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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

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Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#41

Post by strenholme »

timcobb wrote: post #33
strenholme wrote: post #28

The only place where I use AI for writing is to summarize press articles; this allows me to legally have a mirror of a press article I am commenting about in my blog (whenever I use AI, I make a disclaimer that the prose is AI-generated; EDIT: I also link to the original article, and an archived copy if available). Now that archive.org doesn’t mirror many press articles, and now that archive.today is having a lot of…

So does Fair Use in the states?

Actually, it’s because, as per Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., facts cannot be copyrighted.

This legal trick only works for rewriting an article reporting on a factual event—since the events are uncopyrightable facts, the only part of the article which can be copyrighted is the stylistic writing.

Let me quote from a recent legal opinion on AI summaries (The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation et al 2025):

>>> Exhibit 11 to the CIR complaint provides website links to articles that CIR alleges were unlawfully abridged by defendants in their ChatGPT and Copilot outputs. (CIR, FAC Ex. 11.) Examining the similarities between those outputs and the corresponding CIR articles, including the “total concept and feel, theme . . . sequence, pace, and setting,” Williams v. Crichton, 84 F.3d 581, 588 (2d Cir. 1996), the Court concludes that the “abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11 are not substantially similar to CIR’s copyrighted works as a matter of law.

The alleged abridgments are detailed summaries, usually in bullet point form, of the facts contained in CIR’s articles. Those summaries—which differ in style, tone, length, and sentence structure from CIR’s articles—are not “substantially similar” to CIR’s copyrighted works. They present the “facts in a different arrangement”—bullet point lists or short summary paragraphs—“with a different sentence structure and different phrasing.” Nihon, 166 F.3d at 71. In short, the abridgments in Exhibit 11 are not substantially similar, qualitatively or quantitatively, to the original CIR articles as a matter of law. The Court therefore grants OpenAI’s motion to dismiss CIR’s claim of direct infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501 insofar as it relates to the “abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11.<<<

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#42

Post by tdeck »

dynm wrote: post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

I suppose using LLMs to write is like not wiping your ass, and using LLMs that are bad at writing is like not wiping your ass and wearing a T-shirt that says "Wiping is for losers."

I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#43

Post by Brendinooo »

I'm not morally/philosophically opposed to someone generating text with AI. I just don't want to read something that isn't really "owned" by the person creating it (that is, the writer knows what he is sending me and endorses all of its contents), and because I can't discern that from people I don't know, I tend to view it with suspicion by default.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#46

Post by bigstrat2003 »

lsofzz wrote: post #23

Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader. And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM. I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item. I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challeng…

> Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader. And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.

No. I am interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. If you don't wish to write that is fine, but don't hand it off to the slop machine and present it as though you did anything of value.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#47

Post by andy99 »

dynm wrote: post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified.

LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#48

Post by layer8 »

dynm wrote: post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

People shouldn’t pass off largely unedited AI writing as their own, but I’d much rather live in a world where that writing would be of high quality in both form and content, than in the world we live now. In that sense, lack of disclosure is the lesser evil.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#49

Post by sebzim4500 »

dynm wrote: post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

Personally, I'd be fine with LLM writing if it wasn't so unpleasant to read

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#50

Post by dominotw »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #18
dominotw wrote: post #12

I was fired from my job at spotify for taking fmla when i my dad was dying from cancer. I've been marking the my directors posts on linkedin as 'looks like ai slop'.

Talk to a lawyer about that firing. You might have a case.

i did. They said i had no case since i wasnt fired during fmla and there was no proof that it was the cause.
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