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The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

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Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#52

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…

According to the article, 'Qontour' AKA 'Prompt Digital' simply took the full text of a modern copyrighted and published book and made an official-looking website out of it with affiliate links to the real book. If you agree with copyright at all, then this is just blatant, intentional infringement for commercial gain.

This story has practically nothing to do with AI. It could have been done 20 years ago, the crappy Midjouney illustrations and generative text interface merely add insult to injury.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not surprising, LLMs are bad at pulling hyperspecific facts out of memory. LLMs aren't mapping applications, they're reasoners. Just a poor problem fit

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#54
A similar thing is happening to me. I worked on something for 3 years which I give away for free to help people and a thief took my software, ran it through ai to rebrand everything and relaunched as their own app. Unfortunately the ai missed a few Easter eggs I had hidden so the theft is undeniable. Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order. They refuse to look at or arbitrate. So now I'm on to fighting this in court on principal which is going to be expensive.

Theft is only going to become worse. It's already so easy and it's going to become even easier. We aren't prepared for what's ahead.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not surprising, LLMs are bad at pulling hyperspecific facts out of memory. LLMs aren't mapping applications, they're reasoners. Just a poor problem fit

I wasn’t asking it to pull it from its training data, I was asking it to search.

Also reasoners that can’t recall facts is not how people are using them. No one is asking “from first principles derive this equation”.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#56
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…

I experimented with turning out complete airport thriller novels this way, using earlier LLMs. It's not terribly hard to make this happen, the hard part wasn't gunning out prose, it was plot arcs and internal consistency, but even that was suprisingly easy to solve.

Of course I didn't do anything with the idea, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#57

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.

My company instituted a monthly "best use of AI" award to encourage people to share how they're using it. I suggested we should also have a "most wrong AI output" award to remind everyone they can't just trust it blindly but that hasn't happened yet for some reason ...

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#58
post #16

Prompt Digital Inc (DBA Qontour) is a Webflow premium partner. So let’s ask Webflow’s public relations dept. how cool are they with the fact their partner is a lier and plagiarist.

I really don't think they give a shit > So let’s ask Webflow’s public relations dept. how cool are they with the fact their partner is a lier and plagiarist. I also frown upon bullying companies like this over something they can't control.

They can't control who their partners are?

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#59

DMCA only applies to 1:1 copy, if you used AI to convert it to something else, then DMCA is the wrong tool. It's ultimately a fruitless endeavor to go after because you would have to prove that you can use the said AI tool to create the exact word by word copy and that is going to be very expensive and shaky in court I think its time that we stop extracting rent from outdated copyright laws. Once AI gets good enough…

The fake website also re-published the entire 1:1 text of the original book.

I'm aware I was replying to the comment that suggested using DMCA to take down a "derivative work "

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#60
post #17
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…

I agree. But I don't understand why the focus is always on FOSS. Why don't proprietary IP owners fear this too? Won't music, movies and non-FOSS software also have their copyright laundered if this crap continues?

I think because a proprietary IP owner can allocate some budget to sue the infringers. A community of OSS contributors may lack the money, the will or the know-how to do that.

They will also face a much harder task when explaining their case to a judge. The contributors to the open-source chess engine Stockfish needed a lot of time and energy to convince a German court that it was illegal for the commercial engine Houdini to copy their algorithms.

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