There's authorized plagiarism?
Yeah, I think so. If someone lets you cheat off of their test, that's authorized but still plagiarism.
AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
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Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#202It's basically the same thing as the old joke "if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion dollars, they have a problem". IP law seems to always be disproportionately wielded against smaller players, and the ones who are big enough get away with it.
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.
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#203IP 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…
Anthropic didn't lose because they scraped (read) copyrighted works. They lost because they distributed copyrighted works directly via torrents. Those aren't the same.
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#204Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I paid tuition. The library bought its books. The theater sold me a ticket. Money changed hands every step, which is the part your analogy skips.
Where did money change hands when you looked at a random image on DeviantArt and got inspired and made a similar image yourself?
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#206Being a web content creator was already a dead job (killed by Google) before the AI boom. Chasing after at this point seems beyond foolish. Time to find a new career.
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#207AI "steals" your code, but AI company says "that's a fair use."
AI generates application using a "predict the next word" algorithm built with the stolen/not stolen works. Nothing creative there, just statistics.
That application leaks, and now the company that stole/not stole the code originally claims they own the algorithmic output. https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2026/03/2026-03-3...
One problem, you don't own that output. Either the original authors own it or nobody owns it because it's not creative... https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922
Those are the legal options. You stole it or you don't own it. There is no steal and then you own. That's the core problem. AI companies have demonstrated that they will directly steal the work and they will use their money and influence to claim ownership of it.
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#208"Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy?"
Selfishness, too. But if I follow the logic, and citations are added, how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing?
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#209The 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…
It's never been a problem with people ad-blocking for the last 20 years, why is it suddenly a problem now? We've been celebrating denying creators revenue for decades... Maybe this is just the internet hypocricy of "When I do it, it's good, when they do it, it's bad".
Interesting. I suppose the main difference is that we’re ants compared to an 800 pound gorilla.
Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
#210You guys have fun arguing. I'm gonna be building cool stuff.
Still waiting for this massive wave of cool stuff.
I'm building the same stuff I've always built. Just faster and with less dependence on others. Not having to argue with devs that have their own agendas has been my biggest benefit from coding agents.