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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

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Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#471

Post by cute_boi »

matt_heimer wrote: post #172
aaarrm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, depends on how accessibly to people you want it to be. Most legit search engines are going to honor robots.txt and you can disallow access. Next level would be using something like rate limiting controls and/or Cloudflare's bot fight mode to start blocking the bad bots. You start to annoy some people here. Next would be putting the content behind some form of auth.

I don't know why we are trusting cloudflare when they are the one creating crawlers.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#472

Post by wang_li »

throw1234567891 wrote: post #378
hajile wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

robots.txt seems like it should be a legally-binding terms of service which would make them outright copyright infringing. Sue for $180,000 per infringement which should be calculated for each illegal API call.

Was your robots txt written by a lawyer? Does it hold up in the court?

It doesn't matter. Robots.txt is not a license, it's a set of computer parsable directives of how programs should access your site. The actual license doesn't have to be written for computers to parse to be legally binding.

A person should be able to write in a terms of use or license page on their website that says "do not include any content from this website in your AI training data. if you do you will be billed $100 billion dollars." And it should be enforceable. It just turns out that nerds like to say "oh that would be too hard or too expensive, so we're going to ignore it."

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#473

Post by jongjong »

quantummagic wrote: post #454
jongjong wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But in this case, a human has awareness of what software they are copying or modifying and that's how the original software author receives credit. The contract requires some degree of human awareness to be valid. This is the critical difference.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#474

Post by visarga »

ofjcihen wrote: post #403
rickydroll wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, everybody trains on the knowledge and experience of those who came before. AI just does the same thing at scale. I do not value copyright. All it does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work. It does not differentiate or account for parallel creation. I cannot count how many times I have "created" something, only to find it in a research paper later. Part of the reason I thin…

The fact that these companies are making money off of it negates your argument.

I don't think anyone's "making money" yet. We have a race to build up hardware for AI, and one to train models. There are some profits in there, but who's making money from the work AI performs? Nobody, because any advantage some company claims with AI is quickly replicated by competitors and profit dries up.

Today you can put a coding agent to migrate an existing application to another language (like chardet). Even if you don't have the code, if you can run the app you can still clone it, using it as an oracle for replication. That is why there will be very little profits in AI usage.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#475

Post by cortesoft »

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.

Doesn't this mean that anyone can make a competing Aladdin story, though? Since they don't own the source IP?

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#476

Post by cortesoft »

deaton wrote: post #276
foobar1726 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Writing books and creating music also takes no capital investment

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#477

Post by ux266478 »

hectdev wrote: post #199
Bombthecat wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think we are at the point where copyright doesn't exist anymore, at least for AI

All of human knowledge (an exaggeration, I know) at our finger tips. It's the most punk rock, anarchist thing tech has done since the internet and it's funny it's shaped as a product.

I think the most punk rock, anarchist thing that could happen is someone leverages the shitty, pre-digested consumer-facing models to orchestrate a cybersecurity incident where the frontier base models are stolen and freely distributed to the public.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#478

Post by cortesoft »

jaccola wrote: post #372
Bombthecat wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think we are at the point where copyright doesn't exist anymore, at least for AI

What? If I want to read Harry Potter or watch The Matrix an AI cannot produce something equally as good for me. So I need to pay those people, or break the law. For lots of online knowledge/blogs I guess it is true but even here I often read explainer blogs because AI casts everything in a certain narrative/tone that isn’t always appropriate.

> If I want to read Harry Potter or watch The Matrix an AI cannot produce something equally as good for me.

Yet

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#479

Post by piloto_ciego »

arjie wrote: post #464

The linked article shows that LLMs can be used to plagiarize content through rewriting. Then he gets SEO'd out of it. But it doesn't demonstrate that AI is just plagiarism.

Because it isn't...

These people freaking out about this stuff are... kind of weird.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#480

Post by jongjong »

kmeisthax wrote: post #457
jongjong wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, beca…

You can only seed it on BitTorrent if it comes with the license which identifies the original author and acknowledges their copyrights over the code. Also there is definitely an assumption that a human will read the license or at least implicitly consent to the terms before using or modifying the software. When ingested by AI, the author gets zero credit and no consent has taken place between any sentient being on either side of the contract... Or at least none that are legally acknowledged as sentient or having legal rights.
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