AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

Post by latexr » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #585

svachalek wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not quite sure why my address history, known aliases, and sometimes phone number, are publicly available to anyone who Googles my name, and I'm not sure how to opt out of this.

Post by motbus3 » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

hajile wrote: post #264

kibwen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We found our data in the outputs of their models but who can do anything about it... If the crawlers refuse to voluntarily respect your robots.txt, then you are well within your rights to poison their data.

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.

Post by jerf » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:24 PM UTC

soerxpso wrote: post #566

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…

Post by throw1234567891 » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

hajile wrote: post #501

throw1234567891 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Contracts are legally binding even if they weren't written by a lawyer. Copyright is legally binding even if no copyright claim is explicitly stated. I looked into this a bit (not a lawyer) and it seems that robots.txt isn't legally binding to either party, but this seems to have two major implications for AI agents (and crawlers/scrapers in general). First, even if the robots.txt says you can crawl the site, that is…

Post by 4chandaily » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #606

4chandaily wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not all of them, but some companies, many organizations, and plenty of individuals would. Not everything has to be done for a profit. Plenty of us make software, art, and technology because we find it fun and interesting to work on, and because we want to live in a world that is richer for it. Removing draconian intellectual property laws that mostly only benefit the giant corporations that lobbied for them isn't…

You probably mean you want to take free advantage of what others create, and you offer nothing in return. But maybe you will pleasantly surprise us and show what kind of valuable thing you create and offer for free.