Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#101

Post by Gormo »

masswerk wrote: post #25
Ecys wrote: post #17

[flagged]

Rather: composes (or: re-sequences). Synthesis requires reason and essential capabilities, like an empirical a priori judgement. Without concepts, meaning or imagination, there's no synthesis.

The point is that the AI inferencing is equivalent to a person reading half a dozen separate papers, comprhending the basic concepts of each, relating them together into a mental model of the topic, and then writing an essay that summarizes the basic points. The person isn't plagiarizing anything here, but engaging in research, understanding, and synthesis of various sources of information.

The person absolutely does have the advantage of having empirical awareness and the ability to test their conclusions against external reality. But lots of people do engage in "research" and build mental models of various topics with little or no empirical context, and rely mainly on digesting calcified knowledge from other people.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#102

Post by microtonal »

wolttam wrote: post #72
dvduval wrote: post #27

The broader problem of original sources not being given credit in a way that rewards them remains. Websites owners are paying to host their content so that spiders can come and crawl them and index it into the AI and then if they’re lucky, they might get a citation, but otherwise there’s very little reward for being a provider of content. And of course, this is something that’s getting worse and worse. Why look at a…

I’ve been thinking of a proof-of-work scheme for accessing content where you effectively need to mine some crypto for the author, but, this idea might not fly today

But that will be a hassle for human visitors as well. A web doing proof-of-work to browse, will be a disaster for phones with their limited batteries, etc.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#103

Post by pennomi »

saghm wrote: post #70

It's basically the same thing as the old joke "if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion dollars, they have a problem". IP law seems to always be disproportionately wielded against smaller players, and the ones who are big enough get away with it.

That’s why IP law was a cool concept but ultimately harmful in practice. Anything that can be copied for free cannot truly be “owned”, can it?

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#105

Post by dwa3592 »

ghaff wrote: post #52
dwa3592 wrote: post #35

Plagiarism by default is unauthorised so I think the title should be "AI is just authorised plagiarism". It's authorised by the markets, the governments and the society at large.

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, ideas, and even expressions from others all the time and that's considered pretty normal. And, if you don't want that to happen, don't publish/disseminate something. Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it.

>>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?

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#106

Post by kolinko »

asklq wrote: post #37

Yes, of course it is. If the model is built on all human information, then it is by definition a derivative work of all human information and as such violates IP. 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 may not be the best analogy for you.

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.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#107

Post by onion2k »

Fuck Google for ranking some copycat website higher than mine, even though they copied my article.

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.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#108

Post by rigonkulous »

vb-8448 wrote: post #94
rigonkulous wrote: post #6

AI is human knowledge at scale, wanting to be free. 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…

> We built it, because we as humans intrinsically know that information should be free I don't know if this statement is more stupid or naive ..

I could say the same of your position, honestly. Stupid, naive - or maybe just plain ignorant.

If humans didn't want information to be free, there wouldn't be so much free information.

Or did you not notice?

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#109

Post by ggillas »

IP attorney here and actively working on this 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.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#110

Post by LatencyKills »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #39

People need to cope with the fact that no thought is original. Even Newton and Leibniz were having the same thoughts at the same time. Get over it.

Having an original thought is in no way related to breaking copyright laws.

I don't think we should "get over" the fact that modern SOTA models couldn't exist without being trained on protected works.

Post reply on HN