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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

#611

Post by caconym_ »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #409
caconym_ wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how many would be written if copyright was only 20 years instead of more than a century? I expect it would not move the needle much. I support reduced copyright periods, though not in the specific way you do. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it? The comment I replied to seemed to be advocating for total abolition of copyright law, and my comment is written to be interpreted in that context.…

For what it’s worth I think abolishing copyright wouldn’t have as big of an impact on art production as you do. Most artists (e.g. musicians or authors) aren’t struggling because their art is popular but copied by others (or lack of copyright). But because nobody listens to or reads their work. Even before AI more people tried to be an author/musician than could ever hope to gain even financial success. I don’t think…

I guess you feel strongly that fan fiction and similar derivative works ought to be monetizable? I guess I really just don't care about that. It hasn't stopped huge numbers of amazing authors from doing their thing, and I don't think it's a good reason to [partially] abolish copyright except in a very specific and limited scope.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#612

Post by caconym_ »

nearbuy wrote: post #347
caconym_ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).

People have been pirating books online for 20 years and in that time the number of books published per year has increased 15-fold. A number of my favorites have been released in that time.

Piracy is illegal and most people don't do it.

In a world without copyright, I can stand up a slick 100% legal website (and apps, etc) and distribute electronic copies of every single book (or whatever) straight to normies' phones, and I am free to monetize this scheme however I want.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#613

Post by caconym_ »

runarberg wrote: post #379
caconym_ wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worthwhile ones would still be written. Citation needed, as well as your precise definition of "worthwhile". > Even if they are not enjoyable. Huh? > The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhabitable Yes, I understand that anti-copyright activists want to abolish copyright.

You are arguing in theoreticals, so you should not be surprised if your answers are hypotheticals. In reality most art is done because the artist has something to say, and the money they get from it is only motivating in as much as it enables the artist to do more art. So I would guess in a world without copyright protection we would just find other ways to pay artists and a very similar amount of art would be produc…

Cool. Let me know when the government is willing to pay me to write full time---I would love to quit my job and do that instead. I think it's a great idea!

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#614

Post by caconym_ »

nashashmi wrote: post #383
caconym_ wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worthwhile ones would still be written. Citation needed, as well as your precise definition of "worthwhile". > Even if they are not enjoyable. Huh? > The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhabitable Yes, I understand that anti-copyright activists want to abolish copyright.

Farenheit 451 is a book with the same theme.

No, I don't really think it is.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#615

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

abustamam wrote: post #580
soerxpso wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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' I perceive is entirely in my head; I was deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of my thing.

I get that the intention here is to plagiarize and thus cause the parent to feel the harm of it and realize the error in their ways, but I don't think it works. Plagiarism's harm to the plagiaree (?) is that it robs them of credit and payment, but nobody is viewing your reply in isolation of the parent's attribution and parent wasn't expecting to make money off of an HN comment. The harm to the rest of society where you gain false esteem for another's work is also not carried out in this instance. The harm to the plagiarizer where they fail to learn because they copied instead is likewise absent. If someone were to feel harm just from a copy of their words existing, they wouldn't need you to do it- google has hastily indexed this along with every other HN comment and we all know that this whole thread will make its way into LLM training sets eventually.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#616

Post by eboy »

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…

[dead]

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#617

Post by krackers »

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

It's not going to break, it'll selectively bend to the gravitational pull of wealth like it always has. You won't be able to use anna's archive to "download" that out of publication book, but companies will happily train on all that data and charge a subscription for you to prompt out a summarized version of it.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#620

Post by nonethewiser »

wat10000 wrote: post #575
nonethewiser wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this actually imply a representation of it has been stored or simply that the model is sort of over-fit?

Is there a difference?

Well yeah, if you're making the claim that it stores a representation of the data in some form.

Does your calculator app store a representation of the answer to 1+2/2*1.1 and all other combinations of inputs or does it determine the answer from a set of rules?

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