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The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

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Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#41

Post by jonners00 »

sarchertech wrote: post #35
fwipsy wrote: post #10

From the article I guess Qontour reproduced the entire text verbatim. > it also includes the entire text of the book, from its opening 800-word foreword to a complete archive of all 311 neologisms... all penned by Koenig. So it doesn't seem likely to me that they asked AI to make a fan site and it spat out the book; instead they asked AI to make a fan site and then copy-pasted the text of the book into it. Perhaps a…

> However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way. I hate this so much. Not you or your post, just that it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking. Claude’s also technically right but wrong where it matters. The author could easily offer to settle for control of the site instead of suing. If the author registered the copyright to the book, he doesn…

I can't tell you how many times a week claude opus 4.8 high effort has to apologise for being wrong when I'm asking it about something narrow and specific that i want it to research but it blurts out broad context from its training material and incorrect conclusions/assumptions. This is happening all the time. Someone needs to create a repository of its apologies to remind us all of its limitations.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#42

Post by habagav »

pixel_popping wrote: post #20
echelon wrote: post #5

AI laundering is going to become a major tactic in all domains. Fiction and nonfiction writing, software, video, music, you name it. It's easy to take GPL software and rewrite it in another language without the license. Trivially easy. It's possible you'll even be able to do the same with just compiled bytecode soon. Just recently there was an instance where Nous Research Hermes agent cloned some Chinese OSS. It's ha…

Literally this is our future, many devs still don't seem to believe we will be able to "zeroshot" everything, but it's because they haven't experienced themselves proper tooling (at the minimum leveraging 4 models in debate, adversarial and loops and workflows and so-on and unli-loop until completion, MITM everything...) , with the exception of advanced fields, most softwares are pretty basic, let's say redoing X11 i…

Honestly though, even if this is the future what kind of creator is going to participate in that? Why would anyone put effort in substantial ideas that can just be stolen with a click?

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#44

Post by scotty79 »

I'm going to die of old age in this world where no-one can feel safe to make any small, unrelated, irrelevant, unpopular, ugly, worthless thing without the threat of being fed to the lawyers.

No-one is seriously fighting the tyranny of copyright that covers basically the whole world. Even AI companies just retreated and hid after they got what they needed, like a shy teenager with empty wallet who still craves access culture, with no real attempts to change the system.

Meta is only putting up a token fight because it has been directly sued, but we all know how this ends: they will eventually bend the knee. They accessed human culture for practical, not moral reasons.

That's clear evidence that human culture was sucked dry and is no longer needed. OpenAI won't fight to open access to Anna's Archive because they no longer can get any benefit from using it in training. They can pay reddit and such for trickle of their fresh drivel. But the usefulness of any book ever written ran out some years ago and new ones are just riffs of the old ones so not really worthy of pursuing.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is the present and the future and human output becomes something not worth (or legal) to even cite in any interesting volume.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#45

Post by angry_octet »

water-data-dude wrote: post #19

I'm interested to see if this is the whole story[0], but on the surface it sure is infuriating. [0] this article and a bsky post by the author of the article are the only sources I can find other than the website itself - which is definitely as chock full of AI as indicated

It would be delicious if the post is itself an AI-copy of another post.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#46

Post by pixel_popping »

habagav wrote: post #42
pixel_popping wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally this is our future, many devs still don't seem to believe we will be able to "zeroshot" everything, but it's because they haven't experienced themselves proper tooling (at the minimum leveraging 4 models in debate, adversarial and loops and workflows and so-on and unli-loop until completion, MITM everything...) , with the exception of advanced fields, most softwares are pretty basic, let's say redoing X11 i…

Honestly though, even if this is the future what kind of creator is going to participate in that? Why would anyone put effort in substantial ideas that can just be stolen with a click?

Because businesses need to run and make money, I doubt they will just stop building because users can replicate their work easily.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#47

Post by sarchertech »

jonners00 wrote: post #41
sarchertech wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way. I hate this so much. Not you or your post, just that it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking. Claude’s also technically right but wrong where it matters. The author could easily offer to settle for control of the site instead of suing. If the author registered the copyright to the book, he doesn…

I can't tell you how many times a week claude opus 4.8 high effort has to apologise for being wrong when I'm asking it about something narrow and specific that i want it to research but it blurts out broad context from its training material and incorrect conclusions/assumptions. This is happening all the time. Someone needs to create a repository of its apologies to remind us all of its limitations.

I’ve noticed the same thing at work with Opus 4.8.

ChatGPT on my personal plan does it too. Just yesterday I asked it to give some places fitting a specific criteria. The first was that they were within a 2 hour drive of my city. 75% of the locations it gave me were more than 2x that distance. It kept doing this across multiple difference searches. I tried high and pro with no difference.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#48

Post by raincole »

sarchertech wrote: post #35
fwipsy wrote: post #10

From the article I guess Qontour reproduced the entire text verbatim. > it also includes the entire text of the book, from its opening 800-word foreword to a complete archive of all 311 neologisms... all penned by Koenig. So it doesn't seem likely to me that they asked AI to make a fan site and it spat out the book; instead they asked AI to make a fan site and then copy-pasted the text of the book into it. Perhaps a…

> However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way. I hate this so much. Not you or your post, just that it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking. Claude’s also technically right but wrong where it matters. The author could easily offer to settle for control of the site instead of suing. If the author registered the copyright to the book, he doesn…

It's applied Cunningham's law:

> the best way to get correct answers on HN isn't to ask questions, but to post LLM's answers so people will eagerly fact check them to prove LLMs wrong.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#49

Post by lokar »

habagav wrote: post #28
ilamont wrote: post #25

Just to be clear: The bootleg site is pointing to the Amazon listing of the actual book (ISBN 9781501153648, Simon & Schuster, published 2021). The Amazon link is not pointing to an AI slop version of the book. So how is the bootleg site making money? The Amazon link was created with Amazon Associates, the Amazon affiliate program (you can see the affiliate link code, tag=promptdigital-20 , in the Amazon URI). This i…

So they’re basically parasites.

But they are stealing from Amazon, so a public service?

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#50

Post by abdussamit »

Haha, it makes me chuckle because we (the humans could make decisions) let this do to ourselves.

Let the humans use the internet however they want to, and now it's the age of AI, so let humans do whatever they want using AI.

I don't have the answers or a remediation plan for this. But could see this coming eons ago.

And the future is only going to get darker from here. May God help us!

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