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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

Some of their arguments are more than just naive ones.

They argue that LLMs are stealing our culture to feed it back to us. Can we really argue that they didn't make use of everything we wrote and said online to train their data?

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Where did you see this? The only claim I saw from the article was that 1 prompt uses 16oz of water, which is obviously false if you do any level of research

Talk to people. Most are exposed to “AI” through endless social media slop that has taken over the majority of their feeds, not coding assistants. There are also job fears (not unwarranted, due to how AI leaders talk), and of course the DC issues. It is a weird political block but a very potent issue for some. I know both of my older teens want nothing to do with the stuff.

I've barely looked into this but I don't understand the water usage thing. Are people under the impression that water is a one-time consumable like a video game, where you "use" it and then it's gone forever?

I've seen people claim that the data centers are creating "unusable" water whatever that means.

Are the datacenters are sending water-filled rockets to Jupiter so we can't use it again?

It's a spectrum, I think a majority of people with that stance just think "AI datacenters consume water" and that's as sophisticated as it gets. A more realistic nuanced take would be that "AI is evaporating water which then rains in the ocean, decreasing our supply of fresh water".

Clearly the water isn't atomized. But where I live, each year nature presents us with a certain amount of water to allocate as we see fit. It's not like the water the golf course uses goes to Jupiter. But you probably don't want to pay to be able to drink it after. Right?

So what's the solution? Another rent-seeking system where any future information an AI learns about the world has to be carefully attributed for the possibility that someone might take a piece. A whole patent-troll/music industry style mass buy up of AI information rights with a team of lawyers sending out DMCA warnings hooked into every harness.

Does it get paid out on training or is it like music where if the model output is vaguely similar to something someone else created they get a royalty.

Even if the solution is difficult, I don't think that justifies theft.

Imagine actually asking permission to use other people's work to train AI. Imagine respecting the answer of "no".

But it would be unprofitable to ask permission!

I mean.. it feels kinda weird to say that you get to determine how other people use your work? Once you've sold your product, it's out in the open and available for use however the customer wants to use it.

If I bought a cake from your bakery, and then said "I'm going to serve it at my friends' gay wedding!", you couldn't be "hey, no, I don't approve of that". You've already sold me the cake; no take-backsies.

And if I buy a hammer, the hardware store doesn't get to tell me what I'm allowed to build.

If you're arguing for abolishing copyright, I'm all for it.

But as long as copyright exists, AI training should not get any exception to it. That creates an asymmetry, where AI gets to rip off our work and use it to compete with us, while we don't get to do the same with proprietary works (e.g. software).

I don't want a world in which AI can rip off all of my Open Source code and not respect its license, but I can't take macOS and virtualize it and not care what Apple thinks of that.

> If you're arguing for abolishing copyright, I'm all for it. But as long as copyright exists, AI training should not get any exception to it.

AFAICT, the courts currently lean towards allowing AI to be trained even without author permission, and this doesn't violate copyright law.

Copyright law says you can't sell unauthorized copies of copywritten works. Doesn't say you need to get author permission before using their works to train AI.

Yes, the courts are leaning towards creating the exception that I said should not exist, giving an advantage to AI companies over the humans that created the work they've trained on. That is not surprising, but it's still harmful.

So long as the AI company owns a copy of the copywritten work.. does training on it represent an "exception"?

They're not reproducing the work for sale, no? So how does training violate CR law?

Preparing a derivative work, and distributing that.

What is made public and available is treated as such. We do not ask permission to enable neural changes consequent to expressions of people in the open.

Uhh yes. If you can't properly cite the sources you ripped off in training, you shouldn't be publishing the model.

> They argue that LLMs are stealing our culture to feed it back to us.

How is that any different from what media already did.

Most of Disney's original material was European cultural stories.

There's a rather large difference in scale for a start.

Indeed. Disney's cultural impact has been far greater.

Actual humans were involved in that process, implying creativity, intent, craftsmanship went into the final work, not just a mechanical process.

I agree with you, and also wish the wakeup call had come when the Mouse locked up our culture. (Copyright Act of 1976 Shifted the framework to the life of the author plus 50 years, Or 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act pushed individual protection to the life of the author plus 70 years)

Maybe now the wakeup call is loud enough to actually wake more people?

You got it

This question is in bad faith. There are plenty of obvious differences and the poster knows it.

Nobody's livelihood was affected by appropriating old folk tales.

I find their arguments are less naive than the ones who used to say 5G controls our brains just few years ago. I remember personally back in 2021 when we used 5g to fly drones, very educated individuals claimed they don’t feel ok and are sick because they stood next to the tower for few hours because they heard 5g is bad!! just a normal 5g, not even mmwave or anything similar.

AI can be useful no doubt, I think most of people who are against AI aren’t against the concept itself, they are against the business built around it, the greed that will use AI to destroy the quality of life, the mass surveillance that won’t be possible without AI, destroying rare books for AI training, slopification of everything you see around from texts to images to videos, among other legitimate reasons to hate it. Open ai used to be a non for profit, I don’t think anyone protesting AI now would have issues with the company few years ago, when the main focus was research, solve issues, cure diseases, among many other good reasons.

The AI protestors in the article are holding up signs that say AI will kill us all.

They think this is a doomsday technology. They’re not in the streets over a concern about cultural appropriation in LLM training sets.

Too much Terminator.

I mean, the CEO of Microsoft would agree with them:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...

Yeah honestly, I see a future where people start suing for reparations over things like this.

"I would like my $18 for reddit shitposts, plz"

I bet in many cases, the history of a single reddit account is worth substantially more than $18

what kinda money we talkin here?

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