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

561–570 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#561

Post by olivierestsage »

tancop wrote: 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

The problem is that something like (say) a song is much more than an idea. It’s an idea + work (arrangement, production, performance, etc. depending on the situation). The argument for owning work, at least for X number of years in a limited way (vs. our current system), seems reasonable to me.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#562

Post by bigbuppo »

jongjong wrote: post #480
kmeisthax wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ei…

And the thing is, you point out the easy out on this for similarly licensed code... a giant list of authors and contributors that may have code included in the generated output. It's a win/win for everyone. The original authors get their acknlowdgement, and the AI company gets to bill the users of AI for all the tokens for that multi-gigabyte copyright disclosure file.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#563

Post by cortesoft »

deaton wrote: post #541
cortesoft wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing books and creating music also takes no capital investment

And people do do those things out of passion, and many of them are happy to share it so you can listen to it for free. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't own the right to control what happens to what they made.

Sure, but you said that open source software is unique because it doesn't take capital. It isn't unique, as demonstrated by the two other examples (out of many) that I posted.

Whether someone should own the right to control is a separate issue. Your previous response made it seem like the lack of capital requirement was the distinction, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

You argued that if you didn't own the copyright, there would be no incentive for creating and sharing work. Someone said that open source software shows that you can have creative work without needing to maintain ownership. You then said that was only applicable to software.

It clearly isn't, because of my examples.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#564

Post by llm_nerd »

mullingitover wrote: post #557
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…

> why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing! The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably. That's not my hot take, that's a fact from the NYT survey published today. It's going to be hilarious when VCs, having expropriated the IP of the entire internet, build The Layoff Machine That Does Everything Without Workers,…

>The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably.

Sure, where AI means threatens my job or my skills, people view it unfavourably.

But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions.

>enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Maybe in other countries, initially, but the US is very firmly a plutocracy, and has a populace that will very happily vote against their own interests because the plutocrat-owned media told them to. And yeah, it is very rapidly approaching the point where there is going to be zero chance of a revolution even if people opened their eyes.

Which is precisely why the US is now threatening other countries as well, because plutocracy is threatened by rational, educated, better managed countries. Canada, for instance, is an example that country doesn't have to revert to being an idiocracy, so it's first in the crosshairs.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#565

Post by razakel »

altmanaltman wrote: post #486
wgjordan wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would most kids around the world even know Aladdin if it wasn't for the Disney copyrighted movie?

Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor were well-known long before Disney.

There's even a major Chinese company named after one!

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#566

Post by soerxpso »

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…

> It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different.

It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still there. Whatever 'theft' you perceive is entirely in your head; you were deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of your thing.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#567

Post by nonethewiser »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #39

People need to cope with the fact that no thought is original. Even Newton and Leibniz were having the same thoughts at the same time. Get over it.

Im not sure where I land - is it just information compiled like humans do at scale or is it different? But I am sympathetic to your idea.

I think it points to an interesting trend either way. People are less tolerant of machines. Failures of machines are reviled because of their nature, even when the overall problem compared to humans is less. For example, self driving cars. If self driving cars halve traffic deaths from reckless driving but it occasionally mows over a family of four in broad daylight for no apparent reason, society will overwhelmingly reject the technology.

Basically, I dont think people will ever be satisfied even if we prove "its just doing the same thing we are." It's going to be held to a higher standard.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#568

Post by hungryhobbit »

nate wrote: post #492
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

It's funny, the way that term gets used now is actually a wild distortion of the true history.

"The commons" was an incredibly successful system, and medieval (and prior) villages used it to great success, for the entire village's benefit! "Commons" are a great thing for everyone to have!

The real history is that as advances in technology (like the Industrial Revolution) changed things, certain rich villagers were suddenly able to manage more animals than they could before. Those (specific/rich) people over-used the commons, creating the "tragedy" we all know of.

The real lesson of history is not that commons fail: to the contrary, they worked great and helped everyone for centuries! The real lesson is "watch the fuck out for the new rich (especially when they just became rich because of recent technology advancements): those bastard will steal from everyone for their own benefit!"

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#569

Post by nonethewiser »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #537
adamzwasserman wrote: post #39

People need to cope with the fact that no thought is original. Even Newton and Leibniz were having the same thoughts at the same time. Get over it.

I submit most of the replies to my original reply as proof that there are no original thoughts.

Should we hold machines to the same standards as humans though?

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#570

Post by nonethewiser »

Jtarii wrote: post #499
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.

What are you referring to when you refer to the technology of agriculture? Like John Deere's latest tractor? GMOs? The shift from hunter gathering to agrarian society?
Post reply on HN