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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

251–260 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#251

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 dama…

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Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#252
post #171

if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal

Then go ahead and abolish copyright for everyone. Instead we're stuck in an even worse system where the hypercorporations gleefully plagiarize everyone else while sending SWAT teams to kill anyone who pirates a movie.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#253
post #234
post #171

if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal

This is an incredibly naive view of intellectual property. If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things. Do you think any of your favorite movies and TV shows ever get made without copyright protections? Of course not, because money needs to change hands for those things to be funded.

This is naive in the opposite. Creators gonna create.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#254
post #169

This is really not so clear cut as "fair use" might cover 99% of all data scrapping; you are not reproducing the originals just use them to estimate probabilistic distribution of tokens in pre-training. You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLMs.

When I was in school, writing "in my own words" was never an excuse to not cite a source. It was actually something that took me a little while to understand, it's the source of the information that needs to be cited, and that's not limited to literal quotations of someone else's writing.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#256
post #234
post #171

if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal

This is an incredibly naive view of intellectual property. If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things. Do you think any of your favorite movies and TV shows ever get made without copyright protections? Of course not, because money needs to change hands for those things to be funded.

You should check out this thing called open source software

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I wonder how many would be written if copyright was only 20 years instead of more than a century? To the point that most people will never be legally allowed to directly build off of the culture they grew up in. 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 law…

> I wonder how many would be written if copyright was only 20 years instead of more than a century?

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".

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Ownership is entirely a legal concept. Violating it in any form, intellectual or otherwise, is generally free.

I strongly disagree. Copying is fundamentally different than taking because the original source still retains their data. Copying cannot be categorized as theft in any sane society.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#260
post #58
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…

About a year ago OpenAI crawled and go DDOS level the company I work. Even despite the robots.txt not allowing it, and despite some recaptcha we could assemble in time. We found our data in the outputs of their models but who can do anything about it...

I mean, did you check the IPs and make sure they’re from OpenAI? Obviously a fly-by-night AI company is going to set their User Agent to be from a big player.
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