5 ms·

A couple thoughts… Mostly, AIs don’t recite back various works. Yes, there a couple of high profile cases where people were able to get an AI to regurgitate pi

by drob518 7mo ago

A couple thoughts… Mostly, AIs don’t recite back various works. Yes, there a couple of high profile cases where people were able to get an AI to regurgitate pieces of New York Times articles and Harry Potter books, but mostly not. Mostly, it is as if the AI is your friend who read a book and gives you a paraphrase, possibly using a couple sentences verbatim. In other words, it probably falls under a fair use rule. Secondly, given the modern world, content that doesn’t appear online isn’t consumed much, so creators who are doing it for the money will certainly continue putting content online. Much of that content will be generated by AIs, however.

triceratops 7mo ago
You're missing the point. This is the crux of munificent's argument IMO (and I've made variations of it as well) > We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time they have to read stuff and talk to you, and so on. Machines (and AIs) don't have any limitations.
- drob518 7mo ago
  Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.
  - nrabulinski 7mo ago
    Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process? Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Reddit comments. An LLM can do none of those, while also doing the former. It’s a lose-lose. Also, a book nerd doesn’t take roughly ~all human created text to train to produce meaningful results. It’s just such a misplaced analogy and people have been making it ever since OpenAI announced chatgpt for the first time - why do people think “an LLM is just a human who read a lot”
    - charcircuit 7mo ago
      Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped. The economy is not zero sum.
      - zephen 7mo ago
        > The economy is not zero sum. This is true. But it's not always positive sum, either. > Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped. Externalities are a thing. It's not about the profit per se, but about how (a) the making of that profit might negatively impact others, and (b) the deployment of that profit in pursuit of rent-seeking and other antisocial behavior in order to insure its continued existence might also negatively impact others.
        drob518 7mo ago
        Externalities are a thing, but this isn’t exactly dumping toxic waste into a river.
        trinsic2 7mo ago
        I disagree with that. from what I read data centers are going to have some real world negative effects on human populations
        zephen 7mo ago
        No, it's more just drying the river up entirely. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/25/texas-data-center-water-use/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/25/texas-data-center-wa...
  - triceratops 7mo ago
    > An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything But no real book nerd has read everything. Current law was designed for the capabilities of humans.
    - drob518 7mo ago
      Sure, we could change current law, but I think that only forces an AI company to buy one copy of every book. I don’t think it gives any sort of royalty stream to anyone beyond that. Copyright is literally the right to make copies. Once I have acquired a copy, I can read it, summarize it, transform it, etc. in myriad ways.
      - triceratops 7mo ago
        You can't make copies though. AI training requires making copies of materials, even if they're purchased.
        drob518 7mo ago
        Not true. You can photocopy pages from a book you own for your own use. You can make copies of purchased software as a backup. What you can’t do is make copies and give them to all your friends or sell them to the public.
        triceratops 7mo ago
        > You can photocopy pages from a book you own for your own use No. You won't get it trouble for it. But it is against the law. https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright "U.S. copyright law provides copyright owners with the following exclusive rights: Reproduce the work in copies" This doesn't differentiate between partial and complete copies. > You can make copies of purchased software as a backup This is true. They had to write out that exception for digital media. And the key is "backup". You can't run or use multiple copies if you only own one.
  - intended 7mo ago
    Yes. 1) Quantity is its own quality: Scale makes a difference 2) The tools themselves automate tasks and consolidate their outputs. The “sale” of a piece of content, and its consumption, shifts away from the people producing it Example: We have entire networks and systems that depended on consumption occurring on the site itself. News websites, or indie sites depend on ad revenue.

by drob518 7mo ago

triceratops 7mo ago

You're missing the point. This is the crux of munificent's argument IMO (and I've made variations of it as well) > We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time they have to read stuff and talk to you, and so on. Machines (and AIs) don't have any limitations.

drob518 7mo ago
Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.
- nrabulinski 7mo ago
  Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process? Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Reddit comments. An LLM can do none of those, while also doing the former. It’s a lose-lose. Also, a book nerd doesn’t take roughly ~all human created text to train to produce meaningful results. It’s just such a misplaced analogy and people have been making it ever since OpenAI announced chatgpt for the first time - why do people think “an LLM is just a human who read a lot”
  - charcircuit 7mo ago
    Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped. The economy is not zero sum.
    - zephen 7mo ago
      > The economy is not zero sum. This is true. But it's not always positive sum, either. > Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped. Externalities are a thing. It's not about the profit per se, but about how (a) the making of that profit might negatively impact others, and (b) the deployment of that profit in pursuit of rent-seeking and other antisocial behavior in order to insure its continued existence might also negatively impact others.
      - drob518 7mo ago
        Externalities are a thing, but this isn’t exactly dumping toxic waste into a river.
        trinsic2 7mo ago
        I disagree with that. from what I read data centers are going to have some real world negative effects on human populations
        zephen 7mo ago
        No, it's more just drying the river up entirely. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/25/texas-data-center-water-use/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/25/texas-data-center-wa...
- triceratops 7mo ago
  > An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything But no real book nerd has read everything. Current law was designed for the capabilities of humans.
  - drob518 7mo ago
    Sure, we could change current law, but I think that only forces an AI company to buy one copy of every book. I don’t think it gives any sort of royalty stream to anyone beyond that. Copyright is literally the right to make copies. Once I have acquired a copy, I can read it, summarize it, transform it, etc. in myriad ways.
    - triceratops 7mo ago
      You can't make copies though. AI training requires making copies of materials, even if they're purchased.
      - drob518 7mo ago
        Not true. You can photocopy pages from a book you own for your own use. You can make copies of purchased software as a backup. What you can’t do is make copies and give them to all your friends or sell them to the public.
        triceratops 7mo ago
        > You can photocopy pages from a book you own for your own use No. You won't get it trouble for it. But it is against the law. https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright "U.S. copyright law provides copyright owners with the following exclusive rights: Reproduce the work in copies" This doesn't differentiate between partial and complete copies. > You can make copies of purchased software as a backup This is true. They had to write out that exception for digital media. And the key is "backup". You can't run or use multiple copies if you only own one.
- intended 7mo ago
  Yes. 1) Quantity is its own quality: Scale makes a difference 2) The tools themselves automate tasks and consolidate their outputs. The “sale” of a piece of content, and its consumption, shifts away from the people producing it Example: We have entire networks and systems that depended on consumption occurring on the site itself. News websites, or indie sites depend on ad revenue.