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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

441–450 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things How do you explain the creative works of writing, music, and art that existed in the millennia of human history between the Mesopotamians and the Enlightenment era?

Copying was prohibitively expensive.

The original statement was about there being little incentive to create a work you don't "own"

Difficulty in copying is irrelevant to owning it.

Moreover, this does not address music or spoken word. A pre-copyright musician can just listen to a piece and play it in the next town over. A poet or storyteller can just memorize a work and retell it.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#442

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…

  quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes

Well said!

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#443
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically this phrase was said by Jafar in Disney's 2019 live action remake of Aladdin, but wasn't part of the original 1992 version. And I personally would argue that this corporate remake is a worse creative "theft" than what random people are doing with GenAI.

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

I assume he's saying Disney owns the 1992 film so the 1999 film is not theft, but he wants it to be because he doesn't like the 1999 film. Thus the quotes.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#444

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…

This is a great point. I think for coding, the wording of the MIT open source license makes it clear that copying and distributing the software is authorised on a small scale and it's very clear that the act of copying must involve a person.

It provides distribution and modification rights to "any person obtaining a copy of the software" and explicitly requires attribution for any significant parts.

Mass-ingesting the code with a script without any human even reading the licence is a very different kind of copying mechanism and there is no person involved... The contract was bypassed completely. A contract requires consent from both parties to be binding. When ingesting code into the AI training set, nobody even read the license. There was no agreement; neither explicit nor implicit... Because the consumer, a script, never read the contact for that specific project.

There was nobody present when the copying occurred; on neither side! It cannot possibly constitute an agreement between two parties.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you reply to a wrong comment?

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#446
> I found out this because they ranked higher than me in Google search result, and then when I read their article, their article contains links to my actual website, with the exact link text (?!) , which means they didnt bother to check and remove, and thats how I found out.

So, funnily enough, Google's search index may actually have a preference for LLM-generated slop now. Louis Rossmann found this out this hard way: his human-authored, human-written, actually-in-his-own-words site for his business basically stopped ranking in Google until he went and replaced all his writing with LLM slop. He's not happy with this, but he's even less happy about being cut off from traffic his business needs to survive, so he stuck with the slop (and vocally complains about it on other channels every opportunity he gets).

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#447
post #252
post #171

if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal

Then go ahead and abolish copyright for everyone. Instead we're stuck in an even worse system where the hypercorporations gleefully plagiarize everyone else while sending SWAT teams to kill anyone who pirates a movie.

[deleted]

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#448
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oops, I just accidentally fell into every website. Don't know how that happened ...

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#449
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis_(software)

Yes, but: > Although Anubis could be altered to mine cryptocurrency to serve as proof of work, Iaso has rejected this idea: "I don't want to touch cryptocurrency with a 20 foot pole." Which in my mind is a shame. Crypto is an absolute mess, yes, but this seems like an elegant way to get something back for putting things out there.

Mining crypro doesn't materialize money. You have to exchange it for real money which means taking a private individual's money in exchange for scam tokens.

This is the problem crypto fans refuse to acknowledge. The money doesn't magically appear, you're taking it from someone else and letting them hold the bag when whatever cryptocurrency you choose inevitably blows up, fails, or rug-pulls. It's unethical to engage with at all because you're still participating in scamming real money out of private individuals

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#450

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…

We ran into a lot of stuff like this in the early days of the web. For example, there was a lot of information that was "public" in that anyone could go to the city courthouse and ask to see the documents. But it changed in nature when you could suddenly look up anyone in the country by typing their name in your browser.
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