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The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

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Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#71
post #67

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 o…

> Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order. This is especially egregious in Google's case given how trigger happy they are with pulling YouTube videos with a simple claim that something is infringing. I guess unless you can lobby them at the level of the music industry, their default policy is to do nothing.

Let's consider an independent dev making claims vs the army of lawyers from RIAA/MPAA type claimants. Which one do you think evilCorps will pay attention to?

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#73

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.

GPT 5.5 Pro is worth the increased price of the higher subscription.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#74

[flagged]

OP is a good submission but please don't post summaries in the comments (it's not the convention here), and especially please especially don't post generated text - it's not allowed in HN threads - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They basically liked the idea of the book and used the bulk of its text as lorem ipsum in a demo for their most likely one (three?) person "digital agency" that probably has 3 clients including mom. The title made me think that he released a paperback that competes with the original. > If you agree with copyright at all The only part of copyright I agree with is right to inalienable attribution (which the rest of cop…

> He basically liked the idea of the book and used the bulk of its text as lorem ipsum in a demo for their most likely one person "digital agency" that probably has 3 clients including mom.

What is your basis for this belief?

Did you read the part about the obviously intentionally-added affiliate links to the original book?

> The only part of copyright I agree with is right to inalienable attribution [...] So whoever made this silly little thing gets a pass from me.

Did you read the part about the fake site appearing higher in search results for the author's own name?

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#76
post #73

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.

GPT 5.5 Pro is worth the increased price of the higher subscription.

I have it. Got the same issues with xhigh and pro.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#77

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…

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.

I used to do this type of thing a lot. Boldly state something I knew to be wrong, so I'd get correct answers.

Dang asked me not to do it.

Now, when I boldly state wrong stuff (a not-infrequent occurrence), it's because I really am wrong.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#78
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…

There are already companies like Asylum films. Pay attention to the right hand column of this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Asylum_films

The term for these is "mockbusters", and the term has its very own Wikipedia article, linked in the first paragraph of the page you cited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockbuster

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They basically liked the idea of the book and used the bulk of its text as lorem ipsum in a demo for their most likely one (three?) person "digital agency" that probably has 3 clients including mom. The title made me think that he released a paperback that competes with the original. > If you agree with copyright at all The only part of copyright I agree with is right to inalienable attribution (which the rest of cop…

> liked the idea of the book and used the bulk of its text as lorem ipsum in a demo

I'm sorry, what? What exactly do you think is happening here?

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DMCA to take down AI slop? I feel that is twice the mistake. DMCA should not exist in the first place. Neither should AI slop. Here we have AI stealing from people. AI is a thief.

So you're against copyright protection, but also against AI using copyrighted work? I can understand both of those positions separately, but how can you combine them in the same statement?

there are two different things — one can be against the idea of copyright property, or just copyright laws as written into the legal system, while holding the expectation these should apply to everyone equally
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