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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

271–280 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#271
post #91

People need to cope with the fact that no thought is original. Even Newton and Leibniz were having the same thoughts at the same time. Get over it.

When did the last original thought happen then? Clearly thoughts must have been original at some point, or there wouldn't be any at all

[deleted]

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#272
post #169

This is really not so clear cut as "fair use" might cover 99% of all data scrapping; you are not reproducing the originals just use them to estimate probabilistic distribution of tokens in pre-training. You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLMs.

This confuses input and output.

A copy made for the purposes of training is still a copy.

Even if you throw the text away after training, you've still made a copy.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#273
post #27

The 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…

Worse, the constant AI scraping is actually costing content providers additional money for no return. At least Google/Bing/Yahoo scraping would then be used to provide links back to your content.

> At least Google/Bing/Yahoo scraping would then be used to provide links back

That doesn't work anymore. Google provides AI generated summary, nobody looks at the original site.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#274
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure this stands up to much examination when looking at (for example) copyleft, which seeks to give people access to source of binaries they are running. If an LLM can (for the sake of argument) spit out copyleft code which is then used on closed systems, we’ve done an end-run around the protections keeping that open.

Exactly. It looks like GP is guilty of the thing they accused others of - their understanding of what FLOSS is about is so shallow it resembles an aesthetic.

You don't seem to understand what FOSS is really about. The GPL has always been about the user. When a company license-washes a existing GPL software project and turns it into a proprietory product, the resulting code is not "free" anymore in the sense that the user has lost control. This is exactly what the author wanted to prevent in the first place by licensing their code under the GPL.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#275
post #5

People were effectively copying websites (especially ecommerce tutorials) and beating the original authors at SEO decades before ChatGPT 2.

The article’s point isn’t really about whether this was happening before or not, but whether this kind of behavior is what we want in the first place.

There are only two ways to change society's behavior: policy or technology. No use arguing individually: court cases are dealing with the policy aspect and technically there's zero recourse on information being disseminated/copied that is published online.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#276
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly naive view of intellectual property. If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things. Do you think any of your favorite movies and TV shows ever get made without copyright protections? Of course not, because money needs to change hands for those things to be funded.

You should check out this thing called open source software

Open source software is unique in that it takes little to no capital investment to create. People post free art too. It doesn't mean that Game of Thrones didn't cost anything to produce.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#277
post #229
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did the last original thought happen then? Clearly thoughts must have been original at some point, or there wouldn't be any at all

Did those original thoughts not build upon all the original thoughts that came before them?

Is my house a copy of the dirt it's on top of? Did the people who built my house build the dirt? There's a difference between "building upon" an idea and trying to claim you built the idea itself

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#278
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Not having to argue with devs that have their own agendas

Agendas like, "let's not check our API key into a public github repo" or "Let's not store passwords in plaintext" or "Don't expose customer data via a public api"?

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#280
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to strong property rights and norms is secrecy and enforcement.

This is a strictly worse world in almost every sense. It's as if we abolished physical property rights and suggested people arm themselves to keep what is (was) theirs instead. Civilization, gone.

It’s a false equivalence to say that intellectual property is property. Taking your car deprives you of your car. Taking your idea lets civilization advance.
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