Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage. [0]
AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
111–120 of 783 posts
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#112You guys have fun arguing. I'm gonna be building cool stuff.
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Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#113People 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.
When did the last original thought happen then? Clearly thoughts must have been original at some point, or there wouldn't be any at all
Technically one of {Newton, Leibniz} was first, but you're missing GP's point
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#114Seriously how is this surprising? We all know AI companies stole troves of data to train their models, why do you think they'll stop? Have they faced consequences for the mass theft of copyrighted data? 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?
> it's fine for them for whatever reason
the reason is crony capitalism. I wish I knew what the fix was
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#115AI 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…
What a naive and simplistic view.
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.
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#116Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#117Plagiarism 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.
What makes you say that? Which governments? What society? The current US government is not representative for governments out there in the world, you know.
Society - as in population; people are using AI more and more everyday.
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.
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this sentiment. But as a community, this is hated because it impacts people's wages. It's the negative short term outlook of something that may be positive long term
Sure, it could be positive in some distant future utopia. 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 al…
We absolutely have negative cases - but these do not outweigh the positive cases. There is no distant utopia - right now, people are becoming extremely capable because of their personal use of AI - there is also a position on the other side of the curve, where people are becoming more incompetent because of AI.
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...
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#119IP 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 dama…
Doesn't the mere act of publishing your original content online grant you copyright?
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#120I don’t know if this author supports OSS but I’ll share this because HN generally is full of people with that mindset.
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.