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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

451–460 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#451

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.

this made me oof. well said.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#452

What do people imagine can be done about it at this point? Offer a concrete suggestion. Any law or tax against this will give a huge advantage to other countries. It's already over, there's no going back to a world where this didn't happen. Let's just hope some good comes of it.

> What do people imagine can be done about it at this point? Offer a concrete suggestion.

Simple. Free the companies from copyright liability, but after X amount of time they are required to release everything into the commons. The weights, the training scripts and the full training data (appropriately processed so that it can only be used for training and not for people to easily pirate whatever works were used). They'd still get a monopoly on their model for a little bit to recoup their training costs, but in the end would be forced to give back what they took.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#453
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.

How do you distinguish Google/MS scraping for Gemini/Copilot vs Google Search/Bing? In the case of Google, the UA is the same and you are entirely at their mercy to honor the Google-Extended instructions in robots.txt

Google has further complicated it with new search announcement blurring lines between regular search and AI search. And AI likes to not honor any licenses or instructions when it is hungry for training material.

It is once again an example of Google using its dominant position to abuse and promote cross functional products.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#454

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 th…

That's like saying you're not allowed to load the source code into an editor, because it's not a person. Or that you're not allowed to run a global search-replace on the entire code base, because it's a script and not a person.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out this thing called GPL that is the standard license of open source projects like Linux, and heavily depends on copyright laws. Or are you suggesting open source software is public domain?

You may want to review your history. The GPL is copyleft -it only exists to subvert copyright law by using it against itself in a sort of intellectual legal judo. If "IP" laws were not as they were, there would be no need for the GPL. Software would be Free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

Even if companies didn't have copyright protection on their source code, that doesn't mean they'd post it all on the internet for anybody to freely download.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#457

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 th…

This would be an extremely novel mechanism of copyright litigation and I doubt it would fly in an American court with its' emphasis on highly individualized legal rights and obligations. And, if it did get accepted by the courts, that's halfway to an even crazier argument: that the MIT license only allows individual distribution to known parties; i.e. no hosting the code on a website or seeding it on BitTorrent, because that's not "small scale" and doesn't "involve a person".

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#458
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put what you recall on paper, turn it into a screenplay. Let me know how quickly you get sued.

One could argue most screenplays are derivative.

I heard somewhere there's like eight basic plots or something. and everything else is just an elaboration on that

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#459
post #234
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

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.

Is it the pursuit accumulating capital (incentive to profit) or merely to fund something? You switch from the former to the latter. Why do you believe that profit is reliant on copyright? Piracy is so widespread that copyright may as well not exist (in the context of the consumption of media) outside of moralizing rhetoric, and yet insane profits are made all the same.

I cannot at all relate to being so devoid of passions in all categories but the accumulation of capital. If we are to justify copyright and the concept of intellectual property writ large, then as far as I can see its only real usecase is in defending against precisely the people who are possessed by an obsession with capital, those dragons who merely care to see their hoard grow larger. Unfortunately, that's not how these systems are structured in our society. The transferability of intellectual property all but warps the idea into something that instead empowers those it should disarm.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to review your history. The GPL is copyleft -it only exists to subvert copyright law by using it against itself in a sort of intellectual legal judo. If "IP" laws were not as they were, there would be no need for the GPL. Software would be Free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

You are not a developer so you don't understand you can compile to a binary without revealing your sources? No copyright -> No GPL -> anyone can release their own close source version of open source software. Why do you think GPL was create in the first place? We always had public domain you know.

My compilers work just fine? Perhaps I'm not sure what your point is.
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