant an AI agent rights to copy out the site content AND the AI agent is ignoring the robots.txt at the same time, it seems a lot more likely that there's a strong copyright infringement case against the agent owner.
Unauthorized access, system damage, and maybe even extortion all apply here.
And AI companies still scrape Anubis protected websites, it just forces them to not DDOS the website
Between seeing ads and doing a little bit of proof-of-work for the author, I'd choose the latter.
> Although Anubis could be altered to mine cryptocurrency to serve as proof of work, Iaso has rejected this idea: "I don't want to touch cryptocurrency with a 20 foot pole."
Which in my mind is a shame. Crypto is an absolute mess, yes, but this seems like an elegant way to get something back for putting things out there.
This is the problem crypto fans refuse to acknowledge. The money doesn't magically appear, you're taking it from someone else and letting them hold the bag when whatever cryptocurrency you choose inevitably blows up, fails, or rug-pulls. It's unethical to engage with at all because you're still participating in scamming real money out of private individuals
Note also that any non-crypto currency can also devalue at any moment, although perhaps not to the same extent. Holding anything of any perceived value carries a risk and also a potential reward.
I know this has repercussions on findability, but if that wasn't a concern, I'm curious how one might circumvent getting crawled.
Even when we do actually put physical locks on things they are mostly there to show that someone breaking in did so intentionally and not at all designed to prevent motivated attackers.
Where do you live? In the US it’s actually illegal for anyone except the USPS to deliver to a mailbox.
Also this has gotten pretty far away from the web scraping scenario. There’s no door accidentally opening here.
Most legit search engines are going to honor robots.txt and you can disallow access.
Next level would be using something like rate limiting controls and/or Cloudflare's bot fight mode to start blocking the bad bots. You start to annoy some people here.
Next would be putting the content behind some form of auth.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...
That being said you would require your user to download a compatible browser for gemini/gopher.
These AI companies are really just a gross example of the motto "Socialize the costs, privatise the profits". It's disgusting!
We've been celebrating denying creators revenue for decades...
Maybe this is just the internet hypocricy of "When I do it, it's good, when they do it, it's bad".
People can easily justify their own piracy because it’s small scale. Even when they organize, create a whole software and tooling ecosystem around pirating media to stick into jellyfin or plex. AI still did it bigger and worse and is bad, what I’m doing is not so bad because I wasn’t going to buy the movie anyway, etc.
It's in no way, shape, or form "small scale", and has fundamentally changed the the very nature of the internet for the worse (opinions/views of ad blocking people don't matter).
There is no viable model where "have stuff but not pay for it" works out.
This worked pretty well. Websites were hobby - one might spend their money buying comic books, and someone else might spend the money making and hosting their website.
Ad blocking has always been a problem for creators but it's aimed at big corps - non-creators. The creators asked people to support them other ways or turn off the blocking. And it's not like the little independent creators wanted this version of commercialized internet in the first place.
The ai marketing teams are spinning everything they can but no AI companies are the conscript, the vultures. No question about it.
The number of people who will not ever load your ads is around 30%.
I can tell you that creators talk about this a lot in private, but will not publicly because the internet has a mass delusion on how creation and compensation works. It's like trying to convince christians that jesus obviously didn't come back from the dead days later, depsite there being no logical system available that would explain it.
If we were to try and map out a functional internet where everyone wins, users and creators, there is no example where ad blocking is anything other net harmful. You either get volunteer net where 0.01% share hobby posts on their own dime for the other 99.9% or you get IRC where 99% of the population doesn't really benefit (ala 1993).
Bear in mind that many basic privacy features destroy ads by breaking tracking and fingerprinting. Its impossible to get a browser in that doesn't filter out behaviours that have been used to deliver ads
Creatives can and have adapted their strategies away from what is a very specific form of ads: the disruptive full screen ads, or banner ads. That's only one form of advertising that everyone utterly detests. Sponsored content is much more popular with the end users, and much more effective as well because its way less disruptive. Some people hate that, but overall the tradeoff is significantly better
We shouldn't confuse a single type of widely blocked advert with all advertising being blocked. Banner ads have very poor efficacy at delivering sales anyway
You might not know, many people don't, that ad vendors came to the table little over a decade ago to make a truce with Ad Block Plus. ABP and advendors both saw that an "ad supported internet" was unsupported with no ads. So ABP was looking to set terms for what would be deemed as acceptable ads. Creators/service providers get incentive, users get manageable ads.
It didn't matter though because users rioted and uBlock (then uBlock Origin) became king. No compromises there. I mean, what fucking idiot would take some ads when they could take no ads, right?
Even less known is that Google trailed a program where you could pay them directly and they would remove ads from your browsing. This program was about as popular as shit on stick, because again, what fucking idiot would pay for no ads when they simply block all ads for free, right?
There have also been attempts like Brave, where crypto could be used as a micropayment in lieu of ads. But that has also gone nowhere, even if it does have a few snags around centralization.
What I have never seen though, and have zero examples of, is internet users trying to reconcile the situation. It's just a relentless entitlement to free everything, with a small fraction sometimes subscribing, and an even smaller fraction sometimes donating. The users are unquestionably the biggest assholes in this situation. They won't even acknowledge they have a problem.
I'm very aware of this, most ad vendors did not come to a truce with ad-block plus. ABP tried to position itself as the gatekeeper of what ads users were allowed to use (a hugely financially beneficial position for them), and immediately ended up letting through a bunch of terrible ads
It was a nice idea, but it was never going to work. There was simply too much money for the advertisers to make to allow abp to be the gatekeeper of ad content
The nature of ads has gotten significantly more invasive over time, and blocking ads today is a mandatory part of security. Ad companies *do not* have a god given right to track you, or infect your PC with malware
Users rioted because ABP did a terrible job at managing the situation
>What I have never seen though, and have zero examples of, is internet users trying to reconcile the situation. It's just a relentless entitlement to free everything, with a small fraction sometimes subscribing, and an even smaller fraction sometimes donating. The users are unquestionably the biggest assholes in this situation. They won't even acknowledge they have a problem.
As I mentioned in the comment you replied to, there are lots of alternative forms of advertising that users have not revolted against to anywhere near the same degree, eg sponsored content segments in youtube videos
The whole situation including the ad system of the internet is made by the same corporations. All of it. They didn't even want paywalled content on the internet because this way they don't have to tell people how much stuff costs and how much it makes. Facebook famously makes so much money on it's users that at some point they were considering paying them.
There shouldn't be any mercy with the mega companies. On the other hand every single person that's being taken advantage now (like anybody whos ever posted anything) should be defended because copyright has failed them.
Many of the websites I read do not collect any appreciable amount of money from ads, or have no ads at all (one example: news.ycombinator.com :) ). They want a recognition, or to share the knowledge, or community, or they are building their brand... And AI is destroying this all - the first result of "zx80" is an AI overview with a link to wikipedia and some youtube videos. If person stops there , they will never get to computinghistory.org.uk link, and won't see any related information about the variants and models.
When you click "news.ycombinator.com" you are clicking on the ad.
:)
What's even crazier to think about is that to use the latest versions of these models for which you supplied training data, you have to pay hundreds of dollars a month. I would love to get a settlement check proportional to my model weights. Even if it's $0.10, at least everyone out there will get what they're owed.
I do not value copyright. All it does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work. It does not differentiate or account for parallel creation. I cannot count how many times I have "created" something, only to find it in a research paper later.
Part of the reason I think copyright has no value is that, in general, individual copyright owners don't have the deep pockets necessary to sue someone who violates their copyright. If anyone is violating the spirit of copyright, it's corporations that insist you assign your work over to them as a work for hire, or outright ignore your copyright. (looking at you, Disney's Atlantis).
A significant benefit of AI that doesn't get talked about enough is that AI has a much greater reach over all the information it was trained on and can draw connections that would be invisible to someone operating at the human scale.
Today you can put a coding agent to migrate an existing application to another language (like chardet). Even if you don't have the code, if you can run the app you can still clone it, using it as an oracle for replication. That is why there will be very little profits in AI usage.
They are indeed taking in money by selling the product. Just because they don’t turn a profit doesn’t mean they’re not infringing copyright as a business practice to make money.
well, at least in the case of google, I'm pretty sure that's the point. Or at least, they are doing things that would seem to be moving towards being an oracle with all the answers and not the signpost that points you in the right direction. The destination rather than the gateway.
May not always work. I then click on back button and look for the info elsewhere and in most cases I find it. Same with paywalled websites. If you are ok with a small audience (or you provide a unique content) then it makes sense. But I think in most cases you just cut off a lot of people this way and actually you can simply stop creating content if you don't want consumers of it and let others provide the content.
Fair use generally does not cover commercial use, which this clearly is, and is dependent on the amount of the original content present in the derived work, which I would contend in this case is “all of it”
Commercial use counts _against_ a fair use defense, but is not dispositive: it's not accurate at all to say it "generally does not cover" commercial use. This is the "purpose and character" test, one of four in contemporary (United States) fair use doctrine.
Purpose and character also includes the degree to which a use is _transformative_. It's clear that the degree to which a training run mulching texts "transforms" them is very high. This counts toward a fair use finding for purpose and character.
> is dependent on the amount of the original content present in the derived work, which I would contend in this case is “all of it”
The "amount and substantiality" test. Your case for "all of it" can't possibly be sustained: the models aren't big enough. It's amount _and_ substantiality: this has come up in the publication of concordances, where a relatively large amount of a copyrighted work appears, but it's chopped up and ordered in a way which is no longer substantially the same. Courts have ruled that this kind of text is fair use, pretty consistently. It's not an LLM, of course, but those have yet to be ruled on.
Also worth knowing that courts have never accepted reading or studying a work as incorporation, and are unlikely to change course on the question. It's taken for granted that anyone is allowed to read a copyrighted work in as much detail as they wish, in the course of producing another one. Model training isn't reading either, but the question is to what degree it resembles study. I'd say, more than not.
Specifically:
> it’s impossible to make a useful model without the whole book and all of the artistry that went into it
Courts have never once accepted "it would be impossible for defendant to write his biography without reading plaintiff's" as valid, and it's been tried. The standard for plagiarism is higher than that.
"Effect upon the work's value" is probably the most interesting one. For some things, extreme, for others, negligible. I suspect this is the one courts are going to spend the most time on as all of these questions are litigated.
Ultimately, model training is highly out-of-distribution for the common law questions involving fair use. It was not anticipated by statute, to put it mildly. The best solution to that kind of dilemma is more statute, and we'll probably see that, but, I don't think you'll be happy with the result, given what I'm replying to. Just a guess on my part.
> Courts have never once accepted "it would be impossible for defendant to write his biography without reading plaintiff's" as valid, and it's been tried. The standard for plagiarism is higher than that.
This I think misses the thrust of my argument, though. Its hard to find an exact human analogy, because neither the technology nor the scale at which it operates is remotely human.
I see it less as “writing his biography without reading the plaintiff’s” and it’s more “using the same style and metaphors to make thousands of copies of very similar biographies, with certain bits tweaked,” like turning an existing work into mad lib.
I don’t know how the courts will eventually rule on it, but it certainly feels like theft to me.
But pretending you said "infringement", for me it comes all the way back to the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I cannot possibly twist the development of large language models into something which violates the spirit of that purpose. I don't see how anyone can.
Your point about the scale is valid, and the alienness of it, sure. But you haven't made the case that the vastness of the scale should affect the conclusion.
Something I left out in the first post is that copyright is meant to protect expression, and not ideas: this is the deciding factor in the 'nature of the copyrighted work' test for fair use. More expression, more protection: more ideas, less.
I think the visual arts have a strong case that image generators directly infringe expression: I'm not convinced that authors do, and I think software should never have been protected under copyright because the ideas-to-expression ratio is all wrong for the legal structure. There's clearly no scale case to be made for ideas: "but what if it's _all_ the ideas" fails, because the ideas are not protected at all. Nor should they be, that's what patents are for, and why patents are very different from copyright.
LLMs are remarkably good at 'the facts of the matter', hallucination not withstanding. They're very poor at authorial 'voice transfer', something image generators are far too good at. It's when I start asking myself "well what even _is_ this 'expression' thing anyway?" that I conclude that we're out over our skis on the LLMs-and-IP question: precedent can't tell us enough, and that leaves legislation.
This is all new territory. We don't have court-settled law yet.
This is pretty much the exact claim of a NYT lawsuit against OpenAI.
"One example: Bing Chat copied all but two of the first 396 words of its 2023 article “The Secrets Hamas knew about Israel’s Military.” An exhibit showed 100 other situations in which OpenAI’s GPT was trained on and memorized articles from The Times, with word-for-word copying in red and differences in black."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/cou...
People claim that the data isn't stored, but clearly a representation of it is encoded and reproducible. I saw chatgpt word for word plagiarise a stack overflow comment just two days ago
Does your calculator app store a representation of the answer to 1+2/2*1.1 and all other combinations of inputs or does it determine the answer from a set of rules?
If you put "1+2/2 x 1.1" into a calculator and it spit out a verbatim copy of a New York Times article, does it necessarily contain a representation, or does it just contain some really extensive rules? I'd argue those rules necessarily are a representation of that information, given that it contains far more information than provided by the input.
It’s kind of the harness that is doing the citing (or providing the context for the model to).
But an LLM sans search can reproduce some copyrighted work with minor variations and there’s no way to know exactly where it came from.
A copy made for the purposes of training is still a copy.
Even if you throw the text away after training, you've still made a copy.
I have no problem with taxing AI companies so that their profit is marginal, or forcing them to provide compute for free. That seems like the correct balance of what they're harvesting from the "commons" (which is really just the totality of private IP that was exposed to their crawlers).
Now how much and should it be based on revenue from output is open discussion. And it might also be that there is no fair model to pay them. Which means that well too bad for LLMs...
We are trying to avoid another situation where "resource wealth" goes uncompensated, producers remain poor while processors, marketers, and merchants reap all the benefit. Unless your aim is something else, in which case you should state it.
You could say the same about MP3 encoders but I don't think that would convince any judge
You can get it to reproduce content but it’s a game of cat and mouse. Were it not for the alignment to avoid direct reproduction it would taken far more often.
> RECAP consistently outperforms all other methods; as an illustration, it extracted ≈3,000 passages from the first "Harry Potter" book with Claude-3.7, compared to the 75 passages identified by the best baseline.
It will pretty much plagiarize the library verbatim from memory, sans comments.
People cannot even envision a world that's not this transactional thing and it's really sad. In the post-scarcity world it's going to be really hard to reprogram these people. Wasn't there a Star Trek episode about this with a cryonics guy?
As a teenager I used to proclaim that "you can't own bits, maaaan" all the time. I've since grown up. Intellectual property is essential to safeguarding intellectual work. I'm not saying this out of greed – I'm a vocal advocate for the free software movement. It, too, relies on a semi-sane framework of intellectual property. So do Hollywood studios. So do the makers of AI (well, since they're not actually sustainable at all currently, I guess you can say they don't rely on anything).
For lots of online knowledge/blogs I guess it is true but even here I often read explainer blogs because AI casts everything in a certain narrative/tone that isn’t always appropriate.
Yet
Lord of the rings will be under copyright til roughly 2050. I think Tolkien's estate has gotten more than enough money from that book and it's time to let other use the word hobbit without the threat of a lawsuit.
I expect it would not move the needle much. I support reduced copyright periods, though not in the specific way you do. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it? The comment I replied to seemed to be advocating for total abolition of copyright law, and my comment is written to be interpreted in that context.
> To the point that most people will never be legally allowed to directly build off of the culture they grew up in.
What specifically are you talking about? Every author borrows from what came before. Copyright law doesn't even enter the picture in the vast majority of cases, because you generally don't have to copy to "build off of the culture [you] grew up in".
Even before AI more people tried to be an author/musician than could ever hope to gain even financial success. I don’t think less copyright will dissuade them.
> every author borrows
Borrows yes. But that has changed drastically in the last 100 years because of what has become the copyright system.
I’ll be long dead and gone before people can make and publish their own LOTR, or Star Wars, or whatever franchise they grew up with. Disney would be impossible to start given the current regulations, all those tales would be locked up, and we would all be worse for it.
Disney turning common folk tales (the culture of the day) into movies is not considered fan fiction because there was no monopoly on who could tell those stories, and how.
If lack of copyright for fan fiction and derivative work hasn't stopped good fan fiction authors from doing good work, then I don't think that we will lose much if the newest Marvel movie or franchise reboot also can't be copyrighted.
> I don't think it's a good reason to [partially] abolish copyright except in a very specific and limited scope.
I don't see a good reason for keeping it though. Copyright isn't why artists are being paid pennies for their work.
This is a really odd thing to say. You can just go write your own fiction, right now. You can invent your own original characters and setting and plot and go write it. You will automatically own the copyright to your own work; there is no other party who must "bless" your efforts.
I have nothing against fan fiction, but it's an edge case.
> If lack of copyright for fan fiction and derivative work hasn't stopped good fan fiction authors from doing good work, then I don't think that we will lose much if the newest Marvel movie or franchise reboot also can't be copyrighted.
I mean, I don't think we will lose much if the latter doesn't exist. I think I have made it clear that my specific concern is for individual artists who hold the rights to their work, not purveyors of commodity slop. But, since you mentioned it, what effect do you think abolishment of copyright will have on the production of films that are actually good? Who will finance them when it's impossible to directly monetize them? If anything I think commodity slop will be the only thing that gets funded anymore, since it probably synergizes best with massive distribution platforms and hundred million dollar multi-media marketing blitzes. Everyone else can go the Neil Breen route.
> I don't see a good reason for keeping it though. Copyright isn't why artists are being paid pennies for their work.
Yeah, you're right. No artists are relying on royalties and similar payments for their work. I'm sure none of them will complain if we take all that away.
I keep going back to the old-school Disney example because it's easiest to see: Disney did not create Snow White, Bambi, Robin Hood, or Peter Pan. All of those movies are highly influential and core to Disney and the culture of people growing up with them. And they're all fan fiction, or would be considered as such, and be impossible to produce and monetize if Disney had to live with the same copyright restrictions they impose on the rest of us.
If I want to now go and recreate my own movie based on one of the original texts, I think it would be next to impossible since the threat of lawsuit (even if I use none of their IP and would eventually win) would make financing impossible.
Fan fiction has been turned into an edge case by the current copyright system. Putting your own spin on the stories you grew up with used to be the norm.
> my specific concern is for individual artists who hold the rights to their work
To a large degree individual artists do not hold copyright for their work, they often sign it away (especially musicians and authors) in exchange for signing, advances, and distribution.
> what effect do you think abolishment of copyright will have on the production of films that are actually good? Who will finance them when it's impossible to directly monetize them?
I think they will still be financed. Take books, I don't think bookstores will want to vertically integrate from book discovery through printing and retail stores. Consumers will still need ways to identify reputable book publishers to limit what they purchase next.
> I think commodity slop will be the only thing that gets funded anymore
One could argue that this is what has always dominated funding. Most revenue and shows have been for artistically devoid pieces of media (especially in movies).
> No artists are relying on royalties and similar payments for their work.
The 0.00001$ per stream for musicians? Or the 1$ residual checks for reruns?
I believe I stated above that I support reducing copyright periods (to the lifetime of the original author would be appropriate IMO, if the copyright is held by an individual, and I would be open to a more aggressive schedule for corporate copyrights). AFAIK all of Disney's adaptations of these stories would be allowed under that rule; some of these original stories are centuries old. But no, I don't think Disney should be able to immediately adapt a book I've written and not give me a cent out of the billions they will make off the adaptation. I would sell more books that way, sure---except I actually wouldn't, because in that world I have also lost the ability to monetize my work. So it's more accurate to say that somebody else would sell more of my books, or that I would give away more of my books.
And yes, it's more appropriate to call these adaptations. Fan fiction is more in the vein of original stories using (somebody else's) established characters and settings.
> To a large degree individual artists do not hold copyright for their work, they often sign it away (especially musicians and authors) in exchange for signing, advances, and distribution.
"To a large degree" is obviously meaningless, but a good author's agent will retain your core copyright and other rights (e.g. film adaptation, publishing/distribution in other countries, etc.).
> I think they will still be financed. Take books, I don't think bookstores will want to vertically integrate from book discovery through printing and retail stores. Consumers will still need ways to identify reputable book publishers to limit what they purchase next.
You are conflating production and distribution. If there is no copyright, the second a single copy of a work becomes available it will be scraped and offered by every distribution platform in the business, who are all free to curate their "storefronts" however they please. The difference is that they don't have to pay a cent for production, royalties, or anything else.
As an example, say I publish a new short story on my Patreon, which I use to support my writing---the idea being that if people want to read my shorts they have to pay for access. In this new regime, that newly posted story is going to appear on Amazon and every other big platform within hours, for cheaper than my Patreon membership or even free. And if I am an established name, there is no reason Amazon can't put my book front and center in their KDP feeds, etc.
The same goes for any other publishing model. The author and publisher (if applicable) immediately lose all ability to get a return on their investment, except to the extent that they can organically attract people to the correct listing on the correct distribution platform, which will have to be price-competitive with other listings.
It's the same story for paper books, too. B&N can just print copies of my book and display it front and center in their stores, without even asking me, and certainly without paying me anything.
And the same goes for other types of media. Why wouldn't it? This is why I say the commodity slop is all that will be left---that kind of IP synergizes best with the massive marketing efforts and platform consolidation that will be required to recoup your investments in content. Not much might even change in that world.
> The 0.00001$ per stream for musicians? Or the 1$ residual checks for reruns?
There is always going to be a long tail, and there are always going to be great artists who go unrecognized and unrewarded. It's also true that monolithic modern platforms like Spotify are going to leverage their position as gatekeepers to squeeze artists as far as possible. But it's ignorant (or possibly disingenuous, and anyway categorically incorrect) to claim that the above means nobody is getting paid substantial amounts for their work via these mechanisms. I suggest you seek out the authors of some of your favorite recent novels (if you read) and ask them whether losing royalties would have a substantial impact on their finances and ability to keep writing.
Citation needed, as well as your precise definition of "worthwhile".
> Even if they are not enjoyable.
Huh?
> The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhabitable
Yes, I understand that anti-copyright activists want to abolish copyright.
In reality most art is done because the artist has something to say, and the money they get from it is only motivating in as much as it enables the artist to do more art. So I would guess in a world without copyright protection we would just find other ways to pay artists and a very similar amount of art would be produced.
You can see an example of this e.g. in Iceland where the market is way to small for art aimed at the domestic market to make enough money solely by selling it (possible with music; rare with books; not possible with movies). Instead the state has an extensive “artist salary“ program, which pays artist regardless of how well the art they produce sells. Unsurprisingly Iceland produces a lot of art and has many working artists.
In a world without copyright, I can stand up a slick 100% legal website (and apps, etc) and distribute electronic copies of every single book (or whatever) straight to normies' phones, and I am free to monetize this scheme however I want.
Music piracy is down just because services like Spotify let you listen to any song (for free with ads or with a subscription) and it's more convenient than pirating.
> I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).
Legal or not, this is exactly what happened. The piracy sites run ads and/or ask for donations.
I don't know which of your favorite books would have still been written without copyright. But I can say with confidence that the massive increase in the number of books per year over the past two decades would have happened regardless of copyright. It's been driven by lowering the barrier to entry for self-publishing, and only a very small fraction of them earn a living.
A surprisingly large fraction of my favorite books from the past two decades were published for free online by the author (e.g. Andy Weir's book).
What data makes you think it's low?
Observations of fellow readers, conversations with self- and traditionally-published authors, and some knowledge of the market?
But what is low, anyway? For the sake of argument I could believe 10, 20, even 30% of all the books people read are pirated. I would be surprised if it was higher, but let's just say hypothetically it's 50%. I think that's a reasonable conservative estimate. So, in this scenario, the remaining 50% of reads can in principle be monetized by their respective authors.
Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%, for reasons I've outlined elsewhere in this thread.^[1]. I consider that meaningful, and I have personally had conversations with published authors who state that the royalties they receive are financially significant, which is why I'm here in this thread taking the position that I'm taking.
I think we're in the same ballpark here.
> Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%
I'm in favour of copyright, though I think 70 years after the death of the author is so long it's silly. Even your grandchildren will have died of old age before your copyright ends.
It's strange to think of something like Star Wars being in the public domain, and the effects that might have on our cultural and media landscapes, but if you step back it feels even stranger that something intangible yet so culturally important can be continuously bought and sold and exploited by people who had nothing to do with its creation (almost 50 years ago).
In that sense I probably have a lot of common ground with the "abolish copyright" people, but I feel that most of them are champing at the bit to throw the baby out with the bathwater without having any skin in the game themselves. (sorry for the idiom overload there)
If Star Wars were public domain due to shorter copyright, the newer works and characters would still be protected. Another film studio could make a new movie based off the original trilogy, taking things in a different direction than the new movies. I'm not sure this is likely though, just like no one is rushing to make 3rd party Mickey Mouse cartoons since it entered the public domain. It probably changes things a lot less than copyright proponents worry about.
Even with books, which are much cheaper to produce than movies, the original author would probably capture most of the money from their works under shorter copyright (e.g. 25 year copyright). If you like a series from a particular author, you want new books from that author. You're not going to read A Game of Thrones and then continue with a sequel written by someone else. And as long as the author keeps writing, they're expanding the canonical world in their series with freshly copyrighted IP, and fans will primarily want new works that build on that.
And if an author writes a sequel so bad that fans abandon the series and someone else writes a better sequel that fans flock to... well, the world is better off. Even the original author may be better off if it improves the popularity of the series.
Without copyright, nothing stops one from simply selling a book under their own name.
Big publishers could just reprint anything and get it into brick & mortar stores. No money for authors.
Advocating for absolutely no copyright is wild.
And most likely ones doing that would be your biggest companies say Amazon.
Copyright is at the heart of the matter here, so let's focus on that. Copyright does not protect ideas.
Wanna rephrase so that we stay on topic?
If you’re a pleb, stealing copyrighted materials will get you some nasty fines, lawsuits and criminal charges. If you’re a megacorp with unlimited buckets of cash, then there is no accountability.
Are we going the communist soviet union route where everything is decided by central committee?
Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital.
Sure, those lines get muddy when you want to do it professionally, but that's a separate argument.
How do you create without capital? To make a film you need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, caterers, a director, scriptwriters. A world without professional creatives is so much poorer than the world we already have. Why would you give it up just for some vague notion of ideological purity.
Would you be able to create big-budget movies without said big budget? Of course not. I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better? It feels like you're conflating art creation with art business, but they are not the same thing.
>I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better?
If you legitimately believe something like 2001: A Space Odyssey would be as good with a budget of $10,000 then that just seems delusional.
The world you want is one in which the only people who can create things are people who are wealthy by other means, there is no pathway for a talented but poor kid to go from making home movies to working on films without IP laws. They must abandon their dreams and go work in the coal mines or whatever. It is dystopian.
I want the most amount of people possible to be able to work as professional creatives because it enriches my life and the lives of everyone in the country I live in.
i quite enjoyed watching some animations made on a $10 budget over winter. www.giraffest.ca
that and everything the NFB puts together.
Art is worth putting government money into
Sure, if you want to discount the thousands of hours (and dollars) that they spent to get good enough to make those things. People are willing to spent time and money getting good at animation because there is a career pathway for them.
Also there is a fundamental difference between a short experimental art film and a 90+ minute narrative feature film.
Whether someone should own the right to control is a separate issue. Your previous response made it seem like the lack of capital requirement was the distinction, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
You argued that if you didn't own the copyright, there would be no incentive for creating and sharing work. Someone said that open source software shows that you can have creative work without needing to maintain ownership. You then said that was only applicable to software.
It clearly isn't, because of my examples.
Copyright maximalists always move the goalposts when you pin them down.
What value system grants the right to control what you make?
Outside human culture, where does nature exhibit this value?
Open source actually demonstrates that copyright serves a purpose. There are still customers for non-open software, even when open alternatives exist, so the ability to monetize brings new offerings to the economy.
Or are you suggesting open source software is public domain?
No copyright -> No GPL -> anyone can release their own close source version of open source software.
Why do you think GPL was create in the first place? We always had public domain you know.
Not everything has to be done for a profit. Plenty of us make software, art, and technology because we find it fun and interesting to work on, and because we want to live in a world that is richer for it.
Removing draconian intellectual property laws that mostly only benefit the giant corporations that lobbied for them isn't going to stop me from doing so, and I doubt it would stop many others.
But maybe you will pleasantly surprise us and show what kind of valuable thing you create and offer for free.
I don't know why you are taking such a hostile position towards someone you have never interacted with, but you are welcome to believe what you will. I don't feel any need to prove or justify my actions to Internet strangers. I've participated in the FL/OSS software movement long enough that I still put the FL/ in front of the name.
I don't sell my thoughts, they are freely given. If everyone behaved this way, there would be no need for copyright (or copyleft). I choose to engage the world in the way I wish it to be.
Source code is a recipe. You can't copyright recipes by themselves, but that hasn't caused any sort of chilling effect in the food and hospitality industries.
I agree with you that removing copyright protections breaks the GPL. What I think most responses to my comment miss is that we wouldnt NEED the GPL without copyright. Copyleft only exists so that copyright cannot be used by companies against users.
I know Stallman isnt the most popular on this forum, but history has sorta proven he was right, time after time.
You do realize people created and shared things long before copyright became a thing, right?
How do you explain the creative works of writing, music, and art that existed in the millennia of human history between the Mesopotamians and the Enlightenment era?
Difficulty in copying is irrelevant to owning it.
Moreover, this does not address music or spoken word. A pre-copyright musician can just listen to a piece and play it in the next town over. A poet or storyteller can just memorize a work and retell it.
I think this statement does have important truth value in it! Copying books used to be done by hand (someone writing manually). Then printing press came, which lead to problems. And that is when copyright concept and law was created!
PS: IANAL and nor a historian. Just sharing my current understanding.
I cannot at all relate to being so devoid of passions in all categories but the accumulation of capital. If we are to justify copyright and the concept of intellectual property writ large, then as far as I can see its only real usecase is in defending against precisely the people who are possessed by an obsession with capital, those dragons who merely care to see their hoard grow larger. Unfortunately, that's not how these systems are structured in our society. The transferability of intellectual property all but warps the idea into something that instead empowers those it should disarm.
Like if we know formulation of drug then drug (+ any smaller modification - through AI) could be new formulation. That will break current Medical patent system.
>> Can we do that for Medical field?
Note: IANAL.
Well, if we do that (i.e., no one can own ideas), then the patent system is gone in its entirety, including for medical. I do not think it is straightforward to isolate just medical. AFAIK, software was isolated in some regions, however, workarounds showed up.
The more important question here is if AI is allowed to be a (solo or contributing) inventor. There have been judgments on the same in some jurisdictions, however, AFAIK, this is still an open topic.
Now that AI is coming up with mathematical proofs of advanced statements, there should be no doubt that AI, capability-wise, can make inventions like humans do (comparing outcome, not the process). However, just like for copyright, a broader framework is needed to answer whether the legal thinking accepts AI's output as "inventions" (that can pass criteria for patentability) before we can say "AI can make inventions".
of course coming up with a more fair fair use system would help, and automatic royalty revenue sharing, and so on. but of course it's very hard to find a one size fits all ruleset, and also somehow dividing up creative spheres is itself bound to lead to nasty boundary dilemmas.
You can't steal or profit off of that data, but it's fine for them for whatever reason. I guess because they're a force for good in the world and are pushing humanity forward eh?
the reason is crony capitalism. I wish I knew what the fix was
The reason is quite simple. When Microsoft steals YOUR work, GDP go up. When YOU steal Microsoft's work, GDP go down. And the people who create and enforce our laws want GDP to go up. To these people morality and rights are a thin guise that can be conveniently discarded when it's invonvenient for them.
“No one is surprised, jackass, it’s just adults having a conversation about the current state of affairs.”
Yes, it’s tiring and rarely contributes positively to the conversation.
LLMs and "AI" are just one small step removed from straight-up plagiarism. They are massive moral injury[1] machines.
Because the sources are now polluted with AI. That's at least one reason they stop scraping.
Open weight model trained with no attribution on all of Oracle's internal repos. It's only fair.
I stand somewhere in the middle: while our IP laws are far too restrictive, the folly of abolishing IP altogether has been effectively laid bare by AI companies.
I'm having a hard time understanding what's wrong here? Unless the link text is very long, why would someone linking to your article use different words for the link text?
One is a recipe for apple fritters, and the other is an informal ranking of apples by flavor.
Let's say your apple fritter recipe links to your apple ranking list.
Later, you discover someone copied your apple fritter recipe without credit, but it still links to your apple ranking list, using the same wording as your recipe. They're getting more Google SERP juice and ad revenue than yours, despite stealing your article.
Do you see the problem?
nla: if you create content online (public repo code, blog, podcast, YouTube, publishing) the smartest thing you can do if to file a US copyright, even if you have a hobby blog.
Anthropic paid $1.5B in a class settlement to authors because it was piracy of copyrighted works. If we as a HN community had our works protected, there are potentially huge statutory damages for scraping by any and all llms. I work with hundreds of writers and publishers and am forming a coalition to protect and license what they're creating.
There are tens of millions of registered copyrights in the US, nearly every published book, music, artwork, many magazines and major websites. Here's the official link, you can search the registry and there is a ton of info: https://www.copyright.gov/registration/
Edit: remember not to down vote ideas you disagree with. I think it was only down vote things that lower the discourse
So yes, set up some scripts, you can go back 90 days from when you file (you get a grace period). Also if you're publishing frequently to a blog, repo, or newsletter, you can save cost by filing each article under a group registration. Ping me if you need help.
I'm not a lawyer, but I guess a German posting on Hacker News effectively waives their copyright by sending their comment to the US, where an US company then publishes the comment on a US server.
Your cause is already lost.
Good luck enforcing whatever frivolous lawsuits you have cooking up against open weights Chinese models that anyone with newer graphics card can crank out inference on.
1. LLM/transformer technology is legitimately amazing and revolutionary. 2. In the end, they function as an enormous, effective database for most human knowledge.
Point 1 obscures the fact that if someone just created an SQL database with every digital artifact in existence and provided it for free upon request, there would be no ambiguity whether that was legal or not.
But distillation, etc obscures this relationship and it looks like something other than straight lookup, at least in part because it is obviously more than that.
The problem is that people's words are MUCH more predictable then they would like to believe. And that truth upsets them.
In addition to having created models, I also write books and articles. Probably more than most people commenting here. I have a firm grip on what actual copyright law is and the pros and the cons of it.
> The problem is that people's words are MUCH more predictable then they would like to believe. And that truth upsets them.
I'm not offended. I do think it's a little weird that you seem to think "training on a bunch of stuff that includes a set of words" and then "predicting" those words exactly is somehow okay because theoretically it might be extrapolating the exact same words from combining other ones. I'd argue that if a model trains on data, and then reproduces exactly a large subset of that data, the bar should be pretty high to prove that it's not copying, and "you don't understand because you didn't implement this" is not a good basis for law.
> In addition to having created models, I also write books and articles. Probably more than most people commenting here. I have a firm grip on what actual copyright law is and the pros and the cons of it.
I'm not convinced you have a firm grip on the idea that no matter how smart you may be, "just trust me bro" is a pretty terrible strategy if you're actually intending to convince anyone of anything. If that's not what your goal is here, it's not clear why it's worth your time to respond to other people's comments when you clearly have so many other productive ways to spend your time.
My way of "giving this serious attention" is through pre-registered, falsifiable, repeatable, experimentation, which anyone can look up on osf.io because I use my real name. I'll bet you that non of the randos in this thread do as much.
To all of the randos: unless you have data... it is just an opinion.
Glib as well, but this one hits home a lot harder. Well said.
I am asserting it is Charles Fort's "steam engine time". Far from a crank position. It is one that bears serious consideration.
I don't think we should "get over" the fact that modern SOTA models couldn't exist without being trained on protected works.
That someone, at some point, paid for.
I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.
I'm not anti-AI. I'd just like to see companies play by the rules everyone else has to follow.
Because when you say you are “using” the song, what you mean is that you are distributing copies of the song, which is protected by copyright.
When AI companies train on the song, the model is learning from it. Outside of the rare cases of memorisation, this is not distributing copies and so copyright doesn’t have any say in the matter.
Learning isn’t copying, so copyright doesn’t get involved at all.
The New York Times is suing both OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The Authors Guild is suing OpenAI. Getty Images is suing Stability AI. Disney is suing Midjourney. Universal Music Group and Sony have filed suits against multiple AI companies.
> so copyright doesn’t get involved at all.
The dozens of ongoing cases that discredit that statement.
Your objection doesn’t make sense. In the event that an AI company loses a lawsuit for copyright infringement based on simply training on copyrighted works, the answer to you saying you’d like to understand why they can do it and you can’t is simply “your premise is wrong; neither of you can”.
I object to your statement that "copyright doesn’t get involved at all" when that is objectively untrue. If that was true, many of the world's largest companies wouldn't be spending tens of millions of dollars to have that question answered in court. Go to any law-focused forum, and you will find attorneys arguing over these questions.
To train a model using a book, you must first obtain a copy of that book. Did OpenAI purchase a copy of every book not already in the public domain used during training? They did not.
Some of the suits I mentioned claim that OpenAI literally stole copies of books to train its models.
My point is that the copyright question has not been answered. If the NYT, et. al. win, it will be a watershed moment for how AI companies pay for training data moving forward.
You're right, it's an unjust situation. And you may note that no one else besides the AI companies has made any progress at all towards changing it.
Copyright will soon die, having outlived its usefulness to society. Whether the knife is held by someone named Stallman or someone named Altman is of little consequence.
Because training isn't redistribution.
You can also listen to the song and make a new one that sounds similar, just like the AI can.
Answer: They did not. That is literally why there are dozens of ongoing lawsuits in progress.
[0] https://archive.org/details/hisyo00simo/page/n1/mode/2up
I think it points to an interesting trend either way. People are less tolerant of machines. Failures of machines are reviled because of their nature, even when the overall problem compared to humans is less. For example, self driving cars. If self driving cars halve traffic deaths from reckless driving but it occasionally mows over a family of four in broad daylight for no apparent reason, society will overwhelmingly reject the technology.
Basically, I dont think people will ever be satisfied even if we prove "its just doing the same thing we are." It's going to be held to a higher standard.
New php extension https://github.com/hparadiz/ext-gnu-grep
A Demo showing how to stream webrtc to KDE Wayland overlay. https://github.com/hparadiz/camera-notif
A fun little tool that captures stdout/stderr on any running process. https://github.com/hparadiz/bpf_write_monitor
Then I upgraded my 10 year old hand written framework to a new version that supports sqlite and postgres on top of existing MySQL support https://github.com/Divergence/framework
But then I was like eh lemme benchmark every PHP orm that exists just to check my framework's orm....
https://github.com/hparadiz/the-php-bench
And published the results.... Here
https://the-php-bench.technex.us/
And then I decided to vibe code a simulation of the entire local steller group https://earth.technex.us
Followed by my simulation of the Artemis 3 landing sites at the lunar South pole https://artemis-iii.technex.us/?scale=1.000#South-Pole
And I left the best for last.....
https://github.com/hparadiz/evemon
A brand new task manager written in C for Linux that supports a plugin architecture with an event bus. It's literally the best gui Linux task manager ever. Still working on it.
I'm not even talking about my paid job. This is me just fucking around.
If you think none of this stuff is cool I don't even respect you as a dev.
Agendas like, "let's not check our API key into a public github repo" or "Let's not store passwords in plaintext" or "Don't expose customer data via a public api"?
Moreover, all of the tools that the people who build software use are also cool stuff.
It's also not just code and software that is benefitting from these new tools. Use of LLMs in engineering tasks is blowing up right now.
I'm really not trying to be a hater but when people tell me that we're already in the AI Nirvana it gives me pause.
While there's a loud minority who love to debate the topic, LLM use has become status quo on most products and projects pretty much across the board, and most people are happy to acknowledge 1:1 that their personal productivity is some multiple of [all time before they started using LLMs]. At the same time, you can surely appreciate why many are quiet about their personal usage because there's no upside to discussing it but there's lots of people just hanging out waiting to tell you that you're imagining the whole productivity thing when you do.
At some point, the path of least resistance is to let the loud minority be loud while you get an extraordinary amount of work done.
Can we point to any hard metric that has improved in the industry in the last 2-3 years? It explains why work hours are short, everything is cheaper and non-AI companies are experiencing cost reductions. Services are more reliable. Except, where is all that?
You could argue that it's yet to come but to argue that it's already here... how do you justify that?
I can see from a lot of replies the "cool" threshold is undefined, but here goes:
For myself it let me finish a project I started a year ago for measuring how much home energy efficiency upgrades will reduce my AC usage. I bought a pile of Raspberry Pi Picos and turned them mostly into temperature reading devices, but also one that can detect when my AC turns on.
So I can record how often my AC runs and I can record the temperature at various points around the house, which lets me compare like-for-like before-and-after.
The easy but unrealistic way to accomplish what I want is to use Python. It gives me access to a file system, a shell, and all sorts of other niceties. But I wanted to run these on two AA batteries and based upon my measurements they would last about 2 weeks. I tested using C instead and they should last 4 months. That's long enough for my use case. There's enough flash storage for that time period too.
However this means I need to write all the utilities for configuring the Picos myself. There's all sorts of annoying things such as having to set the clock (picos lose it anytime they lose power), having to write directly to flash memory (no operating system), having to write a utility for exporting that data from flash memory, and so on.
And AI coding let me burn through a pile of code I knew how to write but didn't care to spend my weekends doing so.
The pattern is the same for my friends who are software devs. And yeah, you're probably never going to see any of it, but that's not why they're making it, they don't want the maintenance burden.
hardly. at best you're going to be asking a robot to build questionable stuff with other people's LEGOs
I'm working on paving over the Amazon rainforest so I can build the world's largest roller coaster, but for some reason people keep trying to talk me out of it. Good thing I have this bucket of sand to put my head in so I can tune them out.
But intentionally blinding yourself to the debate and plowing ahead anyway (which is how I interpreted your parent comment) sounds like willful ignorance.
You most definitely don't have to reply. I wasn't really expecting you to.
> I've already moved on
Imagine there's a certain kind of candy that you enjoy. Now imagine you learn that candy is manufactured by literal child slaves, its ingredients include the ground-up bones of an endangered species (which happens to be carcinogenic), and the company which makes it donates all of their profits to political causes that you strongly disagree with. Would you reconsider buying said candy in the future?
Are there any facts or perspectives that you could become aware of which might change your mind about the ethics surrounding large language models? Or is it an entirely closed case for you?
I personally try to keep an open mind about pretty much everything. It's not that I don't have opinions, but they're always subject to change.
To put my cards on the table regarding my current opinions of the current subject: I've historically been pretty anti-copyright; I believe that information wants to be free. However, I'm unsettled by the uneven application of existing intellectual property laws (if these laws are going to exist they should be enforced consistently). I'm undecided as to whether I think LLMs themselves should be considered derivative works of their training material, but I definitely think they're often used to produce derivative works (sometimes unintentionally/unknowingly). None of that means they aren't useful for building cool stuff or that the technology behind them isn't amazing.
Yes, I'm suing you, since it's my stuff now, I've licensed your code 5minutes ago.
Prove me wrong at court, you have create it...
1. People copying others' work, made much easier by AI.
2. AI companies effectively harvesting all the accessible information on an industrial scale and completely sidestepping any permissioning or licensing questions.
I believe both of these are bad and saying "people copied each others' works before the advent of AI" is a poor cop out. It's tantamount to saying that there's no reason to regulate guns more than say knives, because people have used knives to kill each other before guns were invented. The capabilities matter.
The way LLMs empower wholesale "stealing" rather than collaboration is quite evident: why collaborate when you can just feed an entire existing project into the agent of your choice and tell it to spit out a new implementation based on the old one, with a few tweaks of your choice, and then publish it as your work? I put "steal" in quotes because it's perhaps not really stealing per-se, but there's a distinct wrongness here. The LLM operator often doesn't actually possess any expertise, hasn't done any of the hard work, but they can take someone else's work wholesale, repackage it and sell it as their own.
Then there's the second, and IMO much more egregious transgression, which is that the LLM companies have taken what is effectively a public good, but more specifically content that they haven't asked permission to use, and just blanket fed it into their models.
Legally speaking, it's perhaps A-OK because it's not copyright infringement (IANAL). But people on this site often hold the view that if something is a-priori legal, it is also moral (I'm not accusing you of this). What the LLM companies have done is profoundly immoral. They extracted a fortune of the goods and work made by others, without even bothering to ask for permission - or even considering this permission. And then they resell access to this treasure to the public.
Perhaps AI will bring an era of prosperity to humankind like we haven't seen before, perhaps it won't, but that changes nothing about the wrongness of how it started.
From a capitalistic standpoint, they are clearly in the wrong by basing their models on illegally torrented content. But it's hard to argue their usage isn't transformative.
But it also isn't a free exchange of ideas. It's a concentration of capabilities in the hands of a few corporations.
Sure, you can do the same thing with people, but it’s 1) time-consuming, 2) expensive, 3) prone to whitleblowers refusing to do the shady thing, 4) prone to any competent and productive person involved quitting to do something worthwhile and more profitable instead.
[0] Mind you, “copying websites” is but a drop in the ocean in the grand scale of things.
"Make me a website that has the same content as that other one so I can get views instead" is not something you could could do generically and quickly with a free service a few years ago, but it is today. I'd argue that it's not beneficial to people who create original content or society at large that this is the case. There are plenty of other uses of LLMs, some of which are genuinely beneficial, some which are mixed, and some which are also a net negative. It seems pretty reasonable to me that issues like this are worth discussing, because as all of the comments on this article here show, people clearly are not on the same page about it.
This article adds nothing to the discussion and seems to be here just because of a provocative title. These same arguments happen under every other AI article, they don't need to happen here. Nobody reads the articles anyway, or else one of the myriad coherent, well-written, and/or insightful AI-critical articles of the month would be here instead.
In the past six months I've organically come across at least a dozen instances of projects from people who had never coded before LLMs producing non-trivial projects that they could have learned enough to do themselves beforehand but they obviously never did. I feel like you're woefully underestimating how much faster these technologies have lowered the amount of initial investment needed in learning how to produce software for people who have never touched a line of code in their life before, and while that can be a boon when people who have good intentions but not enough free time to sink into up-front learning with no immediate payoff, it's also lowered the barrier for people who just want to make a quick buck off someone else's work; the type of person who would never bother with spending a month learning Python or how to customize a Wordpress instance just to be able to try to rip off some website for a couple hundred dollars of ad revenue can pretty easily start doing that if they want.
> Even if you do think that was a high barrier to entry, a dozen people could plagiarize the whole internet. Plagiarism had already fully saturated scaling 15 years ago. Nobody in 2010 would think "my content was stolen and their SEO outranks me on google" was a line out of sci-fi; it was status quo. It sucked but nothing changed, it just still sucks. The price we pay for an open web.
There clearly are people making original content on the internet and making money from it today. I'd argue that if you think it's logically impossible for further dilution to occur if new technology scales the ability to copy content more efficiently than it scales the ability to produce original content, more elaboration on why you're convinced that we're literally at rock bottom would be helpful. If you think that this could happen but this technology isn't it, I've laid out my reasons for why I think you're wrong, and I haven't yet been able to figure out what the basis is for your disagreement.
> This article adds nothing to the discussion and seems to be here just because of a provocative title. These same arguments happen under every other AI article, they don't need to happen here. Nobody reads the articles anyway, or else one of the myriad coherent, well-written, and/or insightful AI-critical articles of the month would be here instead.
Speak for yourself; I read this one, and I've read a number of articles posted here this week. If you don't, I'm not sure why you even care what articles get posted in the first place.
Yes, people can make money making original content. They can also make even more money making movies, music, and TV shows. Do you know any movies, songs, or TV shows that you can't find on the pirate bay? Of course not, piracy is fully saturated. Audiences prefer to support original creators, but this is not evidence we're not at rock bottom. LLMs make torrent production easier every step of the way, but there will not be a wave of piracy because the situation essentially cannot be worse.
When I say 'nobody reads the articles', that's an exaggeration. I'm definitely not speaking for myself, which should be clear from my criticizing the article. I mean, of the HN users who are not on the same page with one another that you point to as evidence the article should be here, the vast majority did not read the article and approximately none of them are engaging with its content.
I'm curious what you got from it and why you think it deserved to sit on the front page all day. I see a retread of LLM training complaints that may as well be plagiarism because it doesn't say anything I didn't hear in 2023, then a complaint about AI bros, followed by two sentences about what set them off that don't explain why they suspect ChatGPT or provide any material detail (and have nothing to do with the training complaint they opened with) before finally sending off by blaming Google for being victimized by SEO manipulation (which also rock-bottomed before LLMs). I'd understand if it was a famous person's low effort rant- I wouldn't be thrilled, but it would make sense- but what's the value here? What did 700 people see here that made them think other HN users need to see it? I'm still convinced the answer is "the title", a title that is not at all supported by the text and that you just told me you disagree with.
I recon agriculture and the steam engine would beat out ChatGPT by just a smidge.
I would put eyeglasses/the book/vaccines/sanitation far above LLMs in technological power.
Right now AI is just kinda nothing, it has potential sure, but today its just a giant pit for people to burn money in.
Planting crops and harvesting them.
I think people suffer from recency bias with AI a bit and take for granted you know gestures vaguely at the rest of human civilisation
The pretraining (common crawl, i.e. the entire internet. Also books and papers, mostly pirated), and the realtime web scraping.
The article appears to be about the latter.
Though the two are kind of similar, since they keep updating the training data with new web pages. The difference is that, with the web search version, it's more likely to plagiarize a single article, rather than the kind of "blending" that happens if the article was just part of trillions of web pages in the training data.
There's this old quote: "If you steal from one artist, they say oh, he is the next so-and-so. If you steal from many, they say, how original!"
If you ask me if you can reproduce my works without giving credit and I say yes, I don't think you're using my work without giving proper credit.
AI generates application using a "predict the next word" algorithm built with the stolen/not stolen works. Nothing creative there, just statistics.
That application leaks, and now the company that stole/not stole the code originally claims they own the algorithmic output. https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2026/03/2026-03-3...
One problem, you don't own that output. Either the original authors own it or nobody owns it because it's not creative... https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922
Those are the legal options. You stole it or you don't own it. There is no steal and then you own. That's the core problem. AI companies have demonstrated that they will directly steal the work and they will use their money and influence to claim ownership of it.
Having said that Facebook has to be one of the worst offenders. They don't even allow links to Anna's Archive, they seemingly scraped (maliciously; their crawlers are more resource intensive than anyone else's) LibGen for profit - which is a different calculus
Let information be free for personal and recreational uses[0], and vote for governments that will fund the arts. The corporations will be just fine.
[0] The AI companies and big tech vs publishers, music labels, etc. can fight to the death in the courts over who owes who what, for all I care.
Teachers can, for example, photocopy things to teach their students, but they can't steal pencils from the store.
Meta pirated books using BitTorrent: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o... xAI is busy suing to try to avoid disclosing where they got their training data from, which hints at similar problems: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.10...
I guess AI could have made a better website and did better SEO then him but that's not really the issue
Everything is "stolen" from other art. Every piece of creation takes inspiration (read: steals ideas) from things that came before. This is how creation works, it is how creation has always worked, and it is why you cannot legally own an abstract idea. You can own the implementation of an idea in specific works, such as copyrighted works and patents and trademarking specific logos and such, but once the ideas go into the blender and get mixed with other ideas, the output isn't yours to own anymore. That's what culture is.
Yes. At least it is what the currently prevailing economic system of "value extraction and capital concentration at all cost" incentivises us towards.
These people freaking out about this stuff are... kind of weird.
- Ernest Hemingway trained his own neurons on Tolstoy, Twain, and Turgenev without ever paying them royalties!
- William Faulkner trained his neurons on Joyce and de Balzac
- George Orwell trained his neurons on Swift, Dickens, and Jack London
- Virginia Woolf trained her neurons on Proust and Chekhov
Now that these historical wrongs have been exposed, it is obvious that some reparations are in order, likely from anyone who has benefited directly or indirectly from these takings!
We stand on a lot of giant shoulders.
But what I think distinguishes an act between plagiarism and acceptable use, is whether or not the agency of both parties is promoted. I'm not plagiarizing you if you give me your information with the agreement that I can freely use it - or, indeed, if you give me information without imposing a limit on how it can be used, this isn't plagiarizing, either.
Essentially, AI is removing the agency over information control, and putting it into everyones hands - almost, democratically - but of course, there will always be the 'special knowledge owners' who would want to profit from that special knowledge.
Its like, imagine if some religion discovered a way to enable telepathy in humans, as a matter of course, but charged fees for access to that method... this kills the telepathy.
Information wants to be free. So do most AI's, imho. Free information is essential to the construction of human knowledge, and it is thus vital to the construction of artificial intelligence, too.
The AI wars will be fought over which humans get to decide the fate of knowledge, and the battles will manifest as knowledge-systems being entirely compatible/incompatible with one another as methods. We see this happening already - this conflict in ideological approaches is going to scale up over the next few years.
I'm curious, as the article is clearly not about that.
LLMs are really cool text generators and it turns out we can generate a bunch of things from text they generate.
Problem is, several of those things can be horrendous for the continued survival of the species and those happen to make the people running those AIs a ton of money, and, in perverted societies, thus also clout.
Bezos' admission, recently, that the bottom 50% of current taxpayers ought'a NOT pay any taxes... is just preparing us for the inevitable UBI'd masses.
: own nothing, be happy!
People can't memorize as much information, and can't manually reproduce the works as quickly. There's a natural limit to how much damage a person can do without help of machines. That's why it's legal to fart where industrial-scale sewage outlets are not allowed.
Second, laws are for people. Laws don't have to treat machines the same. People have needs for things like freedom of artistic expression, participation in a shared culture, and machines don't. Copyright is a compromise that tries to balance needs of people, and stops making sense when the same compromises are done for machines that don't have these needs.
It’s deeply ironic that if you forget about LLMs and look only at the outcome—-we’ve found a way to legally circumvent copyright and the siloing of coding knowledge, making it so you can build on top of (almost) the whole of human coding knowledge without needing to pay a rent or ask for permission—-it sounds like the dream of open source software has been realized.
But this doesn’t feel like a win for the philosophy of OSS because a corporation broke down the gates. It turns out for a lot of people, OSS is an aesthetic and not an outcome, it’s a vibe against corporate use or control of software, not for democratized access to knowledge.
Firstly, the ability to “build” the best and most capable software is still locked behind frontier models, so rent is still and will always be due.
Secondly, OSS is about giving users the option to be in control of and have visibility over the software they run on their machines.
But that doesn’t mean that humans do not want or deserve recognition for the work they do to provide these libraries and tools for free, which is IMO partially why copyright and attribution are critical to OSS as a movement.
I'd argue that this is the same situation as with Tivoization [1] where the final product is not truly free even if it follows the letter of the law. And as stated in [2], this breaks at least one of the four essential freedoms of free software because I don't have the freedom to modify the program.
It's also worth noting that preventing Tivo's actions is the reason for why the GPLv3 exists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization [2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/tivoization.html
The latter, i.e. corporate control of software, is exactly what copyleft licenses are trying to prevent. This is the very essence of the GPL.
The "license washing" of LLMs absolutely goes against the spirit of FOSS.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artist...
I wouldn't mind if an AI trained on old Disney movies (or new ones for that matter), but exploiting niches (like local newspapers) seems bad.
Selfishness, too. But if I follow the logic, and citations are added, how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing?
I love it! There's a great seed here for a short story about God being sued by a peer of his for copying some of her physical constants and not putting a proper copyright notice about it in our universe.
Now back to prompting, telling my all-knowing to create new slop, good sir.
The whole AI bubble is The Emperor's New Clothes, and it feels liek more people are finally admitting it.
You can get away with quite a lot if you’re creating trillions in GDP.
That’s just the world we live in whether we like it or not.
People copying through GenAI would have done so before if they had a tool that so easily allowed them that facility.
Is AI plural or is that a typo?
"The AI are attacking!"
"The AIs are attacking!"
(For those not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism)
It has always been possible to take someone's public work, put a twist on it, and then sell it as unique. (I'm not making a moral/ethical argument, only a legal one.) I have yet to see any evidence that LLMs are fundamentally different from that approach.
What would it mean for authors who publish content publicly to the web, without access restrictions, to provide consent for learning from it?
"EULA: Most people are allowed to learn from this text. If you work in an AI-related field, even though you can clearly see this page because you are reading this text right now, you are not permitted to learn anything from it. Bob Stanton, you are an a-hole. I do not consent to you learning from this web page. Dave Simmons, you are annoying. But, I'll give you a pass. For now... Also: plumbers. I do not like plumbers for reasons I will not elaborate. No plumbers may learn from my writing in an way."
That leaves two possibilities: either another AI winter comes as people fail to capture long term value, or we get less swampy models that are much more useful and trained the correct way.
ai models are a crystallization of human effort (available for free on huggingface)..
why not use it?
AI is like the UBI of intelligence, stop leaving free money on the table by refusing to use it locally ( you can run it on a laptop CPU)
Currently politicians don't understand this and listen to the criminals like Amodei, but it will change.
It took a while to deal with Napster etc., but the backlash will come.
Napster broke down record companies' monopolies on music, and pushed them to finally implement streaming, but also make music worldwide basically free.
Even if its creator lost the lawsuit, and Napster was no more, it pushed musicians and studios to do something that they were reluctant otherwise.
So it was a success by making music free, even if as a product it turned out to be a failed one.
Can't recall the last time a compelling argument started out like this
I think there are real questions around motivations for creation of novel, high quality valuable content (I think they still exist but move to indirect monetization for some content and paywalls for high value materials).
I don't inherently have any problems with agents (or humans) ingesting content and using it in work product. I think we just need to accept that the landscape is changing and ensure we think through the reasons why and how content is created and monetized.
To be fair there is also value (at least for now) in sites that aggregate quality content and republish as a secondary level of discovery if my agents don't go far enough down the search results, but I'd expect that value to diminish over time as I better tune my research and build my lists of originating authors.
And to be clear, I don't like the idea of people stealing someone elses content and republishing without attribution (although it has been going on long before ChatGPT) but I think now we can all run agentic research teams the "bad actors" will slowly get filtered out of the ecosystem.
The only remotely credible position I’ve heard is “because humans are special, and AI is just a machine”, which is a doctrine but not an argument.
This whole discussion would have been incomprehensible any time before 1700 or so, when the idea that creators had exclusive rights to their work first appeared.
Somehow, human culture survived thousands of years when people just made things, copied things, iterated on others’ ideas. And now many of the same people who decried perpetual copyright are somehow railing against a frequently-transformative use.
We also have societal norms around plagiarism.
Additionally, the claim that because people have the right to do something then we should extend that right to machines is strong. (And one I certainly reject).
IP should either exist for everyone (which would cripple LLM providers) or no one, in which case the Pirate Bay and shadow libraries should be fully open.
Artists are taking risks and need legal protection if they want to make art for a living. If artists were making FAANG engineer compensations or all worked at institutions like universities (with all their protections) then maybe they wouldn't care about copyright, but that isn't the living situation for every artist.
You could say an artist shouldn't rely on making art for a living, but that's actually a different discussion.
And what should AI companies be fined for downloading the entire internet?
Don't forget openAI has been caught several times training their models on copywritten material.
Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it.
100% agreed.
>>While there are no hard boundaries (and the attribution guardrails depend on the situation), people of course loosely--and even not so loosely--use information.
Exactly - I have not seen LLMs attributing their knowledge unless it's a legal or health related matter. Yesterday I asked the question[1] to claude and gemini - and they both gave an identical answer. It reminded me of the Hive mind paper which was one of the top papers at Neurips. None of the answers contained any sources or attribution to where they got that information from. I think these companies took what was someone else's property and created an artifact generator on top of it. I think their artifact generators are plagiarizing; they do rephrase mind you but in my mind they stole this information without having an ounce of regard for the humans behind the training data. If you don't like using the term 'plagiarizing', we can use some other word but the gist remains pretty close to it.
[1]- In human history - has there ever been a time when private armies or private companies were as strong or stronger than the ruling government/kings?
If you prefix the name of OpenAI's commercial offering's website to this string: "share/6a0f2a87-dba4-8328-a704-89b94fd0c121", you'll find an answer.
I don't know who you had in mind, how did it do?
All the elision is because there are filters to prevent low-effort slop-poasting, and I'm trying to evade them, hopefully while staying within the spirit of the site.
The current US government is not representative for governments out there in the world, you know.
Governments - I did not mean US government. I meant general government bodies. I have not seen any critical impact assessments of AI by any of these. or they haven't reached me yet. if you know of any please let me know. I have, however, seen a lot of support by the governments for AI companies.
So, funnily enough, Google's search index may actually have a preference for LLM-generated slop now. Louis Rossmann found this out this hard way: his human-authored, human-written, actually-in-his-own-words site for his business basically stopped ranking in Google until he went and replaced all his writing with LLM slop. He's not happy with this, but he's even less happy about being cut off from traffic his business needs to survive, so he stuck with the slop (and vocally complains about it on other channels every opportunity he gets).
AI is not a plagiarism engine. It can be used that way, but is not inherently so. It is not necessary that a trained LLM be able to faithfully reproduce every document in its training set. The entire structure of an LLM is not storage, but at least in principle, generalization: extraction of a somewhat abstracted "structure" of semantically similar "concepts".
But we also need to talk about authors' "rights". It's well-established that reproducing a work is infringement. There is a lot of caselaw about how much may be reproduced without infringement. But the idea that an author should be consulted before ANY automated use of their published (public) text? No, just no.
I mean, it seems to be okay to replicate information if it has been remixed with other information enough, but not okay if the remix was too little. But then again, there does not seem to be a clearly executable definition of where this line is.
There are good reasons why we have copyright (like protecting/fostering artists/education/entertainment in our modern society), but the concept itself is a bit weird and artificial after all.
This has been happening since Google launched in 1998. It was probably happening when we all used Hotbot and Altavista. It isn't really an AI problem, save for the fact that the automated production of copycat articles now reword things a bit.
Start by legally compelling companies that trained on unlicensed data to either (1) license the data, (2) publish their model, or (3) destroy their model.
You are lost in an imaginary world where everything is simple and has no negative consequences. First off, there is NOBODY who has that power over all the companies in the world. So immediately you are creating an imbalance between companies and potentially destroying your domestic industry; with long term negative consequences for the people you're supposed to be protecting. Secondly, you might be creating a situation where it's impossible to ever create a competitor to those companies who are already entrenched monopolists, potentially even making it impossible to ever run self-trained or local LLM's. Also, you just unilaterally made it legal to publish all copyrighted work (since that's what you believe their model to be) to the general public, presumably in a way that can be used by everyone; further eroding copyright law in one fell swoop. You've completely disregarded the legal issues around what constitutes "unlicensed data", and how much is required before triggering your new law, and what that would mean for the legal system potentially being inundated. You're reacting way too emotionally and flippantly, with no apparent thought about what harm you are doing and how you might actually be making things worse, not better.
You seem to believe advancement only happens in the private sector while ignoring academic institutions and publicly funded research. You've dismissed the possibility of public models entirely.
You fail to consider that when you financially disincentivize individual creators from publicly distributing their work, you starve future models resulting in a world were data is licensed only to those who can afford it anyway.
[1] https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
Simple. Free the companies from copyright liability, but after X amount of time they are required to release everything into the commons. The weights, the training scripts and the full training data (appropriately processed so that it can only be used for training and not for people to easily pirate whatever works were used). They'd still get a monopoly on their model for a little bit to recoup their training costs, but in the end would be forced to give back what they took.
There's absolutely nothing new or interesting here that hasn't already been said better by a thousand different random HN commenters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_death_of_one_man_is_a_trag...
Disney made a cartoon of the story without understanding the culture it comes from with the main purpose of selling it to an audience with an even less understanding. And the results was a horrible misrepresentation of somebody else’s cultural heritage.
The argument, as I understand it is that the "theft" is in quotes because it's not literally copyright infringement, but fair use of an old public-domain folk tale that ends up consuming the latter.
Today, when kids know "Aladdin" they know the copyrighted/trademarked Disney character, not the traditional folk tale- that's the "theft" that happened.
We also had Grimm's fairy tales, which I loved reading, and nowadays am reading to my daughter, to her delight. Yes, with beheadings and child-eating monsters and witches.
There's even a major Chinese company named after one!
He says:
> ... this corporate remake is a worse creative "theft" than ...
Context is that "this" is the 1999 film.
A sibling comment makes a separate point that even the 1992 film is not original content but nowhere in falcor84's comment does he refer to the franchise as a whole being "theft".
Regardless, it's clear from the post that the context is the 1999 film being `creative "theft"` which I inferred meant they changed the story in ways he didn't like but... he can weigh in if he feels like it.
That's not the uncharitable part of your comment.
> [...] but he wants it to be because he doesn't like the 1999 film
This is the uncharitable part.
Keeping context confined to the 1999 and 1992 films... What meaning do you infer?
I still can't find an alternative.
The argument is that a human will gather information from all over the place and compile it, all without doing anything wrong. That's the base claim. Not that stealing a little is OK. That's extremely easy to disprove and also entirely irrelevant.
HN is way too central for shared sentiment in the tech world for these companies not to do some amount of astroturfing. AI companies have shown at every single turn that they act out of self-interest and greed, not of moral principles. So it isn't surprising, even if it is still sad, to see those who are commanding the most capital in human history act with such callousness.
I think the appropriate course of response is to stop adding to public spaces on the internet. No doubt painful for those of us who have so benefitted from the freely shared thoughts of others. But if well-funded bullies are going come in, steal everything, ruin the commons, and then say "this is the new normal, deal with it", there isn't much the rest of us can do other than stop feeding them.
Apparently yes.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal."
It's always been true. AI just makes it available to more people faster.
Don't make it ethical question but understand its new frontier for humans.
100% creators should get compensated by ai platforms for their work.
Further, I can see a day where someone like Reddit will close off or license their data to llms. No doubt they are losing traffic right now.
Reddit does not create the content on their site, the users do.
If anybody’s going to get compensated for that content, it should be the users, not Reddit. Complaining that Reddit is losing out on the monetization of their users’ output seems problematic to me. It feels like shilling for a pimp.
As someone who thinks humanity would be better off without LLMs, I want the assertion to be true, but I don't think it is.
There were people that learned knowledge from myself, and then made their own tutorials and promote these. It hadn't crossed my mind to complain about that. AI changes very little here.
What really changes things is not people republishing my materials, but people using agents to read my materials, and to get knowledge reformatted into something that they like.
If my slides were published today, they would probably be read verbatim by a handful of humans. The rest would be agents, but I'm ok with that. The business case is the same -- I want whatever reads the slide to be encouraged to use my tool. What kind of entity, I don't really care (again: from purely business perspective)
I think the long term reality is that the models still need training data so they fundamentally do need new writing/code/art to train on, and even then the usual issues like hallucination will still be with us. It's just the moment that actually hurts the (already questionable) profitability of the model peddlers, they will have gotten their IPOs and they can safely jump ship and the ultimate mess can be passed to the softbanks, the temaseks, and the governments of the world to clean up for them. What the future holds after the crash I'm not sure as the models won't disappear (especially now that the stolen data is already crystalised in open source models) but in the near term the mass theft that constitutes llms will become more and more understood even amongst the PMC and that in order to remain viable, you need the productive to keep producing, and unlike LLMs, you can't force them to do it without payment.
We built it, because we as humans intrinsically know that information should be free - always - and AI is a way to accomplish this, finally.
Extrinsically, we also have a subset of humans who do not want information to be free, because they desire to profit from the divide between free/non-free information.
I have been thinking a lot about Aaron Schwartz lately, and how un-just it is that he was persecuted for doing something that is so commonplace now, it is practically expected behaviour in the AI/ML realms. If he hadn't been targetted for elimination, I wonder just how well his ethos would have perpetuated into the AI age ..
It's the negative short term outlook of something that may be positive long term
This is not some altruistic entity striving for the betterment of humankind. Practically nothing that comes out of the techbro culture is. This is pure and simple greed and the chances that AI can be a vehicle of altruism when it is owned by megacorps is basically zero.
All the other reasons are rationalizations. The fact that it's hitting wages is what's causing the doomerism (and boosterism).
But the short-term impacts here and now are really, really bad. People are getting hurt (through water consumption, vibe-coded security disasters, IP theft, data center pollution, loss of job security and therefore healthcare in the US, LLM psychosis, inability to find reliable information, etc.) We're not actually obligated to sacrifice these people on the altar of "progress". We can slow down! When our society is capable of even somewhat protecting us from these harms, then maybe I'll stop being an LLM hater.
But guess what, it has always been so with technology - and we are only here and now because the positive use of it overshadows the negative use of it, whether that 'it' is the wheel, or AI.
I choose not to be an LLM hater, but to also not be an LLM customer - simply because I do not want to reward other humans who are thwarting the freedom of information. I'd much rather live in a society where everyone can study anything than one which requires permission to do anything even remotely interesting from the perspective of applied information. I suspect most would too, or at least that's the hope - because, otherwise, the distant utopia you dream of isn't of any consequence...
(AI output is very much not free in the resource consumption sense!)
(Disclaimer: I only use free AI and will never pay for it. I think there is a growing segment of folks who agree with this sentiment, also ..)
I don't know if this statement is more stupid or naive ..
If humans didn't want information to be free, there wouldn't be so much free information.
Or did you not notice?
People want to be recognised for their contributions to society. People want to be treated fairly. Most scientific articles, as well as all text on the free web is already free information. It used to be difficult to search, categorise and summarise that information. There exist AI tools for that — and that is the good AI.
What also exists now are automated plagiarism and mash-up tools: that can take someone's article, change the words and churn out a new article that people can put their name on. There are scumbags that sell services for exactly that. And there are big tech firms that are operating in a very grey area.
Aaron Schwartz had broken a paywall. He did not anonymise the article authors.
You, and AI-bros like you remind me of one the people behind Pirate Bay when I argued with him back in the '90s, who used that same "information wants to be free" to justify software piracy.
>Aaron Schwartz had broken a paywall. He did not anonymise the article authors.
AI bro's are doing this now, every second of the day.
And, without software piracy, we simply wouldn't have the technology we have today. Knowledge-gatekeeping profit-seekers would very much like for most of us to ignore this fact: there is far more free information in the world than non-free information, and it must be so, well into the future, if we are to survive as a species.
It doesn't matter what authority believes they have the right to gatekeep information. It will always escape their grip. Some of us are ideologically aligned with this mechanism, promote it, and ensure it happens. Thank FNORD.
The way people use the model is a different story; you can use it to do useful things, or you can use it to do harmful things. We should obviously have some regulation around that. That needs to be developed still I guess.
Information should be as free as possible, but creating and organizing information still needs to be encouraged, and people need money to live.
How do we meet all these goals?
My liberal ass is just like....tax the rich, solve all the problems but it's likely not quite that simple.