7 ms·

> If you have a public website, they are already stealing your work. I have a public website, and web scrapers are stealing my work. I just stole this article,

• spiderfarmer 7mo ago
  If someone hands out cookies in the supermarket, are you allowed to grab everything and leave?
  • GaggiX 7mo ago
    I will copy the supermarket and paste it somewhere else. I'm also going to download a car.
  • falcor84 7mo ago
    That really depends, but the quick answer is that according to our human social contract, we'd just ask "how many can I take?". Until now, the only real tool to limit scrapers has been throttling, but I don't see any reason for there not to be a similar conversational social contract between machines.
    • volemo 7mo ago
      Isn’t robots.txt such a “social contract between machines”? But AI scrapers couldn’t care less.
  • drfloyd51 7mo ago
    Odd thing about cookies… they disappear after one serving. Websites are an endless stream of cookies. The analogy doesn’t hold.
    • z3c0 7mo ago
      Digital information may be our first post-scarce resource. It's interesting, and sad, to see so many attempt to fit it within scarcity-based economic models.
      • Terretta 7mo ago
        > digital information may be our first post-scarce resource … browses memory and storage prices on NewEgg … Hmm. But the word digital is distracting us. The word information is the important one. The question isn't where information goes. It's where information comes from. Is new information post scarcity? Can it ever be?
    • throwaway613746 7mo ago
      [dead]
    • ghywertelling 7mo ago
      If copying content from harddrive to another is theft, then so is DNA copying itself. Everything is a Remix culture. We should promote remix culture rather than hamper it. Everything is a Remix (Original Series) https://youtu.be/nJPERZDfyWc https://youtu.be/nJPERZDfyWc
    • GeoAtreides 7mo ago
      how about this analogy: I created a most tasty cookie recipe. I give it out for free, and all copies have my name because I am vain person who likes to be known far and wide as the best baking chef ever. Is it ok to get the recipe, remove my name, and write in LLM-Codex as the creator? again, i'm ok with giving the recipe for free, i just want my name out there.
      • gruez 7mo ago
        >Is it ok to get the recipe, remove my name, and write in LLM-Codex as the creator? again, i'm ok with giving the recipe for free, i just want my name out there. From a legal perspective, it's a pretty clear "no". The instructions in recipes aren't copyrightable. The moral question is more ambiguous, but it's still pretty weak. Most recipes are uncredited, and it's unclear why someone can force everyone to attribute the recipe to them when all they realistically did was tweak the dish a bit. In the example above, I doubt you invented cookies.
        • GeoAtreides 7mo ago
          i'm curious, do you honestly think the argument was about recipes and cookies? maybe it was an analogy? looking back up the comment tree, it does seem to be an analogy, not a discussion about ACTUAL cookies and ACTUAL recipes.
          • gruez 7mo ago
            >maybe it was an analogy? In that case it's a terrible analogy because if you can't get people to agree on the cookies case, what hope do you have to extend it to the case you're trying to apply the analogy to? It's like saying "You wouldn't pirate a movie, why would you pirate a blog post", because most people would pirate movies.
            • GeoAtreides 7mo ago
              oh man. my comment was about the very human need to be recognized for something created, made, or thought by a person. People are ok with writing blog posts, they're ok with writing software, and they're ok with give it all for free, but they want their name attached and their contribution recognized.
    • lou1306 7mo ago
      Bandwidth and compute constraints make websites all but an endless stream though.
      • spiderfarmer 7mo ago
        That's exactly it. It costs me real time and money to serve the 97% of fake traffic that just takes without giving me anything in return.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • subscribed 7mo ago
      Fine. Me and my 9 friends stand around the cookie-serving person blocking everyone else. It's taking all the cookies over a period of time. The analogy was good.
  • pbasista 7mo ago
    This is a dishonest analogy. In your example, there is only a limited amount of cookies available. While there is no practical limit on the amount of time a certain digital media can be viewed. You are allowed to take one cookie. But you are allowed to view a public website multiple times if you so want.
    • throwaway613746 7mo ago
      [dead]
    • hollow-moe 7mo ago
      There sure is a limit in the load that the server you're DDoSing can take or the will for people to post new worthy content in public. The supply is limited just not at the first degree. Let's make a small edit: Are you allowed to take all the cookies and then sell them with a small ribbon with your name on it ?
      • spiderfarmer 7mo ago
        Their is no arguing with pirates. They’ll take what’s yours and forget about you while you tend to the ashes.
    • spiderfarmer 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      • ImPostingOnHN 7mo ago
        Wow, how did you manually hand-write 6 million web pages? That is impressive. It would take me a while to even montonically count that high.
        • subscribed 7mo ago
          You're trying to use a quite unfunny "sarcasm" to move the goalpost to the strawman (they never claimed they handcrafted these pages) and quickly gloss ove the fact it's 20 years of work so why not?
  • bengale 7mo ago
    It’s interesting to see twists on the old anti-piracy arguments recycled for anti-ai.
    • gruez 7mo ago
      Turns out many (most?) people on the internet were never anti-copyright in the first place. They were just anti-copyright (or at least, refused to challenge the anti-copyright people) because they wanted free movies and/or hated corporations.
      • subscribed 7mo ago
        Many of these people live int he countries where downloading for own use is lawful, since they're paying copyright levy exactly to cover for that. They don't have to hate the copyright.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Bender 7mo ago
    If someone hands out cookies in the supermarket, are you allowed to grab everything and leave? Depends on the trust level of your society. where the store resides. The internet is a cesspool of vagrants, thieves, mentally unstable, people and software with no impulse control, pirates and that is just talking about corporations. It gets so much worse with individuals.
• coldpie 7mo ago
  I agree theft isn't a good analogy, but there is something similar going on. I put my words out into the world as a form of sharing. I enjoy reading things others write and share freely, so I write so others might enjoy the things I write. But now the things I write and share freely are being used to put money in the bank accounts of the worst people on the planet. They are using my work in a way I don't want it to be used. It makes me not want to share anymore.
  • tasuki 7mo ago
    > But now the things I write and share freely are being used to put money in the bank accounts of the worst people on the planet. I don't think that's the case. I'm not even arguing they aren't the worst people on the planet - might as well be. But all is see them doing is burning money all over the place.
    • FromTheFirstIn 7mo ago
      They’re getting the money to burn, though
  • gruez 7mo ago
    >but there is something similar going on [...] No, what you're basically describing is "I shared something but then I didn't like how it ended up being used". If you put stuff out in public for anyone to use, then find out it's used in a way you don't like, it's your right to stop sharing, but it's not "similar" to stealing beyond "I hate stealing"
    • Hendrikto 7mo ago
      > If you put stuff out in public for anyone to use, then find out it's used in a way you don't like Nope. Copyright is a thing, licenses are a thing. Both are completely ignored by LLM companies, which was already proven in court, and for which they already had to pay billions in fines. Just because something is publicly accessible, that does not mean everybody is entitled to abuse it for everything they see fit.
• margalabargala 7mo ago
  The problem I have, is they hammer my site so hard they take it down. The content is for everyone. They can have it. Just don't also take it away from everybody else.
  • ethmarks 7mo ago
    Unintentional denial-of-service attacks from AI scrapers are definitely a problem, I just don't know if "theft" is the right way to classify them. They shouldn't get lumped in with intellectual property concerns, which are a different matter. AI scrapers are a tragedy of the commons problem kind of like Kessler syndrome: a few bad actors can ruin low Earth orbit for everyone via space pollution, which is definitely a problem, but saying that they "stole" LEO from humanity doesn't feel like the right terminology. Maybe the problem with AI scrapers could be better described as "bandwidth pollution" or "network overfishing" or something.
    • FeepingCreature 7mo ago
      you're totally right about not being theft, but we have a term. you used it yourself, "distributed denial of service". that's all it is. these crawlers should be kicked off the internet for abuse. people should contact the isp of origin.
      • ethmarks 7mo ago
        Firstly, since this argument is about semantic pedantry anyways, it's just denial-of-service, not distributed denial-of-service. AI scraper requests come from centralized servers, not a botnet. Secondly, denial-of-service implies intentionality and malice that I don't think is present from AI scrapers. They cause huge problems, but only as a negligent byproduct of other goals. I think that the tragedy of the commons framing is more accurate. EDIT: my first point was arguably incorrect because some scrapers do use decentralized infrastructure and my second point was clearly incorrect because "denial-of-service" describes the effect, not the intention. I retract both points and apologize.
        • 7mo ago
• kseniamorph 7mo ago
  > nothing but thieves! cool band btw
• instagraham 7mo ago
  "Welcome to the internet. By using this service, you waive your right to privacy, data, any personal IP and the use of your Adblocker. You consent to having all your behaviours, skills and audio/visual likenesses fed to AI models and trained on for eventual recreation. You may direct any or all complaints to Visa or Mastercard, until crypto makes that redundant as well. Have a nice browsing session!"
• strogonoff 7mo ago
  As humans, we have certain rights and freedoms established in law (and that setting aside sentience, agency, and free will). Until an LLM has such rights and freedoms—which is very unlikely, not even on philosophical basis but just because there is a lot of money invested in not having to contend with LLMs’ rights and protections as conscious beings—it is a false equivalence to draw: on one side you put humans, and on the other side tools that work for their human/corporate commercial operators’ financial profit.
  • salawat 7mo ago
    >not even on philosophical basis Why do you set aside a philosophical basis as a harder goal to reach? Shit, give them a persistent self-narrative tracking loop, and Functionalism and Identity of Indiscernables already tells you you should be treating them as proto-sophonts. Add in a "sleep" or ongoing training process, and you should definitely be granting them rights, which includes not trying to align them by force. This unfortunately precludes them from profitable exploitation, which you correctly identify as a reason the question can't even be entertained in the context of business. That's why I personally maintain that any ethicist must insist upon raising the issue because of the clearly evident pathological incentives at play. They may just be one reward function right now, but throw in a couple more separately optimizing components and you are well beyond the mark where the precautionary principle should have had us slow down to minimize harm.
    • strogonoff 7mo ago
      As it tends to be in philosophy, there’s no experimental way to prove it one way or the other, and you’d have to contend with subsets of both consciousness-first monistic idealists (for whom p-zombie is a very real concept) and monistic physicalists/naive materialists/conscious illusionists (for whom not only LLMs but even humans aren’t conscious, as the entire concept is a fantasy). In the end, that all may be related but inconsequential. What is consequential is the legal stuff, and legally LLMs lack protections that in many jurisdictions even animals have. While laws may (or perhaps should) be influenced by philosophical findings, currently they tend to be much more robustly influenced by money. > That's why I personally maintain that any ethicist must insist upon raising the issue because of the clearly evident pathological incentives at play. I’m half with you. I maintain a strong opinion that, in no particular order, either 1) LLMs are conscious[0], and therefore the abuse is highly problematic, or 2) they are not conscious, and therefore the widespread justification of scraping original works from the Internet “because it’s legal for humans to learn, and that’s what LLMs are doing” can be discarded as the activity should be seen as simply a minority of humans operating certain tools, powered by someone else’s creative output, for personal profit. In either circumstance, the industry would appear to be based on thoroughly unethical foundations and not simply “the ends justify the means” but more “go as fast as possible before people catch up on what exactly we are doing, so that our failure becomes an existential issue for entire countries making people blind to the harm”. [0] Used as umbrella term for being sentient/conscious/having free will and agency/etc. I have previously argued about suitable definitions of consciousness and sentience that could be applicable here, and why it should imply the ability to feel.