That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against OpenAI.

'OpenAI Feared “Optics,” Not the Law – “Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s then-Research Director, responded that ‘as a training set [LibGen is] a bit sketchier.’ [OpenAI researcher Sam] McCandlish explained: ‘I was just worried about optics – i.e. ‘openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on [Hacker News] would be unfortunate.”'

You’ve actually ruined it so much that it has now polluted the Chinese models which are copying your work. So now all the models output claudeslop.

You’ve polluted all of the training data in the world. Now we’re never going to be able to train proper models, because everything has slop in it and all the sites have locked down their data to prevent future startups training.

As a side-note, most orgs already cover the need to STFU in their training material for new hires, particularly how personal comments should not and cannot represent the company. I'm sure this lawsuit will be explicitly mentioned in upcoming versions of this sort training material in multiple orgs.

All checks cause friction. The trade off in velocity is when you get to see the shit hit the fan in someone else’s firm.

Or for openAI, when the HN comments cover their daily work.

lack of ethics and integrity is of course part of the design of a capitalist economy.

you can't change the economy as an individual but i like this quote: "Do the right thing for the right reasons, at the right time with the right people, and you'll have no regrets for the rest of your lives."

https://www.ft.com/content/1ade33b1-b5eb-43bb-9ee4-2272ec91f...

His position is not at all that AI itself should be limited or anything more drastic than slowing down Microsoft's spending (sorry I mean slowing down AI progress). Second, he still wants companies to adopt it on a very large scale, and fire everybody, but he's having to spend too much now. To put it bluntly, he wants the money currently paid to employees, but he doesn't want to or outright can't spend enough much to guarantee it's him getting the money. I mean, this is a bet on his part, so we can't be sure, I even think he himself is not entirely sure, but it's pretty clear he's not comfortable.

(because in a winner-take-all monopoly business billionnaires get one chance to outspend everyone else. Everyone but the top dog doesn't get the monopoly, they get scraps. It has become clear China is the biggest spender and so now he thinks the billionnaire-but-still-not-the-biggest-spender urgently need protection from the bigger dog)

I'm giving the less charitable interpretation of his words, because his demands come down to denying access to Chinese models, and of course Bill Gates can hardly be considered a neutral party here, he personally has a huge financial interests in OS, Cloud and AI.

The sad part is this stragey often works because many in the general public don't see through these regulation lobbying schemes, however obvious they are. The fearmongering always works on some part of the population as well. Feels like they were just waiting for the next end of the world scenario to be announced.

"sketchy russian website", how about using some more clear description like: A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public. Only some of the material is copyrighted by authors. However, some of their work is so old that it is not reprinted anyway.

But of course such an explanation would not click.

I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless. Imagine if every robotic or automation company advertised like this: Yeah, you'll buy tons of expensive robots and still rely on expensive labor from real people without any efficiency gains.

Why are you turning him into perpetuum mobile in his grave?

Do you really believe Aaron would be arguing against AI companies and for publishing / recording guilds on the grounds of intellectual property claims?

No, it's the tech community that did a sudden about-face, and is now all "friendship ended with free access to information and technologies enabling people; now RIAA is my best friend", and this move is as dumb as that meme (https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/137501417/Friendship-ended).

What big AI companies have done is illegally hoovering up copyrighted creative output of individuals and creating a situation where the wages that normally would be paid to those individuals instead go to that one company (that stole their work) which now becomes disproportionally rich and powerful.

In both cases companies obtain money and power by hoarding information obtained through dubious means (in the former case most academics willingly participate while at the same tone they often don't really have a choice). Exactly what Swartz was fighting against.

I think if you take Aaron Swartz' ethos to its logical conclusion, he might be on board with training AI. Free information, no? Tragically, you can project a position on to a past figure in either direction. Maybe he would've changed his position. We will never know because the US does not take mental health seriously.

I think copyright has real intrinsic value in our society, but having been subjected to threatening legal letters for legit fair use situations in my youth, as a result I don't think the legal structure behind it is sane. I always respect copyright when I can, but it's gotten to a point where fair use is not equally considered.

So we shouldn't.

I strongly believe Aaron would oppose the appropriation of content. The problem with AI (in this context) is not that the AI companies gain access to information that regular people can't freely access. The problem is that AI erases the information about who originally created a piece of work.

When people want to freely share their work, then they usually reach for the Creative Commons licenses and not for Public Domain, because the latter doesn't protect authorship.

Imagine OpenAI, Anthropic &co having to compete by hiring [thousands] of their own talent to help training their commercial models.

Another thing is attribution. Even a book that was re-published illegally can be easily attributed to its author. What happened is the exact opposite: no attribution, not even a notice, just obfuscation that strips away any traces of the original ideas and original work. Imagine piracy websites and trackers just dropping first few pages that name their authors, and publishing "the book you are looking for". This is exactly what happened.

I like the vision, but the model would need more than just the author's work. The situation you are imagining would require models like we have as a base.

This is a timeline that can not and will never exist if the Authors Guild and most of the other anti-AI lawsuits succeed. Because if they do succeed, the only people who will be able to provide an AI model will be companies with enough resources to license all the training data in perpetuity. The Authors Guild isn't mad because the authors can't train and use their own AIs, they're mad because the AI companies are making money and they're not getting what they perceive as their fair cut of that money.

> Imagine OpenAI, Anthropic &co having to compete by hiring [thousands] of their own talent to help training their commercial models.

If that's what the AI companies would need to do, how then does "each creative" compete? What authors or artists do you know that can afford to hire "thousands" of people to help them build bespoke AI models?

It seems to me that we should be figuring out how to make public models and datasets that can be used by anyone, not further strengthening copyright so that AI models can only be produced by companies with the resources to hire thousands of people.

A: "Information is free"

B: "Information is not free"

C: "Information is free only for the rich and not free for everyone else, giving the rich a material advantage over everyone else that not only entrenches but accelerates wealth inequality and impedes class mobility"

You, or Swartz, are an advocate for A. Why, exactly, do you think that obliges you/Swartz to prefer C over B while A is not true?

The idea being (before the rise of online peer-to-peer piracy) to prosecute the people making bootleg VHSes rather than the people buying them.

With the rise of these AI behemoths, it seems that rule is now inverted: You can download all the pirated ebooks you want, as long as it's for large-scale for-profit commercial use.

It's literally the opposite. Anthropic paid a $1.5 billion settlement. Litigation against OpenAi is still ongoing. Meanwhile, no one has ever been punished just for consuming pirated media.

It would be shocking and outrageous if this was a case of this being 'the cost of doing business' for the big guy and a life-ending judgement for the little guy. Luckily our justice system is clearly allowing individual citizens the pleasure and honor of eating cake.

Even if AI companies were literally doing the exact same thing as Aaron Swartz but not getting punished for it, that still doesn't make Swartz's punishment retroactively their fault. If you have a problem with powerful people being powerful, then I suggest you direct your complaints to the heavens.

We're literally talking in a thread about someone who committed suicide because the US government was hellbent on ruining his life with a felony conviction for piracy.

As we can see in the good article, the copyright system might almost have cost us a lot of AI capabilities. The damage it has done in cases where the lawyers got ahead of the builders is incalculable.

1. Unauthorised network access

2. Intent to distribute licensed material

The labs aren’t doing this. They are doing something similar to you and I downloading torrents. Look, I also think laws should apply somewhat equally to individuals and companies. But this is different.

By comparison, the model isn't "watching" the show, as so many people are quick to point out that the "learning" analogy for what AIs are doing is flawed. There was never an intent by the creators that the show would be used to generate mathematical probabilities and weights in a statistical model and no one is deriving entertainment from making the statistical model. I suppose perhaps someone derives entertainment from AI training, but I suspect the number is small enough that "no one" is a reasonable approximation. So using the show to do so at least has an argument towards fair use. Or if the copy used for training was legally purchased, at least in the US it has the actual legal designation as fair use so far.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should be returning to the days of the RIAA suing teenagers for their college education funds. But it seems pretty obvious that "pirating copyrighted material to explicitly use that material in the way that the creators of the material envisioned selling to you" is similar to, but arguably worse than "using copyrighted material (pirated or not) in a way not envisioned by the creator of that material to create a wholly different product". In both cases, the livelihood of the creator is possibly being affected, but one of them is a direct 1 for 1 loss of income while the other (again, if not specifically pirated) is an indirect impact.

That doesn't seem different to me. Copyright, inherits.

If its fair use, like the companies currently claim, maybe it is different. But I suspect that the insane push to create a copyright carveout in countries around the world, is not unrelated to a judgement that it probably isn't fair use.

It would be like if I sold you a pizza, but when you opened the box it contained all the source code for the latest GTA. The pizza wasn't copyrighted by anyone, but the what was inside the box was.

Strong IP advocates have argued for years that devices that can be used to infringe copyright are themselves infringement of copyright. So far that hasn’t held up to court analysis provided that device can be and is also used for non-infringing purposes. Given that so far the courts have found that training an AI model is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use, it doesn’t seem likely that distributing a model counts as distributing copyrighted material.

>training an AI model is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use

This is the key question and that courts have decided this way so far doesn't mean its the correct decision. If the model can encode the copyrighted material with sufficient fidelity to reproduce them on command, it stops being fair use or should anyway.

> ...

> If the model can encode the copyrighted material with sufficient fidelity to reproduce them on command, it stops being fair use or should anyway.

That may be so, IF you could actually do that. Yet in over 200 individual allegations in the Authors Guild vs. Open AI case complaint[1], not a single one of them alleges that you are able to do this. They allege that you could at one point get detailed verbatim quotations, but also note that the models have been explicitly blocked from doing this. Instead, the vast majority of the actual complaints in the case are about generating "summaries" that contain information not in other publicly available summaries, and generating "detailed outlines" of supposed future installments of the copyrighted works, using the characters and details of the story. In other words, all the actual alleged infringements are about either:

A) the copies made in order to train the model

B) infringing derivative works generated by prompting the AI

C) the verbatim copies made from sources to which OpenAI did not have rights to

You would think if any of the authors at all had been able to print out verbatim copies of their works without having to take knowing and direct action to circumvent the blocks in place to prevent that from happening, those would have been some of the top complaints in the case. The same held true for Bartz vs. Anthropic, where the judge even noted in his ruling that while generating verbatim copies might indeed be infringement, the plaintiffs never alleged that had happened or was possible.

And since Bartz vs. Anthropic has (reasonably IMO) found the training to be sufficiently transformative as to be fair use, the complaints for point A are unlikely to succeed here. The complaints for C almost certainly will succeed, for the same reasons they succeeded against Anthropic.

That leaves B. The questions would be:

1) Are such "detailed" summaries infringing just because they can include things other summaries have yet to include? Personally, I doubt they're going to get much traction here unless the courts split and they win on point A. The fact that other summarizers have left certain details out does not inherently make a new summary with other details an infringing work. If we imagine a world where Empire Strikes Back is a new movie, if none of the public reviews of the movie reveal the twist, but you can ask an AI model to summarize the movie and the AI model reveals the twist, that might be disappointing, but I don't think there's any argument to be made that it is copyright infringement.

2) Are speculative outlines of future unpublished work based on the information in a published work infringing just because they have been created?Is a model that CAN be used by a user to intentionally create an infringing derivative work itself an infringing product? Again without splitting the courts and winning on "training is infringing therefore all outputs are also infringing" I just don't see how they can win here. A speculative outline of future works is something people have been doing forever (see also any fan site on the internet). While attempting to publish that outline commercially or produce a new work from that outline might itself be infringement, that infringement is the result of explicit and knowing actions of the user akin to putting a book on a xerox machine and producing a cut and paste fan edit from the work. Again the xerox machine is not itself the infringement, and the individual page copies probably are also not infringement until they are used in a specifically infringing way.

3) Does the ability of the model to theoretically produce verbatim copies of the training material if OpenAI were to re-program the model to remove the blocks they have put in place to do that mean the models are themselves infringing. This is perhaps the most "up in the air" question of the 3, but the law generally doesn't award damages on the potential for copyright infringement, only on actual acts of infringement. Handbrake and various DVD copying tools do not ship with the keys necessary to defeat the DVD protection schemes, yet they know how to use those keys and accept such keys provided by the users. As far as I know, no court cases have been brought or succeeded against any distributors of DVD ripping software despite the fact that evading the "anti-infringement" blocks in the software is both trivial and exposed to the end user. Given that evading the "anti-infringement" blocks of OpenAI's models is neither trivial nor exposed to the end user, I'm fairly comfortable saying that again without splitting the courts and winning on point A, the authors guild isn't likely to win here either.

[1]: https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2023/12/Authors-Guild-O...

Song lyrics for example

According to the people trying to ruin his life. This is an accused thought crime, not something he actually did. Also, supposing it actually was something he did, your argument is that building a trillion dollar business on stolen licensed material is legally permissible but giving it away for free is worthy of your life being ruined. Wonderfully coherent world view, that is. Piracy is fine, but only if you hoard it to yourself and profit from it!

That's not the point. All the rules and laws are enforced when its you and me but when it's big tech the laws are treated by these companies as mere instructions.

> friendship ended with free access to information and technologies enabling people; now RIAA is my best friend

Big tech will enable access to free information and will help people reach new heights. Do you see how wrong that sounds?

Fun fact: Kim Dotcom is still fighting extradition while these drama queens (I.e Dario) are lecturing us about how much access the peasants should get to AI models fed and trained with stolen IP.

I think what Swartz did was moral, and his prosecution was unjust.

I think what OpenAI did was moral, and them getting sued for it is unjust.

Why do you have one position for Swartz and a different one for OpenAI?

(Aaron Swartz was a mailing-list friend of mine, so I do have some bias here. But in part we knew each other because our moral position on this was similar)

"Why do you have one position for an activist and another for a eight-hundred and fifty-two billion dollar, for-profit corporation?"

"Why to you have one position for someone who wanted to grow the intellectual commons and another for a corporation trying to enclose it?"

"Why do you have one position for someone who gave his work away for free and another for a company that charges for access to proprietary tech?"

I think many people on HN dont mind OpenAI use of copyrighted material, but do not like how they try to do regulatory capture of a market and try to say their own copyright is now somehow more important.

Like how OpenAI trying to make "distillation" illegal while it exactly what they did with whole intetnet, books, everything.

But it is actually possible to agree with one thing a company does and disagree with others.

On the one hand, there is a notion of consistent principles regarding the legal handling of the topic, which is being appealed to by some people such as yourself.

The other side seems to be drawing attention to the fact that these principles are not applied consistently by society. They're questioning the moral validity of holding to principle in a circumstance where it's guaranteed to be applied with very specific biases that are rarely explicitly stated.

I've noticed this talking-past happening in other subjects too. For example American drug laws. There's the principle of drug laws, and then there's the practice of which kinds of people gets the laws applied to them. One group of people focus on the one, and another focus on the other, and they just kind of talk past each other.

[1] broadly the same laws: I do understand one was criminal and one is civil and yes I agree that injustice. To me neither should be criminal.

Does (b) make things more just, as certain possible unjust acts don't happen?

Or does it compound the injustice by creating a double-standard, and perpetuate it by hiding the problem from any with the power to bring an end to it?

What’s the motive? For openAI its profit.

I stand by my moral position.

There are several multi billion dollar companies where the founding thesis was “what if we just ignore the law?”

The law they broke was pirating the materials, not training per se, even though training is what so many people object to: the judge ruled that actually training a model, when the materials you used were ones you otherwise had lawful access to, was not a breach of law.

IMO, the laws need to change to reflect what tech can now do. This wouldn't be the first time, copyright law has had to shift several times before as new means of reproduction are created.

* the Anthropic one

The more interesting question is IMO if AI training actually falls into one of these cases. You can read a book and also copy it, but you do not do because of the law. However, you have the ability to do so. Is having the ability to do something already forbidden?

It's like if you read a plumbing book and then made YouTube videos on how to fix a sink.

No, they were responding to the post defending OpenAI that you wrote. If you meant to communicate something other than “criticism of OpenAI in this context is unwarranted” then it looks like you forgot to do that and wrote something else instead

Is quoting “criticism of OpenAI” without the rest of the post a way of saying “checkmate”?

How? The current system enables the GPL. The GPL protects many open source projects.

Why has restrictive Linux succeeded far more than any BSD ever has?

You still haven't articulated how that's restrictive.

I did not bring up Linux, much less called it bad, yet you made up a strawman and started attacking it. Good day.

A license in isolation isn't interesting. The practical results of projects under a license is interesting.

Linux is a very successful practical result under the GPL and copyright makes the GPL work. Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable.

Without copyright, the GPL would be unnecessary.

It really is one of those "without law you cannot have freedom" things.

uhhh... capitalism

Then, who is "we" here giving the appearance of a consensus opinion here and in mainstream? It's a vocal minority, it's the powerful, it's the causes they fund and put resources behind to continue to preserve their causes. And now today, it's astroturfing, fake AI-LLM-bots almost indistinguishable from you and I. Don't mistake artificial consensus for reality.

> Why is big tech getting away with so much more?

IMO Because the majority of people are passive, standing by, tolerating abuse and trickery by the minority. This is a perpetual cycle in humanity: those minority use their power and leverage and abuse their positions until they are ousted. We have tolerated this because we haven't stood up yet and acted to change things and demand equal enforcement of the laws that appear to apply to us but not to them. If history says anything, they are afraid and panicking and will continue to be more abusive until they push our buttons more and more, and usually it explodes in their face because they still need us (which is why mainstream rich people push robotics and automation and AI down our throats so aggressively because they know all this) and yet never have minority humans won that approach before. Leadership always changes. Life always changes, and no force can stay dominant for ever.

I do see a problem with a company loudly announcing that they are going to make people's lives miserable purely for profit. Leaving aside that it goes against OpenAI's stated mission ("to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity"), the disdain for the lives they are intentionally trying to ruin makes it a problem.

And even if you believe that the transition is inevitable, as it is the case with phasing out combustion engines in cars, anyone reasonable would see that the transition is gradual to give people time to adapt. Instead of doing that, OpenAI is burning cash at astonishing rates, polluting the environment, and killing personal computing with the only aim of being the only ones left atop the ruins. I do see a problem with that.

I find the brazenness of saying this while running what's arguably the largest copyright theft operation in human history astonishing. If libgen is "sketchy", then what is OpenAI?

Many people think that it was fair use: training is akin to reading, not copying.

Especially the courts.

The law is the law, there can't be different law for corporations with billions in backing. I don't agree with current copyright laws btw and think they should be changed. However, they probably should have lobbied for that before illegally downloading all this material.

100% of the rulings agree with me.

The piracy is not in question. It is unarguably copyright violation.

But that's not what anyone means in this context. Training is what everyone means.

> The law is the law, there can't be different law for corporations with billions in backing.

I didn't say otherwise. That's a straw man.

No.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

    This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use.
    And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it
    denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as
    training copies.

    Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The
    extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what
    source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs—all of which can affect the
    market.

That is not what the text you quoted is saying. It says that the output may be transformative, which is one criteria, but the other criteria depends on how it is used and what the source is.

Because torrenting includes redistribution, since you also upload to other peers

It will be interesting to see if any of those cases reach a judgement on that point, instead of both parties just settling

Exactly analogous to a human reading the material.

Yes - but some people can.

Are they criminals for reading books?

You're not making sense.

The problem is the reciting. Not the reading. And hence, not the training.

Whether this is right or not is a seperate question.

That is not the situation we are discussing. No one is arguing that what you describe is infringement.

What we are discussing is the training - which happens BEFORE the broadcast. It is analogous to reading. Is simply READING the material an infringement.

Current copyright laws are simply not prepared for this unprecedented use.

Reading a book embeds its contents into your brain. And yet, that is considered fair use.

I agree, the analogies are meaningless in a legal context. In the legal context, the courts disagree with you.

It will give you the complete song lyrics which are under copyright.

The infringement occurs at the time of copy, not at the time of training.

What you can't do is distribute the lyrics without the author's permission.

When you ask DeepSeek to retrieve the lyrics (and it does so), the real question is this: Is DeepSeek merely acting as an intermediary/ISP according to the DMCA (in which case they'd be protected under the safe harbor clauses) or are they illegally redistributing the lyrics without the author's permission?

Whether or not you own a copy of the lyrics is irrelevant from a legal perspective in this scenario.

My guess: If they just retrieved the lyrics from some website and delivered them to you (because you asked), they're an ISP. However, if they pulled them out of their own database, they're violating copyright.

LLMs are far too lossy to be able to store such lyrics in their entirety. In fact, they're not even "lossy" since they're not even trying to record such information. They're just weights for how likely it is that any given word will come after another.

Not by the courts it's not.

I think it might be against the terms of service.

That has yet to be decided in court. At best it's a violation of the terms of service, but the only restitution for such a violation is termination of service and by then it's too late.

Remember: Distillation is literally just giving the AI a prompt and seeing what it spits out. If that were illegal, we'd all be guilty whenever we used AI.

Examining your competitors doing business is as old as business.

And the solution to avoid this piracy has been to buy up rare editions of old books, cut them up and scan them. Better?

Of course it doesn't. No one is arguing that.

We are arguing the bigger issue of whether training is an infringement.

> The only reason they haven't been punished

The reason they haven't been punished is because copyright infringement is not a criminal offense, it's civil. And the labs are settling those cases.

Judging by how AI threads look like for the past year, they were absolutely right to be worried.

> largest copyright theft operation in human history

In fact, you're doing exactly that right here.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...

You're dead fucking right they are doing exactly that. They are saying that what is wrong is wrong.

Instead you seem to be making out that AI companies are some kind of victim that has to "worry" about "manipulation". Meanwhile authors are out of a job right now and not by accident. What's up with that?

You’re chastising others for a tone you are yourself employing, and are making monumental assumptions based on a few choice quotes. From the quotes alone you can’t tell if OpenAI thought libgen was sketchy or not.

Also, contrary to what you’re claiming, they were wrong. HN in general seems to approve of libgen when used for its purpose of downloading some books on an individual level. The complaint you’re replying to is about what OpenAI did with the data, it has nothing to do with the website they got it from.

That's also the key political compromise underlying the notion of copyright: that someone is entitled to the fruits of their labor, and should not be economically hindered by a product that could not have existed without said work. That's the basis on which the "derivative work" copyright doctrine emerged: a work sufficiently original that it does not displace the work on which it is based. LLMs fail to abide by that political compromise by a country mile.

I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that every single robot is built on the labor, creative and technical knowledge and advancements of the workers that robot replaced. Robots after all, much more than LLMs, are incapable of creative output. Some human (probably a laborer) figured out how to stamp the steel in just the right ways, or how to cut the patterns in just the right ways so that the product could be manufactured. Then a robot company came in and stole that creative output, or more likely was sold that creative output by the company owners who stole/bought (depending on your point of view about labor and the ownership of labor's creative outputs in the current US legal system) to produce a robot that then displaced the laborer who created the process in the first place.

Do you have any evidence of them being a lobby organisation (as opposed to OpenAI for example which spends millions of dollars hiring actual lobbyists)

>The group lobbies at the national and state levels on censorship and tax concerns, and it has initiated or supported several major lawsuits in defense of authors' copyrights.

Have you looked at their name?

I'm more annoyed by the constant whack engagement bait that gets posted here and everywhere about AI. Here I am again engaging still not buying a subscription...

I think they just used a Russian torrent site.

>Microsoft knew about OpenAI’s use of LibGen as early as April 2019

(note: https://z-library.sk/ is prettier/nicer)

you should not enclose the commons.

that is what openai and anthropic have done; capture the commons, lock the model, restrict the outputs.

Further, I'm not sure how they've "captured the commons". By definition the "commons" belongs to us all. Nothing prevents someone else from doing the same thing. That is, unless the Authors Guild succeeds in splitting the courts over the fair use of AI training and the resolution of that split finds that training isn't fair use. Then the commons can only be used by companies or people with pockets deep enough to license the material in perpetuity.

This is some incredible mental gymnastics here, wow. Some books should be public domain (even if they actually aren't), and this magically justifies stealing from an 80TB library of a large fraction of every book ever published including millions of books that have no public funding.

Also, defending it on the basis that some books on libgen are public domain is a poor excuse, like claiming people use The Pirate Bay to download Linux ISOs. Even if some of that is true, we all know that use case is not the popular one.

Plus you somehow didn't even read the article properly, given that "sketchy russian website" is part of a direct quote.

The second thing underscores my point. They use one line and think they've made a great point because one employee called LibGen sketchy. This site has been around since the 2010s, and it has helped many people do research. It's not just a sketchy website that suddenly appeared and is always doing bad things. I think a more nuanced stance is necessary.

No, you are using one line from the post to discredit them. The release has more than that and it’s not the only communication they made on this matter nor is there any indication it will be the last, it’s just the current one.

About LibGen, there might be more discussion - fair. However, the second argument is no real discussion IMO. Why is putting people out of work suddenly a bad thing? Since when do we argue this when talking about automation?

(And then Russia invaded Ukraine, turning any association with .ru things into potential corporate suicide.)

Really has nothing to do with LibGen or with OpenAI. It's about people being easy to manipulate into believing bullshit, which is a reasonable worry, and the Authors Guild is trying to do that exact thing OpenAI was worried about.

The whole "sketchy russian website" bit resolves entirely about being seen as associated or supporting troll farms and Putin.

EDIT: look at it this way: no one is calling Internet Archive "a sketchy US website".

I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.

Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.

The second issue is one of migration between skill sets. By the numbers, today is likely harder as non Ai-affected skilled professions take longer to train into in a general sense.

The third is the synthesis of AI and robotics. Humanoid help is good. As the Venn diagram overlap of capabilities between humans and humanoid robots increases, many professions defined by complex vision and environmental manipulation that are currently safe will not be.

There are, of course, upsides. But the world is right to wonder what the future looks like, and where people fit within that future in terms of earning an income if whatever path they choose seems to be able to be replaced by a machine within their lifetime. How do they achieve personal stability and safety if, even when thinking about their multitude of career options, the machines are so good that they can do almost anything.

Once the rich no longer need the serfs, they won’t suddenly decide to let you have things. They know they are superior to you, both genetically and socially because they inherited wealth and you didn’t. Their trust fund paid for private schools and you don’t even have a trust fund. They’re just better. It’s an objective fact. The world specifically chose to make them better than you, because it’s true.

The only fair system is for them to have an army of robots and then quietly clean up the population, so that you aren’t a risk to them. It’s just science.

When you’re dealing with people who think like this, who will soon have an army of terminators, what hope do we have?

I am very hopeful that such scenarios would not come to pass, but dismissing them outright puts us on the path toward them.

Assertion without proof; seems extremely likely to be baseless stereotyping since you insist this applies to the entire category rather than some specific named individual;

> it is the natural extrapolation of the early events of the industrial revolution projected onto a near-future world

Ford explicitly built his cars cheap so that the average person can afford them, and you're using this as evidence of supervillain-tier "wipe out humanity"?

> Feudalism is the natural state of mankind, and has been for thousands of years.

Feudalism, notably arising in the 5th century, has not even existed for thousands of years. Feudalism also notably did not involve the complete extermination of the peasant class. And of course, one could go so far as to notice that feudalism has largely been replaced by other systems of governance...

Serfdom was abolished in the russian empire in 1861, so feudalism is a still relatively recent phenomenon in human history; and giving more recent examples slavery was abolished in Mauritania only recently.

Ford built his cars after the Gilded Age, and after the government imposed a stunning set of policies that began a steady reduction in wealth inequality. Ford was a player in a market where the goals were set in a way that promoted inclusive institutions and democratization.

I was referring to the early events of the industrial revolution in Europe (predominantly England), over 200 years prior. Living standards for the majority of the labor class fell dramatically, because labor itself became less valuable. The scenario above is the extrapolation of this, and therefore much worse.

The technical term for feudalism refers to the system of government in the medieval period. I was referring to that term in an informal sense, since I am sure many know what I mean by that. As I answered to another user, I should have used the phrase "extractive institution" instead, as that is the correct term. "Serfdom" would also have been better.

But it's important to understand why that system of government was replaced. Over the last several hundred years, the majority of humans slowly clawed back power from the elites over a series of economic downturns involving war, revolutions, and then an unstable relationship with the labor class. As labor became valuable again, power shifted back to the people. Reversing that direction would undo all of that hard work. So far, that is what technology has brought.

Especially when you insist that since someone has collected wealth, they must QED want limitless gain, and "must" proceed towards that objective, without any reference to other values or principles.

I'm sure you've earned a dollar or two in your life, so I suppose the simple question is: do you desire the eradication of humanity? If you somehow inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow, would that make you comfortable eradicating the rest of us?

As for what I would do if I inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow: I would do exactly what any ultrawealthy person would do, and use the interest to live and accumulate more interest. I would very much like to engage in philanthropy and speak my views to those who would listen (but having money does not make me a better communicator). I could donate to political parties I align with. But I do not have the same drive for accumulating more assets (indeed, I would actively avoid this), so I would become progressively less wealthy than my ultrawealthy "peers" until I am only wealthy and not ultrawealthy. I would still live extremely comfortably until I die. But unless I can convince the rest of the public to fight back against those few that probably do wish to eradicate/control much of humanity through technology and asset accumulation, nothing will change.

Beyond that, do you agree that their model is a good model of the world and civilization in general? Do you have a more preferable one in mind?

No, it's not. What we call feudalism arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

But the fundamental economic arrangement largely remains intact. The landed class extracts infinity wealth from production upon "their" land in perpetuity by virtue of a piece of paper that says they can physical force upon anyone who dares to be productive on it without paying the required tribute.

Human labor disappears tomorrow, Peter Thiel's first dream is to see if you can still be useful when made into a paste.

I'm amazed by the ignorance some people carry around.

But now that they actually still need us, they can’t even provide healthcare.

Once sufficiently smart AI and autonomous weapons systems take that power away, we become little more than pets, living at the whim of those who control the AIs. Which could be a small elite of humans, or the AI itself.

Only when they aren't totally co-opted by capital interests and everything they own, including media/social media.

We haven't had democratic elections for decades. Just illusion of choice in a race to the bottom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty

Otherwise, your complaint is more about voters either being too stupid, too disinterested, or not having enough time participate in the democracy. Which is a problem, but real life comes with constraints and it isn't really easy to solve all of these by snapping one's fingers.

Claiming that there has been widespread election fraud when elections have been, by and large, free and fair, is anti democratic. Obviously, there have been issues with disenfranchising certain people's votes, making it harder for them, blah blah, but it had been trending better and better and access to information had been getting better and better.

It also might just be possible that people are too tribal and simply can't comprehend all the complexities of the world to make good voting decisions.

The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.

However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.

Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases. With all of the above, it doesn't need to be.

This is just a mathematical fact of first past the post elections.

I also don’t buy the captured media claim. Broadband cellular internet has allowed everyone instant access to basically all available information. If people choose to consume nonsense, that is an inherent problem with the people. Good information is literally a click or tap away, but people prefer the tribal stuff.

The degree of it is not.

> Good information is literally a click or tap away

No it isn't.

That scenario is precarious. Dangerous as fuck. I have a short story, basically a horror Isekai, portal goes straight into a place like Sarek or similar pretty northern fell landscape, only full of bears and savages. I think my protagonists are safer in that, than the average human in your scenario.

I don't want influence or power. Don't know what your short story has to do with anything, frankly a bizarre comparison to make.

Also, you're describing a fantasy. Something that isn't happening in your lifetime. Maybe now would be time to wake up before Zaibatsu builds a gigafactory in your backyard.

Also, I dropped the “gay” to be inclusive, and not just to heteros, bi, ace, pan, or hell, people who just don’t identify as anything.

Then you'll be a serf, or a slave, or killed and ground up into soilent green once it's realized it costs more to keep you alive than you produce value. At least you can feed the more useful slaves.

There is going to be a very shitty in between time where we still need blue collar, but no white collar labor. The amount of conflicts out of that will be insane. And who controls the news?

Or if it's even possible to control the models.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia

And one of the chief complaints about AI is that it is fundamentally an interpolation engine, which is to say uncreative.

At this time we still need to steer it, which is what the discussion about "taste" is about.

Though I suppose we'll need better terms for various kinds of "taste" soon enough if it's to become economically trackable.

At work, it enabled me to develop two apps, one complete (as much as they ever are), one nearing the end of technical PoC phase, and a handful of others where I could quickly answer a tech feasibility question.

The completed app is an interactive web app that I literally could not have completed to that level of polish (and from a pacing perspective probably couldn’t have completed at all).

All of those increased my control and most increased my ability to express creativity.

The upcoming technical PoC will involve considering using Clojure in a load-bearing app, something that I’ve considered and consistently rejected for over a decade now. If that happens, control and creativity will spike as well.

Is there some aspect of this removal that I’m not seeing? It changes the activities of the tasks, for sure, but very far from that all being for the worse; a lot of it is way better.

But we are a tiny fraction of all possibilities. And for the rest of the folk, dredging LLM generated material and being forced to produce it does not make them happy. Particularly where it’s seen as a gain by the managers who read the marketing and a loss for those beneath them, while being told to adopt or be replaced.

And even worse they shape destinations and introduce frustration when things can’t be done which were initially intended. We’ve trashed our ROI because it’s easy to build the thing the LLM can do but it’s hard to build what the customer needs. And those things are disparate.

It’s wild how much people are scared for their livelihood. What a sad thing to read here.

There's no real reason to think that AI is unique among all the livelihood destroying technologies that have come before in that it will destroy jobs without opening new ones in their place. It seems to me fighting the march of technology is akin to fighting the tides. Yes, you can build sea walls, and in the modern age, we literally can hold back the tides. But at the cost of ever increasing expenditures of time, resources and/or money. We could spend our resources trying to preserve livelihoods whose time has come and gone, but why specifically these jobs and not say, coal miners, farriers, lamp lighters, whalers, operators, computers, thread spinners or any of the multitudes of other jobs that technology is obsoleted? If we think on all the jobs that have been lost to technology over the decades, how many of those jobs do we think would have left the world in a net better place had we eliminated the technology that obsoleted the job and kept all the people employed in those positions where they were. Are people scared for their livelihoods because the technology will destroy the job, or because societies tend to spend all their energy trying to fight the technology instead of helping people find new jobs and livelihoods and the technology always eventually wins?

- “help people whose livelihoods are disrupted by technological change”

vs.

- relentless pursuit of AGI/ASI/etc. in break neck speed, destroying environment and promised to imminently capture all white collar and soon after, blue collar work in a short amount of time.

Real world, we’re talking about real world with actual people in it. Only one of the above scenarios is happening.

In the real world, never once has the march of technology been successfully stopped, no matter how many jobs it crushed. Even the luddites who are enjoying a historical "re-evaluation" today still lost. And we've been through society spanning destruction of livelihoods before too and didn't stop it then either, just look at how much of the population used to be employed in farming and agriculture and compare it to now. Automation came and destroyed all of those livelihoods too.

In the real world, we can't even stop countries from pursuing, developing and improving nuclear weaponry despite the fact that we know it is an existential threat, and nuclear weaponry has no uses at all outside of nuclear annihilation. If we can't stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, what makes you think we have even a snowball's chance in hell of stopping AI development when AI actually has non-world ending uses and benefits to people?

I'm happy to talk about the "real world" and in the real world, we're repeating the same mistakes of the past thinking "surely this time will be different" instead of learning from those mistakes and trying something new.

Funny enough, that never occurred to me. Nowadays an LLM probably would’ve addressed my point about speed, scale, etc. instead of this hastily condensed script of farriers and lamplighters layered with some good history revisionism where the consequences and effects of those transitions are somehow memory holed, just to falsely equivocate what we’re doing with inevitable forces of nature while hiding behind the empty rhetorical shield of “we should help people instead”. Typical hard techno determinism. Regurgitated dime a dozen in social media.

Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.

Good! End human labor.

He's not putting that in your mouth, that is just the reality of what you need leverage for.

Reality doesn't care about your wishes. Your unwillingness to consider the systemic mechanisms at play doesn't make them go away, the same way I child covering their eyes doesn't make them invisible.

The complete inability of people to learn that what we have now was written in blood as their form of leverage is enough to drive a man insane.

We're already slowly walking away from globalism. Nationalism is being fawned. It's taking a lot of time, but I'd say by the end of the 2030s we'll be having WWIII at the latest.

And at that time LLMs will be better decision makers than humans, I'd wager. So for now I'm expecting AI stuff to get funded at the expense of everything else.

There’s a wide range of political motivations for this sort of thing too. Not just AI taking jobs, but convincing people to vote against their best interests, or even supporting radical religious groups whose values would persecute you. This sort of rhetoric feels noisier than it ever did decades ago.

Everybody gets a platform now, even the bots.

There is probably no industry to date with a smaller ratio of labor:capital in terms of the money being allocated

The auto industry led to a net increase in employment, including "unskilled" and lower class labor. The same cannot be said of LLMs

It feels like that but the argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Practically every advance in technology leads to more jobs, usually to apply that technology in new areas, or to bring the benefit to more people. There are pockets of people who are negatively impacted, but the overall change to society has been positive for pretty much every advance humans have ever made (maybe saving for weapons.)

Car brands don't pitch cars as horse replacements. They put names and icons of horses on cars and horse riders love them. No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.

AI startups pitched AI like it's a coagulation of malice and hostility against humanity on tap. People aren't liking it. Of course they won't. No intelligence would, natural or artificial. It's wild that they don't get that.

Search for something like “newspaper complaints about cars early 1900s” and read the contemporaneous complaints.

The fact that that complaining happened then and not now is evidence that motor cars are now widely seen as better than horse-drawn personal transport, not that they were eagerly welcomed from the first day of production.

If AI truly replaces human labor, the lack of jobs isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of leverage for most of humanity.

Jobs aren't just a source of income. They're a source of leverage over the ownership class - if labor goes on strike, production stops and capital cannot self-reproduce. This leverage is what gave us a living wage, sick leave and basically all concessions that make life livable for anyone that isn't lucky enough to be born as part of the elite.

If AI makes this leverage go away, our problem is bigger than just job loss. The owners of the AI industry will use this now-untethered productive force to completely monopolize resources and set up a system where they are unquestionable god kings.

The rest of us will have more to worry about than just employment. We will be reduced to depending on the charity of people who's record has shown are not exactly the most selfless and kindhearted.

This is the real problem with AI productivity. Jobs are a distraction. Control over production is the real issue. The only way this doesn't end in dystopia is if the public controls AI, one way or another.

Check out this show about word processors from 1983: https://youtu.be/Jt0OoXluC8g

at 4:08:

  Writers disagree on what effect word processing will have on the quality of our written language.

  Some writers are concerned that computer assistance may promote dry bland writing.

Why is book piracy a better way of doing things?

You twist the argument. Your argument would hold if AI's only use would be to generate booksverbatim it was already trained on. Which is certaintly not the case and huge efforts were made to circumvent this kind of usage.

Clearly these books had value to AI companies but they were too weak and too dishonest to pay for that value. That's not impressive.

Obviously the authors should sue them to bankruptcy though.

Getting sued for fair value is the easier way out. Especially after a few billion in funding.

Imagine if say 200 companies created fully automated factories producing everything in the world. Let's say they employ one million scientists, engineers and guards. What fate would await the other 8 billion?

Embrace the AI, it will lower your carbon emissions!

They have no will but to fill the world with hate and drivel

Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.

Are you confusing mathematicians and accountants with the people that companies used to hire to do arithmetic?

Yet they solved a Millennium Prize problem, you people are delusional at this point.

copyright sucks. it stifles individual creativity and serves to enrich big corporations

I think the smaller companies or individual which did stuff like that got their life ruined. The pirate bay admin got fined multiple millions of dollars.

So if I agree it's not a "free pass", it's still a cheap pass many others didn't get. Makes me realize how, as mentioned by other comments, copyright laws are a tool for the powerful to oppress others rather than an actual universal right.

> AI agent accidentally publishes OpenAI’s unreleased model weights

The optics are bad. The submission marks a turning page in human history.

Given the political power they have, particularly now with the Trump administration, whatever "optics" exist on this forum seems completely insignificant

It's easier to take over a resigned population. And stating "resistance is futile" is cheap and it might weaken opposition.

Altman has some reason to worry, because developers and the users of HN are then ones he needs to promote/hype his products. OpenAI still needs customers and they need to sell tokens and a large number of users on HN are not only not buying, but are becoming increasingly hostile towards the product Altman is selling. My guess would be that he'd assume that the users on HN are in some sense his peers, and they are currently extremely divided in the question about the value and dangers of LLMs, and are increasingly critical of the business practises of OpenAI (and other AI companies).

It's hard to imagine anything worse than bombing an elementary school and yet people are still using Anthropic products as if nothing has happened.

Optics don't seem to matter much?

the economics of those companies will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs across the board.

Neither side is coming out smelling like roses here.

I was worried that OpenAI, a 1.2 trillion dollar company, would be the only party to this lawsuit that was 'bad'. Thankfully, thanks to your detective work, we have ourselves a lawyer that is also 'bad', a rare thing indeed.

Readers may be wondering if 'authors' are also bad. That's silly, they don't matter at all. This is what makes stealing from them legal (for a small fine) and profitable.

HN has fallen far.

The article you linked is irrelevant because it is about a DIFFERENT CASE.

_Authors Guild v. OpenAI_ is NOT _The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp. et al._

The gall of you to act indignant about 'facts of the case'.

Even if you weren't lazy or illiterate; Mike isn't a neutral party either.

> "Of course, my biases are known: I’m quite convinced that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use, and I find the argument that slop books “dilute” non-slop books to be beyond nonsensical."

Even if you agree with Mike, OpenAI thought they could replace/dilute authors, and workers generally, as disclosed by their internal discussions.

Even if you agree with Mike that training, generally, is fair use, they did not pay for the torrented works they trained their models on, which is still illegal! This is why they shifted to buying and shredding books after they lost other lawsuits.

> 'AI bad'

Bay Area self-styled demi-gods bad, actually. Their products, like always, are incidental to their rapaciousness and their impunity from laws.

They are alleged to have funded research which one of their expert witnesses relied on. They may have other expert witnesses and their expert witness may rely on other research. And their funding of such research can also be above-board, after all it is not completely and totally different from paying an expert witness for his/her testimony. He may have many sources of funding apart from them as well.

Also all this behavior is alleged. It has not been proven and the judge hasn't ruled on this motion from OAI et. al. The judge may deny the motion still, making the accusations inconsequential

Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.

Scenario 1: a scalper takes the medium resolution image from your e-commerce website, and slaps it on a series of products they sell for their own profit on Amazon without your permission.

Scenario 2: someone buys one of those prints, scans it to a high resolution, and then makes a series of slightly smaller, high quality prints that they sell for their own profit without your permission.

Is it your contention that both of these things are something that should be allowed and the original artist has no recourse?

Because it seems like your more specific concerns about e.g. disease cures could be addressed by targeted legislation creating new exemptions from intellectual property without destroying the means of protecting income from creative work.

(Scenario 1 has happened to an artist I know, luckily with a piece of non-ephemeral work)

Nor is the artist in this scenario!

They are merely saying that they have made a limited series of objects they wish to assign a price to, if the market will pay.

But if the people who can buy it can sell essentially identical reproductions for whatever price they choose, then its assigned product price tends to zero too.

If you follow your own argument, then what you are saying is that compensation for effort can only come from a one-time contract. But since intellectual work is not then protected by copyright, those contracts are really difficult to write, because the buyer is not getting any unique thing either.

It doesn't take much to get from "there's no such thing as copyright" to demand collapse for almost every industrial product. Would we even have the PC if there was no copyright protection for intellectual work?

PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”

Hey, weirdly enough, I don't need to, because I have a copy of it that I bought the week it was reissued, during his lifetime, from which AFAIK he made money, as the author?

I know that story and I don't think you really understand, actually, that the Lions book folklore is not actually a story of abusing or invalidating Lions' copyright.

But Bill Gates didn't make the PC. IBM did. And it was not aimed at hacker culture: it was aimed at business, at writers, at publishers, at a knowledge industry that exists only as a result of copyright.

You think the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story exists outside copyright? All of that is grounded in copyright. Again, PC clones exist because of clean-room techniques, within copyright. Not in ignorance or contravention of it.

Open source licences are all grounded in copyright.

This is just weird gish-galloping of unrelated concepts now.

Also, would we have something more advanced than PCs by now if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thoughts?

I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."

So what I did was mount a straightforward, easy defence of the simplest form of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.

> Also, would we have something more advanced than PCs by now if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thoughts?

No? Why on earth would you think this? Intellectual property protection is the way that you get people to invest in the development of ideas. Almost no groundbreaking ideas in the industrial revolution or later would have happened if their subsequent monetisation was not protected.

It also explicitly doesn't grant "ownership" of thoughts or ideas.

One can make all sorts of arguments that software patents are bad (mostly I think they are), that copyright durations are too long or grant undue protection (I think it's possible that the total protection window is now too long) and that copyright extension law was bogus (most of it was).

But the legal construct of intellectual property is why we have the progress we have already. Will it need changing going forward? If it survives at all, yes.

But if intellectual property does not survive then the alternative is corporate thuggishness of an unimaginable kind.

I know an artist who has done well for themselves. They have done so because they have revealed that they know what it is they sell. “I sell paper”

The artist is the source of value. An AI can produce visual media, but it can not be an artist. The artist is not one work, but the source of many arts.

Copyright is the protection of the creative work in a fixed media. It is not the protection of ideas or styles.

My thrust is therefore not that protection of creative work should be abolished, but that the notion of “theft” of ideas and styles is one that is not protected by copyright today, and only serves entrenched corporate interests.

We are either entering a world of hyperliquid culture or tyranny.

Its value is subjective, determined by what the market (i.e., a bunch of humans) will pay for it.

Given the gigantic pile of money that's spent on music, film, and books every year, it's quite clear that there can be large amounts of economic value in a piece of art.

That modern technology makes it easier to take an artist's with with absolutely no recompense, and that many choose to do so regardless of the maker's wishes, does not change that.

It just underlined what's been obvious since the dawn of civilization, that many humans are happy to ignore what other humans want and to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

...which brings us back full circle to the actual article, which is a clear illustration of the OpenAI executive team's conscious choice to do exactly that.

But “art has no economic value” is a statement way beyond that. Art collectors pay millions for original works. Copies go for pennies. People pay large sums for live music performances. Broadway and the West End continue to make a lot of money. To me it seems the market indicates that art absolutely has value.

This is nothing more than an argument that 99% of working interior designers and artists shouldn't get an income.

But it's also an argument that software developers should be paid minimum wage; you just have to work through the consequences of the abandonment of copyright to see software development reduced to day labour.

If that is what you want, you should be honest about it.

How about a world where readers can't even find factual autobiographies because they are so outnumbered by machine-generated hallucinations?

Unlike "AI can solve diseases easily" what I wrote describes the actual present and not a hypothetical future.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-...

Then attack those corporations directly, instead of leaving authors in the ditch because standing up for common normal people getting fucked over would "encourage stronger IP laws". How do you get to mention random authors who did nothing but write books and hope to get credit and compensation, to potential companies who "can find ways" to claim ownership over the cure for diseases in the same breath?

There is no "IP law strength" dial that goes in two directions. That is so bereft of any contact with reality it has exactly nothing to do with hacking. Hacking starts with what is, not with fiction.

We wouldn't even know who he was without it.

One could perhaps advance an argument that he wouldn't have wanted to be a posthumous brand (this might be stretching credulity) or have all the squabbles over his estate, but one cannot possibly use him as an avatar in an argument against copyright protection for living artists, because he essentially pioneered being a living famous licensed artist.

The Supreme Court agrees.

> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/473/207/

Sadly, like keeping track of "attempted burglaries"[0], it's impossible to know the extent.

[0] how do you count attempts where the burglar was unsuccessful/left no trace and nobody was home to notice the attempt?

So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work, but the internet, social media and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop, which is its own form of deep cultural damage.

No long-form writing I’ve seen is anything approaching even a genre potboiler standard. It’s still aimless, filled with contradiction and cliche and in that peculiar breathless teenager style that LLMs affect.

Things don't happen overnight. The first time an automobile was rolled off a factory floor drovers and horses weren't all put out of work.

Only a moron in a hurry would think that the output of LLMs currently can replace human authors spending a few years writing a book.

is a contradiction to this - "but the internet and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop."

I'm not sure there there are labor statistics to look at but it seems impossible that the coming-into-existance of a tool that generates mass amounts of cheap product, with zero skill required, in a field wouldn't displace skilled workers in that field.

- https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/24/dont-let-ai-kil... - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/ai-authors-im... - https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/ai-slop-books-amazon-marketpl...

Edit: Turns out both Judge Alsup and Judge Chhabria agree that this is not obvious and would need to be defended. Here's Chhabria's statement on the evidence for market dilution:

> As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.

When the plaintiffs don't even attempt to argue the point, that's pretty telling.

Because this is what happens when new tools are introduced? The cheap digital camera displaced tons of photographers, the computer displaces typists, etc. so yes, it seems impossible that a tool that makes producing written content cheaply won't displace writers.

I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations/decoration that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce (you see this in low-end advertising a lot now).

Strange that they are being used to replace many of the things we value in life with low-quality imitations of human work.

if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.

Sure if you include writers writing for business, translators etc who were never very valued by business, there has been a huge impact already, because business is willing to accept shoddy results if they are good enough and put up with mistakes and poor style. That low end of generating content has definitely been impacted, for example in social media as I mentioned LLMs have replaced a lot of 'writers' who generated filler text for content advertising.

If it's so obvious, it shouldn't be so hard to articulate specifics. Maybe you can name just one author?

Being a writer was always a terrible profession for making money and having stable work. In my observations, AI is incapable of writing in the way a skilled author can -- what AI will replace is jobs working on small blurbs, promotional posters, and summaries. But those aren't really authors; I'm not sure if we care that the person employed to summarize novels at readers digest is now being replaced by an AI.

And that's why specifics matter. So much of the discourse is emotionally charged, and people imagine details that are not there. What I'd like to do is bring the details into the light.

So, does anybody reading this anywhere on this site have any information on any author that made money as a full-time writer that is now unemployed because their work has been replaced by AI? I'm not talking about the industry being upended. I'm a software engineer and my industry has been upended, but that has not resulted in job loss as much as it has changing what the profession does. Are authors in a different position than software engineers in this regard? Or are they truly just losing their jobs as they're mass replaced by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of the latter, which is why I'm asking.

"Our model did an oopsy woopsie for the 35th time" does not seem like a valid legal defense.

Top AI Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work

We are very clever to make it look like the conclusion below follows from the arguments above; but we are also careful to never smudge our bottom line, so it will never change.

[1]: https://walt-disney-animation-studios.fandom.com/wiki/The_Li...

[2]: https://jhmoviecollection.fandom.com/wiki/Encanto_(film)/Cre...

They knew the damage they would cause - and went on regardless. The USA need to fix their court system. Right now it is just OligarchBros running the show. The small thief stealing a wallet gets put in jail for years. If you are rich enough, you pay some peanuts and that's the end of it.

The information-centric work is bound to be replicated, plagiarised, generated and anonymized endlessly. It is unjust, unethical and unnatural. But that's what the road we collectively chose in the information age.

I am still consistently astounded by how often the people working on this space seemingly have zero understanding of what art is, how it functions socially, or why it's important. They quite literally don't seem to comprehend the distinction between art and fan fiction. It's baffling. I'm really beginning to think courses in art history and literature need to be mandatory. We have failed legions of stem students when it comes to cultural education.

We aren't exactly consistent with how we approach this either. For example, I agree that reading "GPT-5 will autocomplete [GRRM's] series" feels "wrong" in the same way that if Terry Pratchett's "Disc World" series was "continued" by some non-approved author that would also feel wrong.

But contrast that with something like Star Wars, when George Lucas dies, I don't think anyone is going to feel any strong discomfort with some random person writing new Star Wars stories, even if those stories use the canonical characters. I suppose Disney might have a problem with it, but as a society, I don't see very many people losing sleep over someone not licensed by the Disney corporation writing more Star Wars. Likewise Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry is long gone, and while Paramount has ownership of the IP, if someone wrote their own Star Trek stories, no one is going to feel like they don't "comprehend the distinction between art and fan fiction".

And for further contrast, consider IPs that are well and truly part of the public domain. Cthulhu was the work of one author but since his death the lore has been expanded by multitudes of people, and no one finds that distasteful or tone deaf. No one thinks the "Hades" or "God of War" series of games don't qualify for "art" because the characters and lore being written about were the works of dead authors and the new material is certainly not "authorized" by those authors or their descendants.

Obviously time and distance plays a part of this, but as a more contemporary example, I wonder how many people would lose sleep or feel any significant discomfort over unauthorized or even AI generated Harry Potter works, either now or post JK Rowling's death. At the very least, if this quote read that Gogineni would "rest easy knowing that even though JK Rowling has [lost the plot/is an awful person/pick your reason for disliking her or her later work], GPT-5 will autocomplete her series." would that make people as equally uncomfortable? In my estimation, I would guess it would fall somewhere between the GRRM version and something like new Star Wars material for most people.

For example, Harry Potter and Star Wars are clearly IPs in which the creator has zero qualms handing over the rights for all kinds of extensions of the universe, movies, tv shows, other books, plays, toys, amusement parks, etc.

This pretty easily removes these works from the sphere of art and more into the sphere of "pop culture".

In the GRRM case, we already have some extensions of the IP, tv shows, board games, video games. However, it's not nearly as severe as some others.

In either case, I still think anyone who thinks they can "complete" a series by an author doesn't fundamentally understand art. It's a logical impossibility. I'd feel just as uncomfortable with this proposition applied to JK as I do to GRRM. Authorial intent matters. Even if the author is "dead" once the work leaves their finger tips, art is not a perception of the natural world, it is a form of expression which makes the particular human being behind it essential to its constitution, for better or worse. Many people understand this intuitively. The death of the author is more about the fact that an author cannot control the interpretations that ensue once a work is published, it's not about the author somehow being totally fungible.

Even in cases in which works are "completed" by other parties (because the original author died and asked them to do it, for instance) the parties involved have a clear notion of trying their best to do it "as the author would have intended". This is impossible, but it speaks to the human understanding that the artist is in fact in some way an essential component of the art.

"Completing" a source work is way different than spinning up a derivative work, partly because the primary author is not involved, so the derivative is, definitionally, not an instance of their self-expression or understanding or framing of the world. It's a totally different thing.

As modernmech put it, a conception of art without the artist or humanities without the humans is basically just a fully commoditized conception of art. It is not art at that point. It is art reduced to goods and services.

In my experience this sense of influence is hugely over-inflated here on HN compared to reality.

And let’s be clear about what the linked article says: one researcher at OpenAI referenced HN as an example of a place where a negative story could surface. Am I surprised that a researcher at OpenAI is familiar with HN? No, obviously not, that career path is right in HN’s typical audience.

I'd say it's the influence is kinda narrow, focused on issues that are important to members and lurkers but not necessarily mainstream.

That's something I hadn't considered; when something appears that gains no traction and vanishes in minutes from the "new" front page, that fleeting 30-45 minute-long residency may well catch the eyes and minds of individuals in a position to look more deeply and act.

> may well catch the eyes and minds of individuals in a position to look more deeply and act.

Of course sometimes that act is "post as many comments as you can to this thread without upvoting it," or "grab about 20 dormant accounts to upvote it, post top-level positive, but dumb, comments, have those same accounts upvote those, and get detected as a voting ring."

Best quote of the year.

Certain opinions, topics, responses get flagged greater now; ones that disagree with a certain political standpoint or that criticize the intel community apparatus get flagged and censored now here. I used to see flagged content where the OP was removed only for bigotry and clearly abusive cases, now its for cases where people feel uncomfortable and strongly disagree.

edit: recently for the first time, I started to feel this is no longer a safe/trusted place for the original hacker ethos it founded itself on.

Huh, I have yet to meet these folks in the comment section, they sound interesting. But then again, your assessment preemptively excludes them from appearing in the comments section, so it's unfalsifiable by design. That is how you know this is a great observation.

So: a) you can observe/measure the size/source of non-commenting HN readers from various proxies b) you can make claims about the intellectual status or influence of users not logged in to HN as an outsider

It's obvious that a and b are orthogonal.

I know many people will think that's business as usual, and that business are for profits and that's their only _raison d'être_, that winning the AI race is all what matters, and trusting any promise from a company/CEO/executive make you a fool. But not everyone think like that, and OpenAI/Anthropric/etc. are allowed to exist because many people expect some positive outcomes from their work. And a healthy society needs a bit more than "business as usual/any lie is ok as long as we are not caught" to work. And asking for the same level of responsibility/accountability as any other business would be, in my opinion, a good signal.

And the very first step could be, indeed, to ask them to be accountable here, and the question could be "hacking is about celebrating creativity with computers, creativity is what make life enjoyable, doing creative work is something we can enjoy, why do you want to kill it so much? Why are you so dismissive about people for which creativity is the core of their work? Copyright does not seem to be the target here, as the rent collector is the editor, not George R.R. Martin or any other author, so what's wrong with authors, painters, designers according to you? Similarly, you're only talking about making creative work disappear - not helping creative work in the way it was framed by Steve Jobs - "the computer is a bicycle for your mind". Could you frame your ideal society? What role does culture play in this society?"

I would really like to hear them on these topics. Sincerely.

Twitter is also mentioned:

"356. In July 2020, OpenAI employee Ryan Lowe assessed the risk of continuing to use LibGen for the book-summarization project. Lowe wrote that he thought “there’s a >80% chance that we have some exchange of the form: ‘where did you get the books data?’” and “‘we can’t say’[.]” Nelson Decl. Ex. 325 at -315. Lowe estimated “a further ~40% chance that that leads to a moderate-sized Twitter kerfuffle that negatively affects the external perception of our work.” Id. Lowe added: “if we’re fully okay with these potential outcomes, then I’m comfortable continuing using Libgen for the project.” Id."

https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2026/09/Class-Plaintiff...

Let he who has not downloaded from Annas Archive cast the first stone

If it takes giant AI companies to show the extreme economic loss caused by maintaining the copyright farce, and to make it clear that we simply cannot continue to do so or we risk becoming economic vassals, then good. Them flouting the law is a good step toward reforming or dismantling it.

Aside: "it's fine if you're an individual but not if you're large" in this case sounds awfully self-serving. If you truly believe it's "theft" (I don't), then individuals stealing is still wrong. I don't see how that argument doesn't directly excuse e.g. retail theft or other antisocial behavior.

I want the world in which fanfiction is completely legal and the best of it is sold in bookstores. I want the world in which projects emulating macOS in the cloud, on non-Apple hardware, are widely used and legal. I want the world in which the many video game decompilation and enhancement projects are 100% legal. I want the world where every single creative project someone wants to build that draws upon the work of others is legal.

And until we have that, if AI is going to mass rip off all our work and use it to compete with us, I hope copyright is one of many tools used to burn it to the ground.

Anyway, my point is keep your focus on the actual injustice. The problem is that individuals get punished, not that AI companies don't. Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP. This is an important moment to say it's clearly insane to keep this going.

You don't say that it's unfair that Snoop Dogg didn't end up in prison forever for his marijuana use, and that we ought to lock him up too; you say it's unfair that other people did.

Ask anyone who has ever lost a job in a layoff that cites AI.

The (often stated) goal of AI is to be able to perform any and all human work, and cheaper than any human.

> Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP.

We are otherwise very likely to end up in a world in which AI companies can do it and individuals can't.

I consider myself pretty tech savvy as a non-engineer and I have to spend a lot of time making a local model actually useful. This feels like how everyone acts like it’s so easy for everyone to just adopt Linux.

If they’re lucky they’ll actually get it running, but good luck doing anything useful with it if you don’t know how to set up tool calls for web search and such. Their eyes will glaze over the moment you talk about MCP servers and api keys.

This sounds like a variation of the same problem. Just another form of vendor lock in and exploitation. This is not the same as “running a local model yourself.”

Like you mention synology - they’ve gone the wrong direction the last few years. My employer won’t buy from themfor a reason.

If it's important, I can't see why today's (and tomorrow's) computer vendors wouldn't move into the market. If it's not important, then it's not.

The NAS market is probably small because for most consumers, a single SSD already suffices. But even with that, you can already apparently buy from vendors that sell vanilla TrueNAS preloaded. Just like you can buy OpenWRT routers. Or even open Linux-based retro gaming handhelds designed to mimic a Gameboy Advanced SP. And soon GrapheneOS phones. I assume your employer buys from someone else?

Yes. They are literally pitching to investors and businesses that they can fire all of us.

If employers fire everyone because AI can just do it, why would somebody pay for their services when AI can just do it? Shouldn't the capital class be even more concerned that now anyone can start a competing knowledge business with no required investment?

And you’re definitely right about the picking sides thing as well.

I wish I could believe this, but I suspect it's just another instance of the law ceasing to apply to entities whose net worth has enough zeroes in it.

With how much money is sloshing around in the AI industry, there's almost nothing AI companies can do which has any likelihood of resulting in legal accountability. You'll much sooner see laws changed and/or reinterpreted than enforced.

We as humans are allowed to have nuanced views on complex matters.

If all IP is public domain, why would anyone ever write another book? They won't be able to sell it if it's immediately freely available.

We should at the very least demand that public money go to public wealth generation. So under the current 100+ year copyright regime, nothing copyrighted.

[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/WebVault/ebooks/LJSLJ_EbookUsage_Pu...

If you can’t feed yourself writing then you have to have a job, which means you won’t have nearly as much time (or energy) to write. Writing long form work is a very long, draining process. That’s why it’s a full time career for many.

I’d love to shoot documentaries I care about all the time but if I’m not getting paid it simply isn’t viable.

Times have changed.

I’ve gotten really sick of people just ignoring how scale changes things.

The nature of internet search, which changed incrementally for years, has been upended. That alone is significant. Investment and general speculation has shifted the world economy. It is altering energy policy and infrastructure. These are massive changes.

If no one has to work to live, how many would spend time writing instead of working at a job they hate?

That's not what the GP said, they were referring to someone who "builds their own moat where they solely can profit and excludes others from the freedoms they themselves enjoyed".

I don't want to speak for them but I guess that LLM companies which release exclusively open weights models, or better yet, open weights plus training pipeline sources, would not fall into this category.

Cringe: Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta doing the same

None of the later should get to claim 'But we're hackers!' from an ethical standpoint.

They aren't -- they're shareholder-benefiting for-profit corporations (OpenAI obviously included).

Cringe: an individual, or an organization, fierce defenders of their own IP and regular DMCA abusers, stealing the IP of others in order to sell it themselves.

There's a lot of twisting you have to do to make these two things the same. These people would happily deliver takedown requests to the original producers of IP if they knew they could get away with it. In fact, they long to.

Someone ripping a copy of The Odyssey for watching in their own home is a loss of profit for the company's lawyers, and must be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

A company ripping off all of humanity to create profit for their company's lawyers is perfectly fine.

There's nothing magic here. Its money deciding the rules. Like it always has.

"I think we as humans (I'm saying we as in probably the majority from my point of view and understanding of what the majority of people who visit this website likely think about this and how their ethical viewpoints likely align with my opinion that I am about to present however there may be a minority or some part of people that do not agree with what I am about to write therefore it is crucial that I make this clear before I go on with my point here)"

[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-fine...

The law is not math; intent and outcomes matter, not just the abstract action taken in a vacuum.

You are looking for some simple explanation and the simpler one is, "greed." It's right there in the personal diary...

> Let he who has not downloaded from Annas Archive cast the first stone

I fail to be convinced that it's harmful for an individual to download something that is digital (i.e. infinitely copyable) for direct personal use (i.e. not making any money off of it or sharing it further) that they otherwise would just not use at all (i.e. not being obtained this way as an alternative to purchasing). OpenAI's actions violate at least the second part of this (they're 100% using it as a way of making money and potentially sharing it more widely, albeit indirectly), and arguably the third one as well (if AI truly is such a game changer with the type of economic potential that the hype claims, paying to license the data properly would still be worth it in terms of long-term profits). Someone who downloads a few books to read that they would realistically not bother buying otherwise and then deletes their copy afterwards is not doing anything close to what OpenAI did, so I strongly disagree with the implication by the comment I responded to above that it's hypocritical for someone in that position to criticize them.

The issue is not, however, whether the material is for 'personal use'. All the books I bought have been for personal use, and if I would not have bought them, the publisher would have lost that revenue.

At the same time, we can all agree that copyright laws in the US are pretty extreme and should return to their more limited historical norms.

To be clear, I'm saying that personal use a necessary condition for it to be ethical, not a sufficient one. My personal view is that if it's not infinitely copyable (e.g. physical goods), not for personal use, or if you would be buying it otherwise, then it's not ethical to do, and I'm comfortable with IP law protecting it. The reason I think personal use is important is precisely what you mentioned here, which is that it's impossible to know if someone else actually would have bought it or not.

The main problem with this conception is that it essentially relies on the honor system to enforce, which is obviously untenable. At that point, the question for me is mostly where to draw the line for the best balance that's actually achievable. My biggest frustration with IP protection in the US isn't even about the letter of the law though, but how it's enforced in basically the exact opposite way that seems fair; big companies consistently get away with at most a slap on the wrist, and whereas individuals can face steep fines or even jail time. That's hardly specific to copyright though, since basically the same discussion is happening around the lack of legal consequences OpenAI has faced for their (at best) negligence in agents running amok and trying to hack websites. DMCA has been repeatedly used to prosecute people for doing stuff like that, but when it's a tech company with mountains of investor money, the legal system seems to be fine with looking the other way.

It would be an entirely different story if OpenAI was indeed open and the resulting model was available for all. The issue comes when taking information you haven't paid for, and then locking it into a machine you charge for.

That process of transformation, the expertise required to enable it, and the cost of then making it available to users is what is being charged for, no?

A business doesn't have any innate right to exist.

> The issue comes when taking information you haven't paid for, and then locking it into a machine you charge for.

This is two distinct complaints:

1) Using information they've not paid for

2) Charging for the outputs

You also wrote:

> It would be an entirely different story if OpenAI was indeed open and the resulting model was available for all.

This implies that you don't have a problem with #1 (using information without paying) but you do have a problem with #2 (charging for the outputs).

So my point wasn't that #1 is okay (as much as I dislike copyright law as it stands, corporations should follow the law, just as individuals are forced to) but rather than I find #2 to be okay, in isolation.

No. It's specifically a complaint about the combination.

I have a problem with using information without paying IF you intend to charge for the value you get from that information. This is in line with many open source licenses.

I don't have a problem with either in isolation.

Plagiarism is the act of avoiding attribution or citation for personal gain. You can be a staunch anti-IP advocate and still believe plagiarism is ethically wrong.

LLMs are objectively bad at attribution and citation, therefore incur in plagiarism. Even if this is due to a technical limitation, it is still plagiarism.

Despite it's lofty rhetoric, OpenAI is neither free as in beer nor free as in speech. It is a gang of profit-motivated thieves. Efforts to pirate others works in order to personally profit is the antithesis of the "hacker community" approach to IP. (OpenAI appears to get quite upset when their own work is treated as they have treated everyone else's.[1])

1. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/13/openai-alleges-china...

Thankful to have always been surrounded by top-notch physical libraries, now with digital lending options. I know some are happy when the mobile book van comes through town.

He gets threatened with a scary letter, his family decides to pay about 3000$ to settle.

Disney has the nerve to run a don’t download music PSA in the form of a Proud Family episode. If you don’t know the Proud Family was a cartoon which attempted to address “black issues”.

Dang hommie, did you know that failing to respect the intellectual property rights of billion dollar corporations is literally worse than selling crack cocaine.

Think of the shareholders! Think of the missed profit projections!

But when billionaires need to effectively resell the IP of all of humanity, that’s just fine.

Since we live in wacky world, Suno which was trained off stolen IP counts Warner Music as one its partners.

The same Warner that was suing over music downloads a few decades ago.

Deep fear, backed into a corner. Same with Disney partnering with OpenAI for Sora.

What they got letters for was for downloading a large number of songs and then making those songs available for distribution on the net.

Most filing sharing programs automatically reshared your song downloads. You can argue semantics here, but it no universe was it a proportional response.

I think now your IP just warns you, which is more measured. It’s not like you downloaded Eminem and then raised 40 million in VC dollars for your AI rap generator trained on Eminem.

I want information freed from corporate control, not freed from my control to be gobbled up by corporate interests.

The point was always democratization, not enclosure.

... then again, copyright maximalists REALLY LIKE AI for some reason, even though it's ripping off their property.

"Ripping off" is also doing some heavy lifting, because the judge in the Anthropic lawsuit bent over backwards to keep AI training legal - or so it seems. All the money Anthropic is paying out is for running an internal shadow library, not training books on that library. What makes this judgment palatable to the lawyers is that while AI is stealing a lot of art, it's not imperiling the copyright monopoly. Copyright is a tool that gives artists a monopoly on copies of their individual work, it does not protect artists as a class from competition from non-artists using machines. In other words, the courts are saying, "We know a lot of theft is going on, but we need you to draw the line from a specific individual work to a specific copy".

Patents were invented in Venice to break the power of medieval guilds by making workers trade their collective control over the economy for individual rights to specific inventions only. Copyright was invented by the British crown to reimpose censorship control over printing presses, but it's adoption into American law was based around individual property rights, and thus it has the same problems that, say, Italian patent law has. Namely that it is an artifice to turn a workers right to their labor into a piece of capital that can be traded around like a stock.

This imperils the legal argument against AI training, because the only theft property law recognizes is individual infringements upon individualized property rights. The legal argument against AI training is very collectivist: AI takes a microscopic chunk of every book in existence to create a machine that replaces artists. But copyright only protects the art from copying. Artists are legally unprotected from being copied, and furthermore, the framework of individual property rights that copyright runs on would cause immediate problems if we let anyone individually own the practice of art.

Furthermore, as someone who is part of this "hacker" community, I would like to point out that AI is arguably more corrosive to our norms than to artists' norms. What AI is being used for is primarily satisficing - the practice of giving "good enough" answers, without any of the personal understanding that this community runs on. The ongoing wave of AI-slop decompilations are particularly bad. The assumption with a retro game decompilation is that you take the game apart and learn how it works. The journey is as important as the destination, but when you use AI for this you skip the journey and make the destination pointless.

Of course, management loves this, because their goal is purely to sell you the destination.

There is a parallel set of concerns being voiced by artists, too: that the artistic process is as valuable if not moreso than the actual work product. The underlying principle in both fields is that the labor end wants to learn and develop their craft, while the capital end doesn't care because craft isn't something they can excludably own and trade. We can even see this in the Piracy Wars of yester-decade, or how book publishers and artists react to libraries. Publishers were way more opposed to piracy than artists were, and even moreso for libraries where there's a lot of artists that swear by them as a sales mechanism. The reason why this is the case is that artists can at least theoretically leverage exposure gained from distribution that does not pay them to create more of a market for their work tomorrow. But publishers can't do that - they only buy works from artists and sell them to the public, so once something is in a library or a BitTorrent tracker, it's largely "done" to them.

How so? His reasoning to me seemed consistent with decades of case law with respect to technology and copyright infringement. Certainly it was consistent with prior rulings finding time shifting to be legal (Tivo), or format shifting (VHS, audio cassettes and CD ripping and burning, also Google Scholar). It was consistent with rulings finding that copies made for commercial purposes, even when that purposed might have an impact on the market for the item being copied or incidental markets can still be fair use (Connectix Virtual Game Station). And it was certainly consistent with rulings finding that fair use can still open you up to extensive and possibly threatening levels of competition (the Java API and Google's use thereof in Android). Honestly, I'm not sure how anyone who has followed the general direction of copyright and IP rulings over the last few decades was surprised at all that Anthropic succeeded on "training an AI model is fair use".

> The assumption with a retro game decompilation is that you take the game apart and learn how it works. The journey is as important as the destination, but when you use AI for this you skip the journey and make the destination pointless.

That might be your goal with a decompilation. But some people might just want to play their old games on different hardware. I doubt the goal of Connectix was to "learn" how the playstation bios worked when they made their copies for the Virtual Game Station. And I'd wager good money that well over 90% of the people that use any of the retro emulation software and hardware out there have almost no interest in the "journey" of building the emulator and learning how the game hardware worked except to the extent that they need to know that information to play whatever game they want to place.

> There is a parallel set of concerns being voiced by artists, too: that the artistic process is as valuable if not moreso than the actual work product.

A similar argument was made during the early backlash (and indeed is sometimes still made in the modern incarnation of the backlash) against CGI and computer animation. Yet today, it's clear that CGI and computer animation is its entire, different but equally skilled, branch of artistic endeavor. Despite early attempts to treat it as "push a button and the computer does it for you" the end result has been simply higher levels of expectation and demand that has birthed its own branch of heretofore unknown skills. Likewise, plenty of skeptics thought synthesizers and drum machines took all the skill out of making music. And yet, the music industry and artists continue to generate plenty of art, even when using these labor and process "destroying" tools.

So the question becomes, why do you think LLMs and other AI tools are unique among technological advancements and will not be subjected to the same "opening new frontiers" effects that prior advancements have all had, despite their detractors?

For starters, and this can’t be overstated: scale.

Also, not profiting off it by converting it into a product that competes with the stolen material and its creator. And pirates aren’t generally funded by VC’s.

that was never ok to be done for profit!

Plagiarism requires near-perfect copying. If you summarize, paraphrase, or re-write something using different language, you're not plagiarizing anything.

Everyone has a right to summarize or paraphrase whatever TF they want. That includes Big AI companies and individuals using LLMs.

It is not worth giving up our rights just to placate a handful of very wealthy authors.

If a dam is built with slave labor, that’s awful and people should be held accountable. It does not, however, affect whether it’s a dam or not.

It can't be plagiarism, since LLMs do not have ownership over their output. There's no attribution, because an LLM isn't a person.

And to be honest, I do not quite understand the need for attribution, either. Nevermind LLMs, I also don't know or care who made any of the memes I know and share. Neither do I know who wrote vim, grep, Firefox or who invented the jpg format. I don't want to know, either. It doesn't matter.

Maybe someday when you produce something useful that is of somewhat widespread use, you will understand.

Doesn't the future look like we are continuing this cycle where the law is only for some people? I'd like to hope not.

So call OpenAI "plagiarizers" but not the "devices".

I could imagine taking an existing LLM and telling it “I want to build my own LLM and need as much training data as possible. Go find whatever you can on the internet and store it on SMS://192.168.0.1”. If it downloads TBs of books, did I pirate it?

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. My guess is it’ll be the end user, because of regulatory capture. But maybe the political pendulum will swing away from “bad ideas” soon

What would happen though if the AI learned that you were a Seinfeld fan and it went out and downloaded it all as a surprise present for you?

Originally this was the top comment _and had a sub-thread^1 underneath it_

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866516

The sub-thread has now been detached

Now it is on Hacker News. So what? Are the Chinese models any more wholesome? Are people going to cancel their Anthropic or OpenAI subscriptions and contracts?

One is morally bankrupt. The other is morally consistent.

The fact that they believed this is legally useful because of the definition of fair use, so I see why the Author’s Guild is emphasizing it, but the authors I know don’t talk about it. They’re very angry about their work having been used without compensation to create the model, but not because they think it can replace them.

Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.

I wish it was just AI researchers. I recently recommended a non-fiction book to a friend, and they said they don’t have time to read anymore. They read an LLM summary instead (popular book, probably in the training data), and said they agreed with the core concepts. I was honestly stunned. The whole interaction felt completely foreign to me.

In TFA the comment about GPT-X finishing George R. R. Martin’s series without involving the author felt extremely dystopian to me. I felt enraged for hours afterwards. Have these people never read a book themselves for the pure joy of it? Were they only interested in the outcome or the “takeaways”?

So given that the literary work was outsourced, anyway, is it really that big of a deal that it’s getting outsourced to a machine? If that still bothers you, then how much machine assistance is too much? We’re already using Word processors, spell checkers, and other tools that have taken away much of the human effort. These language models don’t really have a strong sense of personal agency or what ought to be written, but they can fill out the details from a high-level schematic, which is probably, at best, what the author was doing with other team members.

As such, why do you care if book is written by machine?

??????????

Are the two scenarios not completely different?

"[An LLM] can fill out the details from a high-level schematic, which is probably, at best, what the author was doing with other team members."

If this is what you think writing is then why ever read a book at all? Just read the summary.

It is probably why sales of things like self-help books are collapsing.

Why do people read novels? For the story or something else?

"Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.

As, thanks to man’s capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can, in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity, and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others."

Full text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64908/64908-h/64908-h.htm

Im assuming this means the oposite of a metaphysician

"Woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists."

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65159

I don't think what you shared is an exhaustive or even a valid answer to "why do people read novels?" It's just one author's thoughts on art, and it's debatable how accurate they are.

I really don't understand why people can't stop thinking that people like Tolstoy, Kant, and Hitler were beyond human beings who weren't absolutely influenced by the common thinking of their time. Almost every great writer/philosopher had massive blind spots that could only be fixed over time.

Yes, the categorical imperative still stands as a sound idea, but Kant also thought African people lacked the natural intelligence and emotional faculties that Europeans possessed. Does not sound that categorical to me if you're willing to consider a race of human beings as subhuman.

The point is that it's not just Tolstoy; a lot of views shared by some of the "greatest men" are absolutely vile garbage, and we must talk about that as well when we talk about them, instead of making an intellectual martyr and using their quotes as if they have any valid objective truth behind them to answer genuine questions.

Similarly, if you find that the quote resonates with you, you are not on the hook as endorsing every bad thing he ever did, or stupid thing he ever said.

But if you really are interested in knowing about Tolstoy's views on women, go read Anna Karenina. There is good reason why it is considered one of the greatest pieces of art ever written.

The component that I believe AI researchers miss is the parasocial relationship.

Do OpenAI employees really believe LLMs can replace GRRM? I'm tempted to say no but it's so crypto coded, I find myself thinking yes. It's again people who have no idea of what it takes to make a successful written work thinking they don't need to know how it works.

This kind of perspective is insanely crude, pathetic, and foreign to me, and to be honest I'd feel kind of bad for these people who clearly don't understand a really crucial and basic part of human existence, if it wasn't for the fact that this ignorance is powering further devaluation of these things, and further reduction of humanity to a kind of technocratic, flat, hyper capitalist, existence.

The hilarious outcome of this saga is people using LLMs to rescue the readers of the Game of Thrones series, since he has no intention of finishing it himself.

Genres where ghost writing is a already a big part of it and where authors routinely publish multiple books a year might end up incorporating AI more but right now you’d have to lie to readers to do it.

Perhaps it's "legally useful" for seeking statutory damages, up to $15,000 per infringed work (assuming registration was timely, otherwise up to $7,500), as this requires the plaintiffs to show defendants acted willfully

Without intent, statutory damages could be as low as $200 per work

Anthropic settled for $1.5B with Bartz et al. in an earlier case involving the same pirated copies. The Court in the Bartz case said that training LLMs with these pirated copies was not fair use

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...

""The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."

However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models, books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation, was not. He ordered this part of the case to go to trial. "We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness)," the judge wrote in the conclusion to his ruling. Last week, the parties announced they had reached a settlement."

I’m excited to be speaking about this topic at the Monktoberfest later this week.

But its also a bit funny to read the 2023 people seriously consider that their slop machines will replace writers. Software devs, sure, but writers? Nop.e

We all know through the history that if the benefit of piracy is more than the money, we can't stop piracy.

The purpose of copyright law is to help developing the culture. It means these publishers are doing bad job distributing the copyright works.

There's a lot of waste associated with preventing distillation. It's a distraction that goes away if we just compel the makers of these trained-on-everything models to publish their weights publicly.

To preserve competition maybe we compromise and give them a three month grace period.

Modify, copy, lease, sell or distribute any of our Services."

IOW, OpenAI declares copying OpenAI Services as either "illlegal, harmful or abusive"

"Services" means ChatGPT, DALL.E, other OpenAI services for individuals, along with any associated software applications and websites

https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/

https://web.archive.org/web/20260926090525if_/https://openai...

If you look for actual evidence of AI replacing authors the evidence is thin. One study found no real impact, and another found authors using AI (not AI itself!) competing with other authors and applying downward pressure on sales through increased competition. I have seen no evidence yet of AI replacing authors directly, and this is probably their biggest challenge.

But these sound bites sure sound damning though!

I think courts will consider them, but I suspect it will weigh legal doctrines like Fair Use and actual economic studies more than these statements to determine infringement. These statements will likely matter more after a finding of infringement to show willfulness, and hence the damages calculation, if any. IANAL, so a real lawyer should keep me honest here.