Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#421

Post by inetknght »

danorama wrote: post #414

There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this (not just with LLMs), and I see it in many of the comments here: If it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale. It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same…

If one person is murdered, that's bad. If a million people are murdered, that's war.

If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#422

Post by khuey »

wgjordan wrote: post #415
khuey wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney owns the 1992 production of Aladdin so who exactly are they "stealing" from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin The argument, as I understand it is that the "theft" is in quotes because it's not literally copyright infringement, but fair use of an old public-domain folk tale that ends up consuming the latter. Today, when kids know "Aladdin" they know the copyrighted/trademarked Disney character, not the traditional folk tale- that's the "theft" that happened.

If you subscribe to any concept of the public domain this is surely in it.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#423

Post by chrisbrandow »

I think what gets conflated are two aspects.

1. LLM/transformer technology is legitimately amazing and revolutionary. 2. In the end, they function as an enormous, effective database for most human knowledge.

Point 1 obscures the fact that if someone just created an SQL database with every digital artifact in existence and provided it for free upon request, there would be no ambiguity whether that was legal or not.

But distillation, etc obscures this relationship and it looks like something other than straight lookup, at least in part because it is obviously more than that.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#424

Post by wolttam »

odo1242 wrote: post #185
microtonal wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that will be a hassle for human visitors as well. A web doing proof-of-work to browse, will be a disaster for phones with their limited batteries, etc.

To be specific, it would be more of a hassle for human visitors than for the AI companies with infinite money and specialized browsers.

The idea would be that AI companies would still be forced to do this proof of work. Anubis proved the idea

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#425

Post by biscuits1 »

falcor84 wrote: post #371
biscuits1 wrote: post #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?

> how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing? I love it! There's a great seed here for a short story about God being sued by a peer of his for copying some of her physical constants and not putting a proper copyright notice about it in our universe.

Thanks for the laugh.

Now back to prompting, telling my all-knowing to create new slop, good sir.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#426

Post by dpark »

throw1234567891 wrote: post #389
dpark wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested to know that entering an unlocked door into a space you do not have permission to be in is still illegal.

You might be interested to know that the “illegality” depends on the intent. If I rest on your unlocked door handle, it opens, I enter, it’s an accident.

Sorry, what? In this scenario are you claiming that you accidentally fell inside the restricted area because you were leaning on the door? Or are you claiming that you accidentally opened the door and then walked through intentionally? In the former case, you are guilty of breaking and entering in most US jurisdictions if you don’t promptly get out. Any sane court would likely agree an accidental trespass is probably not a criminal act, but it’s not an accident if you stay. In the latter case, you’re clearly trespassing illegally.

Also this has gotten pretty far away from the web scraping scenario. There’s no door accidentally opening here.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#427

Post by wolttam »

chii wrote: post #154
wolttam wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been thinking of a proof-of-work scheme for accessing content where you effectively need to mine some crypto for the author, but, this idea might not fly today

or you know, just charge for your content if you believe it to be valuable enough for the fee being charged.

Yes, but that tends to limit the reach of your content. Hence why a lot of people reach for ads.

Between seeing ads and doing a little bit of proof-of-work for the author, I'd choose the latter.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#428

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

aaarrm wrote: post #148
dvduval wrote: 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…

Is it possible able to host your website in a way so that it couldn't be found via search engines (and thus wouldn't be crawlable I hope)? I know this has repercussions on findability, but if that wasn't a concern, I'm curious how one might circumvent getting crawled.

If you really wanted and are interested in doing so and perhaps are even happy with just text and normal styling limitations, I recommend you to test out other protocols like creating a gemini website or gopher website. I don't think that scraping happens on even remotely the same scale there as compared to conventional websites

That being said you would require your user to download a compatible browser for gemini/gopher.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#429

Post by Gormo »

masswerk wrote: post #281
Gormo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the AI inferencing is equivalent to a person reading half a dozen separate papers, comprhending the basic concepts of each, relating them together into a mental model of the topic, and then writing an essay that summarizes the basic points. The person isn't plagiarizing anything here, but engaging in research, understanding, and synthesis of various sources of information. The person absolutely does…

I'm afraid, the essence is that is not. Re-sequencing content is not the same as synthesis and therefore not the same as a person processing information and communicating their own conception of this. There's a vital difference. (We can even observe this in the resulting text: we immediately grasp the level of competence of the author, just by the way they take their path trough and at the matter. With LLMs, well, th…

> I'm afraid, the essence is that is not. Re-sequencing content is not the same as synthesis

Drawing different sources of information together into a single understanding is quite literally the definition of "synthesis" in this context. If that process is what you're referring to as "re-sequencing content", then it does fit the definition of "synthesis" in this discussion.

If you're using the phrase "re-sequencing content" as a way of indirectly suggesting that LLMs aren't relating together multiple sources of information and combining them into a single expression, then that itself is the point of contention that we are arguing about.

Perhaps you're trying to apply a philosophical concept of synthesis, e.g. that of Fichte or Hegel, but that definition applies to a specific type of philosophical analysis, and isn't quite the concept we're using in this discussion.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#430

Post by msla »

If we outlaw plagiarism, we've just killed culture.

Everything is "stolen" from other art. Every piece of creation takes inspiration (read: steals ideas) from things that came before. This is how creation works, it is how creation has always worked, and it is why you cannot legally own an abstract idea. You can own the implementation of an idea in specific works, such as copyrighted works and patents and trademarking specific logos and such, but once the ideas go into the blender and get mixed with other ideas, the output isn't yours to own anymore. That's what culture is.

Post reply on HN