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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

#491

Post by short_sells_poo »

lubujackson wrote: post #195
short_sells_poo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two issues the author raises (as I understand it): 1. People copying others' work, made much easier by AI. 2. AI companies effectively harvesting all the accessible information on an industrial scale and completely sidestepping any permissioning or licensing questions. I believe both of these are bad and saying "people copied each others' works before the advent of AI" is a poor cop out. It's tantamount to…

"Profoundly immoral" is a very modern and capitalistic perspective. A free exchange of ideas has been the basis for human advancement up until the printing press made exact replicas trivial. From a capitalistic standpoint, they are clearly in the wrong by basing their models on illegally torrented content. But it's hard to argue their usage isn't transformative.

Nobody said that it's useless, that's a straw man.

But it also isn't a free exchange of ideas. It's a concentration of capabilities in the hands of a few corporations.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#492

Post by nate »

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…

ugh. yeah. the tragedy of the commons

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#493

Post by TimTheTinker »

storus wrote: 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.

Try prompting Claude to create a drop-in replacement for an existing library, testing against that library's test suite to validate functionality.

It will pretty much plagiarize the library verbatim from memory, sans comments.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#494

Post by nate »

this is why I feel like we need some kind of "consortium" or government effort to be like "yo, llms, you need to honor some kind of source markup to give us people you mention more significant boost"? like if you mention my article, you better also show my ad partner?

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#495

Post by psychoslave »

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…

Of course quantity makes emerge it’s own quality. If you kill a single person, you are a murderer, if you genocide "others" and distribute the spoliation wealth to those unscathed you are a national hero. If you steal small material you are a theft and go to prison, if you hog some billions you can enact laws to grab even more.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#496

Post by superkuh »

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…

No. It's more like,

"You say I can take a photo of one flower in your flowerbed you put next to the public street, but you get upset when I take a bunch of photos of many public flowerbeds. That's both an over-reach and inconsistent."

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#497

Post by markhahn »

Is he ignorant, or trying to mislead?

AI is not a plagiarism engine. It can be used that way, but is not inherently so. It is not necessary that a trained LLM be able to faithfully reproduce every document in its training set. The entire structure of an LLM is not storage, but at least in principle, generalization: extraction of a somewhat abstracted "structure" of semantically similar "concepts".

But we also need to talk about authors' "rights". It's well-established that reproducing a work is infringement. There is a lot of caselaw about how much may be reproduced without infringement. But the idea that an author should be consulted before ANY automated use of their published (public) text? No, just no.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#498

Post by nitwit005 »

I can see this argument, but I'm not sure it matters, because it's looking like these companies are just directly violating copyright law.

Meta pirated books using BitTorrent: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o... xAI is busy suing to try to avoid disclosing where they got their training data from, which hints at similar problems: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.10...

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#499

Post by Jtarii »

baby wrote: post #456

I dislike this argument because it’s about limiting the most powerful technology we ever invented because it doesn’t fit well with how we established some social structures.

>the most powerful technology we ever invented

I recon agriculture and the steam engine would beat out ChatGPT by just a smidge.

I would put eyeglasses/the book/vaccines/sanitation far above LLMs in technological power.

Right now AI is just kinda nothing, it has potential sure, but today its just a giant pit for people to burn money in.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#500

Post by sumeno »

internet2000 wrote: post #248
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…

Perhaps we should go back to back when the internet was about sharing information you liked, not about credit or making money on "content".

Ok, AI companies first then since they are some of the biggest offenders
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