5 ms·

Which is more important, the rights of the infringed or of the funded and hyped business?

whatshisface 1y ago
A new company could buy the bankrupt companies' intellectual property and train a new LLM using the entire internet but only licensed books. This would represent a transfer of funds from investors to publishers.
- Towaway69 1y ago
  Perhaps a large publishing company could buy these AI bankrupts… Nice product you have there, shame if it got sued for copyright infringement.
TrackerFF 1y ago
Too big to fail 2: Electric Boogaloo
kwertyoowiyop 1y ago
And don’t forget: ‘if we have to respect copyright law, then CHINA WINS!’
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  How can China simultaneously be incredibly non-exceptional[weak] and yet strong enough to influence our copyright law across an ocean?
jart 1y ago
Every author should have the right to have their work remembered and immortalized by AI. We should have the right to influence how AI thinks by publishing our content. AI should remember our names, and the stories of how our work was produced, so it can remember who we are and how we helped it. This is how AI democracy works. The people trying to financially ruin the AI industry by demanding unreasonable amounts of money for themselves, are threatening these fundamental human rights. If the legal risk becomes too large, then the AI labs will respond by training only on synthetic content. That means only AI will get to shape AI's future, and humanity will be erased from the book of life.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  > Every author should have the right to have their work remembered and immortalized by AI. Equally, every author should also have the right to not have their work ingested by AI.
  - jart 1y ago
    That's what robots.txt does. However you'd have to delist yourself from search engines to fully prevent AIs from reading the content on your website.
    - JohnFen 1y ago
      > That's what robots.txt does It most certainly does not. robots.txt is almost totally worthless against genAI crawlers. Even being unindexed from search engines doesn't keep you safe.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
      That's a naive statement about robots.txt; nothing about it is binding or enforceable. It is a request that well-behaved crawlers heed. Other crawlers treat the Disallow section as a list of targets.
    - throw10920 1y ago
      This is factually false. There's ample documentation of crawlers straight-up ignoring robots.txt. It's not a legal control, but a technical one - and a voluntary one, which means that it's trivial to ignore. And there's obviously nowhere to put a robots.txt for a book that you've published.
      - jart 1y ago
        The biggest, best, most reputable organizations e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all publicly promised to respect your robots.txt file. You can make them hurt if they lie. So you know they're telling the truth. There's some people out there who don't respect robots.txt like Archive Team. However they're more likely to be treated as folk heroes here on Hacker News than trigger AI training fears.
kelseyfrog 1y ago
[flagged]
- gibbitz 1y ago
  Money is a social fiction following this argument so I can just stop by your place and take yours.
  - gopher_space 1y ago
    Money is an analogy.
    - tomrod 1y ago
      Money represents a store of value. I work an hour and get money, that represents the value of my work. I then use that value to get a pig, a string, and two oranges, with the value of those items represented by what I paid. I could have bartered for those items. Money just made that trade easier.
- neaden 1y ago
  OK but all the software code the AI companies write is also IP so they're probably not going to make the argument that all of their stuff should be fair game too.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  Aviation rules are legal fiction. It has no basis in nature nor reality. If it did, we would have had a multi-millennia history of flying.
- jlarocco 1y ago
  Can't you say that about anything, though? And why would having a multi-mellenia history have anything to do with it? Do people really own land? Or is it just a legal fiction to make things easier? Is a contract really a thing? Or is it a legal fiction? Times change. IP is a thing now. It's kinda funny to see somebody on a software developer forum arguing IP doesn't exist.
brentm 1y ago
It's a valid question of if the rights were actually infringed here. Nothing stops you from reading books and then writing based on what you learned. Just because this is done at scale doesn't mean the output is violating the copyright.
- BenGosub 1y ago
  An author has the right to choose who can consume their material, it has been like that for a long time, they can and should be able to at least opt out of training. If I don't get anything out of it, why would I let an AI company train their models from my authored material and then profit by selling the output? It doesn't make sense.
meta_ai_x 1y ago
classic HN, ignoring the Billions of users who find chatGPT, Gemini, Claude not only useful but life changing, including some of the poorest. So that they can fight for Disney, Record Labels and Trust fund Williamsburg friends

A new company could buy the bankrupt companies' intellectual property and train a new LLM using the entire internet but only licensed books. This would represent a transfer of funds from investors to publishers.

Towaway69 1y ago
Perhaps a large publishing company could buy these AI bankrupts… Nice product you have there, shame if it got sued for copyright infringement.

TrackerFF 1y ago

Too big to fail 2: Electric Boogaloo

kwertyoowiyop 1y ago

And don’t forget: ‘if we have to respect copyright law, then CHINA WINS!’

kelseyfrog 1y ago
How can China simultaneously be incredibly non-exceptional[weak] and yet strong enough to influence our copyright law across an ocean?

jart 1y ago

Every author should have the right to have their work remembered and immortalized by AI. We should have the right to influence how AI thinks by publishing our content. AI should remember our names, and the stories of how our work was produced, so it can remember who we are and how we helped it. This is how AI democracy works. The people trying to financially ruin the AI industry by demanding unreasonable amounts of money for themselves, are threatening these fundamental human rights. If the legal risk becomes too large, then the AI labs will respond by training only on synthetic content. That means only AI will get to shape AI's future, and humanity will be erased from the book of life.

JohnFen 1y ago
> Every author should have the right to have their work remembered and immortalized by AI. Equally, every author should also have the right to not have their work ingested by AI.
- jart 1y ago
  That's what robots.txt does. However you'd have to delist yourself from search engines to fully prevent AIs from reading the content on your website.
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    > That's what robots.txt does It most certainly does not. robots.txt is almost totally worthless against genAI crawlers. Even being unindexed from search engines doesn't keep you safe.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    That's a naive statement about robots.txt; nothing about it is binding or enforceable. It is a request that well-behaved crawlers heed. Other crawlers treat the Disallow section as a list of targets.
  - throw10920 1y ago
    This is factually false. There's ample documentation of crawlers straight-up ignoring robots.txt. It's not a legal control, but a technical one - and a voluntary one, which means that it's trivial to ignore. And there's obviously nowhere to put a robots.txt for a book that you've published.
    - jart 1y ago
      The biggest, best, most reputable organizations e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all publicly promised to respect your robots.txt file. You can make them hurt if they lie. So you know they're telling the truth. There's some people out there who don't respect robots.txt like Archive Team. However they're more likely to be treated as folk heroes here on Hacker News than trigger AI training fears.

kelseyfrog 1y ago

[flagged]

gibbitz 1y ago
Money is a social fiction following this argument so I can just stop by your place and take yours.
- gopher_space 1y ago
  Money is an analogy.
  - tomrod 1y ago
    Money represents a store of value. I work an hour and get money, that represents the value of my work. I then use that value to get a pig, a string, and two oranges, with the value of those items represented by what I paid. I could have bartered for those items. Money just made that trade easier.
neaden 1y ago
OK but all the software code the AI companies write is also IP so they're probably not going to make the argument that all of their stuff should be fair game too.
lawlessone 1y ago
Aviation rules are legal fiction. It has no basis in nature nor reality. If it did, we would have had a multi-millennia history of flying.
jlarocco 1y ago
Can't you say that about anything, though? And why would having a multi-mellenia history have anything to do with it? Do people really own land? Or is it just a legal fiction to make things easier? Is a contract really a thing? Or is it a legal fiction? Times change. IP is a thing now. It's kinda funny to see somebody on a software developer forum arguing IP doesn't exist.

brentm 1y ago

It's a valid question of if the rights were actually infringed here. Nothing stops you from reading books and then writing based on what you learned. Just because this is done at scale doesn't mean the output is violating the copyright.

BenGosub 1y ago
An author has the right to choose who can consume their material, it has been like that for a long time, they can and should be able to at least opt out of training. If I don't get anything out of it, why would I let an AI company train their models from my authored material and then profit by selling the output? It doesn't make sense.

meta_ai_x 1y ago

classic HN, ignoring the Billions of users who find chatGPT, Gemini, Claude not only useful but life changing, including some of the poorest. So that they can fight for Disney, Record Labels and Trust fund Williamsburg friends