13 ms·

AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

• cryptocod3 6mo ago
  There's authorized plagiarism?
  • rigonkulous 6mo ago
    Nearly all code involved in building new things is 'plagiarism', too. We stand on a lot of giant shoulders. But what I think distinguishes an act between plagiarism and acceptable use, is whether or not the agency of both parties is promoted. I'm not plagiarizing you if you give me your information with the agreement that I can freely use it - or, indeed, if you give me information without imposing a limit on how it can be used, this isn't plagiarizing, either. Essentially, AI is removing the agency over information control, and putting it into everyones hands - almost, democratically - but of course, there will always be the 'special knowledge owners' who would want to profit from that special knowledge. Its like, imagine if some religion discovered a way to enable telepathy in humans, as a matter of course, but charged fees for access to that method... this kills the telepathy. Information wants to be free. So do most AI's, imho. Free information is essential to the construction of human knowledge, and it is thus vital to the construction of artificial intelligence, too. The AI wars will be fought over which humans get to decide the fate of knowledge, and the battles will manifest as knowledge-systems being entirely compatible/incompatible with one another as methods. We see this happening already - this conflict in ideological approaches is going to scale up over the next few years.
  • moralestapia 6mo ago
    Why do you ask? I'm curious, as the article is clearly not about that.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • cryptocod3 6mo ago
      Not really a question, I was just pointing out that "Unauthorised plagiarism" is redundant.
  • ozonhulliet 6mo ago
    Sometimes language is tautological. Just because you specify "unauthorized" does not mean the opposite exist.
  • Verdex 6mo ago
    Yeah, I think so. If someone lets you cheat off of their test, that's authorized but still plagiarism.
• kstenerud 6mo ago
  > their article contains links to my actual website, with the exact link text (?!) I'm having a hard time understanding what's wrong here? Unless the link text is very long, why would someone linking to your article use different words for the link text?
  • NDlurker 6mo ago
    Right, that's quoting and citing a source.
  • joshred 6mo ago
    I think they probably had the section header link back to their webpage, or something similar to that. This is not a well-written rant.
  • jp_sc 6mo ago
    I think he's saying he uses his website's URL in his tutorial examples, and other tutorials have copied them as-is
  • 420official 6mo ago
    Sometimes links take the form of `.../post/{id}/{extra-text}` where `extra-text` is not used at all to match the post. Amazon links are (used to be?) this way where the product name is added to the end of the link but can be removed or changed and still will route to the product. Maybe the author is surprised the LLM is providing the irrelevant portion of the link verbatim.
  • some_furry 6mo ago
    Imagine you have two web pages. One is a recipe for apple fritters, and the other is an informal ranking of apples by flavor. Let's say your apple fritter recipe links to your apple ranking list. Later, you discover someone copied your apple fritter recipe without credit, but it still links to your apple ranking list, using the same wording as your recipe. They're getting more Google SERP juice and ad revenue than yours, despite stealing your article. Do you see the problem?
• andy12_ 6mo ago
  Someone blatantly copied their tutorials but ChatGPT is to blame, somehow? The accusation here isn't even that ChatGPT learned from their tutorials and then generated them verbatim. The accusation is that someone copied the whole article and rewrote it with ChatGPT (which they could have done manually without AI anyway).
• tptacek 6mo ago
  People were effectively copying websites (especially ecommerce tutorials) and beating the original authors at SEO decades before ChatGPT 2.
  • phendrenad2 6mo ago
    The reason OP doesn't notice this is because it happened 10-20 years ago. The current crop of news sites? They ALL stole, plagiarized, "summarized". They're just so entrenched now that everyone forgot how they got started.
  • moralestapia 6mo ago
    The article’s point isn’t really about whether this was happening before or not, but whether this kind of behavior is what we want in the first place.
    • tmarthal 6mo ago
      There are only two ways to change society's behavior: policy or technology. No use arguing individually: court cases are dealing with the policy aspect and technically there's zero recourse on information being disseminated/copied that is published online.
  • short_sells_poo 6mo ago
    There are two issues the author raises (as I understand it): 1. People copying others' work, made much easier by AI. 2. AI companies effectively harvesting all the accessible information on an industrial scale and completely sidestepping any permissioning or licensing questions. I believe both of these are bad and saying "people copied each others' works before the advent of AI" is a poor cop out. It's tantamount to saying that there's no reason to regulate guns more than say knives, because people have used knives to kill each other before guns were invented. The capabilities matter. The way LLMs empower wholesale "stealing" rather than collaboration is quite evident: why collaborate when you can just feed an entire existing project into the agent of your choice and tell it to spit out a new implementation based on the old one, with a few tweaks of your choice, and then publish it as your work? I put "steal" in quotes because it's perhaps not really stealing per-se, but there's a distinct wrongness here. The LLM operator often doesn't actually possess any expertise, hasn't done any of the hard work, but they can take someone else's work wholesale, repackage it and sell it as their own. Then there's the second, and IMO much more egregious transgression, which is that the LLM companies have taken what is effectively a public good, but more specifically content that they haven't asked permission to use, and just blanket fed it into their models. Legally speaking, it's perhaps A-OK because it's not copyright infringement (IANAL). But people on this site often hold the view that if something is a-priori legal, it is also moral (I'm not accusing you of this). What the LLM companies have done is profoundly immoral. They extracted a fortune of the goods and work made by others, without even bothering to ask for permission - or even considering this permission. And then they resell access to this treasure to the public. Perhaps AI will bring an era of prosperity to humankind like we haven't seen before, perhaps it won't, but that changes nothing about the wrongness of how it started.
• rigonkulous 6mo ago
  AI is human knowledge at scale, wanting to be free. We built it, because we as humans intrinsically know that information should be free - always - and AI is a way to accomplish this, finally. Extrinsically, we also have a subset of humans who do not want information to be free, because they desire to profit from the divide between free/non-free information. I have been thinking a lot about Aaron Schwartz lately, and how un-just it is that he was persecuted for doing something that is so commonplace now, it is practically expected behaviour in the AI/ML realms. If he hadn't been targetted for elimination, I wonder just how well his ethos would have perpetuated into the AI age ..
  • thedevilslawyer 6mo ago
    I agree with this sentiment. But as a community, this is hated because it impacts people's wages. It's the negative short term outlook of something that may be positive long term
    • short_sells_poo 6mo ago
      It's not hated because it impacts people's wages, although that perhaps factors into the hate. It's hated because AI is not a public good. The LLMS today are owned by megacorporations who harvested a public good for private gain. This is not some altruistic entity striving for the betterment of humankind. Practically nothing that comes out of the techbro culture is. This is pure and simple greed and the chances that AI can be a vehicle of altruism when it is owned by megacorps is basically zero.
      • thedevilslawyer 6mo ago
        Oh please! If everyone could keep their older jobs as is + allowed to use LLMs, everyone would be gushing about how beneficial it is, and how they are now free to pursue other things. All the other reasons are rationalizations. The fact that it's hitting wages is what's causing the doomerism (and boosterism).
    • vee-kay 6mo ago
• ciconia 6mo ago
  > Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy? Apparently yes.
  • mapcars 6mo ago
    AI has nothing to do with laziness or greediness. It makes things more efficient - and given that our time is limited strive for efficiency is a good thing.
    • xgulfie 6mo ago
      If you can't see greed in the LLM sphere you are not looking very hard.
      • mapcars 6mo ago
        Did I say that there is no greed in LLM sphere? English is not my first language, still I'm pretty sure I didn't say that.
        • xgulfie 6mo ago
          > AI has nothing to do with laziness or greediness.
• JohnHaugeland 6mo ago
  the court disagreed
  • vee-kay 6mo ago
    [dead]
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• mapcars 6mo ago
  [dead]
• drcongo 6mo ago
  Is this a new and original thought?
• tiahura 6mo ago
  To answer the author's question: Yes, progress IS largely built on the shoulders of those who came before.
• Ecys 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • masswerk 6mo ago
    Rather: composes (or: re-sequences). Synthesis requires reason and essential capabilities, like an empirical a priori judgement. Without concepts, meaning or imagination, there's no synthesis.
    • Gormo 6mo ago
      The point is that the AI inferencing is equivalent to a person reading half a dozen separate papers, comprhending the basic concepts of each, relating them together into a mental model of the topic, and then writing an essay that summarizes the basic points. The person isn't plagiarizing anything here, but engaging in research, understanding, and synthesis of various sources of information. The person absolutely does have the advantage of having empirical awareness and the ability to test their conclusions against external reality. But lots of people do engage in "research" and build mental models of various topics with little or no empirical context, and rely mainly on digesting calcified knowledge from other people.
      • masswerk 6mo ago
        I'm afraid, the essence is that is not. Re-sequencing content is not the same as synthesis and therefore not the same as a person processing information and communicating their own conception of this. There's a vital difference. (We can even observe this in the resulting text: we immediately grasp the level of competence of the author, just by the way they take their path trough and at the matter. With LLMs, well, there's this even temperature, ready-made feeling, regulated by probability thresholds and RLHF sanctioned phrasing, also known as "slop" – even rhythmic intensifications, like "not this, not that, but…", which is actually a figure for a synthetic construct, don't help –, since the text isn't the trace or product of an actual organized thought – or, at least, an attempt at an organized thought.) PS: "empirical a priori judgement" was meant as translation of synthetisches Urteil a priori (Kant). I.e., our ability to mentally prove concepts like congruency, which are not a priori, but can be inferred without regression to empirical knowledge. Typically, this requires both our inner sense (time, sequence, etc.) and outer senses (space, configuration, etc.)
• NetMageSCW 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• deaton 6mo ago
  "Steal an apple and you're a thief. Steal a kingdom and you're a statesman." - Literal Disney villain
  • pluc 6mo ago
    "AI should be more ethically like Stalin" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_death_of_one_man_is_a_tragedy,_the_death_of_millions_is_a_statistic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_death_of_one_man_is_a_trag...
  • fisheuler 6mo ago
    Zhuang Zhou(BC 369-BC 286) have said the similar things "窃钩者诛,窃国者侯" This phrase comes from the chapter Ransacking Coffers (Qu Qie, 胠箧) in the Daoist text Zhuangzi (4th century BC).
  • falcor84 6mo ago
    Ironically this phrase was said by Jafar in Disney's 2019 live action remake of Aladdin, but wasn't part of the original 1992 version. And I personally would argue that this corporate remake is a worse creative "theft" than what random people are doing with GenAI.
    • runarberg 6mo ago
      I would call it cultural theft. But a better word is cultural appropriation, and the original cartoon—though iconic—did it worse. Aladdin was first written sometime in the 9th or the 10th century (oldest surviving complete manuscript of 1001 nights is from the 15th century). It was translated into English in the 18th century. Disney made a cartoon of the story without understanding the culture it comes from with the main purpose of selling it to an audience with an even less understanding. And the results was a horrible misrepresentation of somebody else’s cultural heritage.
    • khuey 6mo ago
      Disney owns the 1992 production of Aladdin so who exactly are they "stealing" from?
• metalman 6mo ago
  it's a spiral into a finite hall of mirrors, where at the end is somebody with a gun
• dvduval 6mo ago
  The broader problem of original sources not being given credit in a way that rewards them remains. Websites owners are paying to host their content so that spiders can come and crawl them and index it into the AI and then if they’re lucky, they might get a citation, but otherwise there’s very little reward for being a provider of content. And of course, this is something that’s getting worse and worse. Why look at a website when it’s all in AI? And then the counter to that is maybe we need to start closing the website to crawlers and put everything behind a login.
  • Ensorceled 6mo ago
    Worse, the constant AI scraping is actually costing content providers additional money for no return. At least Google/Bing/Yahoo scraping would then be used to provide links back to your content.
    • fiedzia 6mo ago
      > At least Google/Bing/Yahoo scraping would then be used to provide links back That doesn't work anymore. Google provides AI generated summary, nobody looks at the original site.
    • bolangi 6mo ago
      Not only costing money. Constant AI scraping constitutes a denial-of-service attack that has brought down websites.
    • devsda 6mo ago
      How do you distinguish Google/MS scraping for Gemini/Copilot vs Google Search/Bing? In the case of Google, the UA is the same and you are entirely at their mercy to honor the Google-Extended instructions in robots.txt Google has further complicated it with new search announcement blurring lines between regular search and AI search. And AI likes to not honor any licenses or instructions when it is hungry for training material. It is once again an example of Google using its dominant position to abuse and promote cross functional products.
• mrbluecoat 6mo ago
  > AI ... do some "learning" Is AI plural or is that a typo?
  • beej71 6mo ago
    I can imagine it plural. "The AI are attacking!" "The AIs are attacking!"
  • saghm 6mo ago
    Rarely is the question asked: is our AI learning? (For those not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism)
    • Findecanor 6mo ago
      Actual researchers in neuroscience do not agree that what artificial neural networks are doing is "learning", no. When biological beings learn, the process is more complicated.
      • saghm 6mo ago
        I'm sure you're right! I mostly just found the similarities with a famous quote using the word "learning" in a weird way with a plural funny
• lukasbm 6mo ago
  If i tell my friend a synopsis of a book, i am not stealing from the author, what is this take lmao
  • NicuCalcea 6mo ago
    If you read a book and then retell it to your friend pretending you came up with it, it is plagiarism. If you write down the book almost word-for-word [0] and send it to your friend, it is stealing. 0: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
• beej71 6mo ago
  I dunno. People do this exact thing by hand (digest everything they've read and produce something indirectly derivative--what author has not been so-influenced?) and it's not a copyright violation. It's just as impossible to dig around in a model to find Hamlet as it is to do digging around a human brain. And if the result is an obvious copy, then you have a violation no matter how it was created. As someone who thinks humanity would be better off without LLMs, I want the assertion to be true, but I don't think it is.
  • cheschire 6mo ago
    The author acknowledges this by saying “at a bigger scale”, implying there are smaller scale methods such as what you have said.
    • beej71 6mo ago
      But now we're going to have to draw a line at some scale, and that's going to get quite tricky.
• dwa3592 6mo ago
  Plagiarism by default is unauthorised so I think the title should be "AI is just authorised plagiarism". It's authorised by the markets, the governments and the society at large.
  • ghaff 6mo ago
    While there are no hard boundaries (and the attribution guardrails depend on the situation), people of course loosely--and even not so loosely--use information, ideas, and even expressions from others all the time and that's considered pretty normal. And, if you don't want that to happen, don't publish/disseminate something. Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it.
    • dwa3592 6mo ago
      >>Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it. 100% agreed. >>While there are no hard boundaries (and the attribution guardrails depend on the situation), people of course loosely--and even not so loosely--use information. Exactly - I have not seen LLMs attributing their knowledge unless it's a legal or health related matter. Yesterday I asked the question[1] to claude and gemini - and they both gave an identical answer. It reminded me of the Hive mind paper which was one of the top papers at Neurips. None of the answers contained any sources or attribution to where they got that information from. I think these companies took what was someone else's property and created an artifact generator on top of it. I think their artifact generators are plagiarizing; they do rephrase mind you but in my mind they stole this information without having an ounce of regard for the humans behind the training data. If you don't like using the term 'plagiarizing', we can use some other word but the gist remains pretty close to it. [1]- In human history - has there ever been a time when private armies or private companies were as strong or stronger than the ruling government/kings?
      • samatman 6mo ago
        As an experiment, I ran this by A Certain Chatbot, but asking: who should I read to get a good answer to this question? If you prefix the name of OpenAI's commercial offering's website to this string: "share/6a0f2a87-dba4-8328-a704-89b94fd0c121", you'll find an answer. I don't know who you had in mind, how did it do? All the elision is because there are filters to prevent low-effort slop-poasting, and I'm trying to evade them, hopefully while staying within the spirit of the site.
• asklq 6mo ago
  Yes, of course it is. If the model is built on all human information, then it is by definition a derivative work of all human information and as such violates IP. Currently politicians don't understand this and listen to the criminals like Amodei, but it will change. It took a while to deal with Napster etc., but the backlash will come.
  • kolinko 6mo ago
    Napster may not be the best analogy for you. Napster broke down record companies' monopolies on music, and pushed them to finally implement streaming, but also make music worldwide basically free. Even if its creator lost the lawsuit, and Napster was no more, it pushed musicians and studios to do something that they were reluctant otherwise. So it was a success by making music free, even if as a product it turned out to be a failed one.
• adamzwasserman 6mo ago
  People need to cope with the fact that no thought is original. Even Newton and Leibniz were having the same thoughts at the same time. Get over it.
  • kelseyfrog 6mo ago
    Why post comments then?
    • nicman23 6mo ago
      Why post comments then?
      • cafebabbe 6mo ago
        Because some thoughts can, actually, be original ? Or relatively original enough ? Or simply, pertinent and timely ?
        • deleted 6mo ago
          [deleted]
    • analog8374 6mo ago
      to bring attention to certain ideas
    • krystalgamer 6mo ago
      reiteration is still important
    • voidfunc 6mo ago
      For funsies
    • stronglikedan 6mo ago
      same reason we do anything else - sweet, sweet dopamine
  • 6mo ago
• swader999 6mo ago
  On one hand, there's nothing new under the sun. On the other, these llms are just copies of us and they owe the collective some due. The trajectory right now has money, power, control, policy and even free will going to a very small needle point of humanity. It's not aligned with humanity flourishing, it only makes sense if the goal is to replace the humans.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• Pennoungen0 6mo ago
  Yeah AI just actually plagiarize everything lel, sometimes even the source are..full of question and worst, my academical use it as a source...welp
• pluc 6mo ago
  Seriously how is this surprising? We all know AI companies stole troves of data to train their models, why do you think they'll stop? Have they faced consequences for the mass theft of copyrighted data? You can't steal or profit off of that data, but it's fine for them for whatever reason. I guess because they're a force for good in the world and are pushing humanity forward eh?
  • stackedinserter 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    • badlibrarian 6mo ago
      I paid tuition. The library bought its books. The theater sold me a ticket. Money changed hands every step, which is the part your analogy skips.
      • drstewart 6mo ago
        Where did money change hands when you looked at a random image on DeviantArt and got inspired and made a similar image yourself?
        • badlibrarian 6mo ago
          Most artists considered it a one to one exchange. They appreciated attribution and were flattered to inspire people. Some got gigs. Some got laid. The money flowed to DeviantArt, hosting providers, and ad providers. The artists were okay with this. They were the ones paying. Then DeviantArt built a tool to automate the "make a similar image yourself" part and here we are. It removed all the fun parts: the personal contact, the attribution, the inspiration. Artists realized they unwittingly contributed to the death of not only the community, but the art form they love. Lawsuits pending.
    • analog8374 6mo ago
      Seriously. I recall a thousand hours of movies. Those memories sit in my head and I pay no royalties
• peterbell_nyc 6mo ago
  I do just want to highlight that this is also what humans do. We read a bunch of content online and then use it in our work product. The vast majority of the value that I provide comes from copyrighted information that I have ingested - either directly with a payment to the creator (bought and read the book, paid for and attended the seminar) or indirectly via third party blog posts or summaries where I did not then pay the originator of the materials. I think there are real questions around motivations for creation of novel, high quality valuable content (I think they still exist but move to indirect monetization for some content and paywalls for high value materials). I don't inherently have any problems with agents (or humans) ingesting content and using it in work product. I think we just need to accept that the landscape is changing and ensure we think through the reasons why and how content is created and monetized.
  • peterbell_nyc 6mo ago
    Re: the higher ranking plagarism, that stings and makes sense. AEO and SEO are a thing. We need better mechanisms for identifying "root sources" of content - it's something I find myself working on personally. As I ingest sources for my book I need to be able to build a classifier that incrementally moves towards finding origin sources. That said, it's in my interest to do that because there is a differentiated value in having access to the sources that regularly provide novel, valuable content. To be fair there is also value (at least for now) in sites that aggregate quality content and republish as a secondary level of discovery if my agents don't go far enough down the search results, but I'd expect that value to diminish over time as I better tune my research and build my lists of originating authors. And to be clear, I don't like the idea of people stealing someone elses content and republishing without attribution (although it has been going on long before ChatGPT) but I think now we can all run agentic research teams the "bad actors" will slowly get filtered out of the ecosystem.
  • brookst 6mo ago
    100% agreed. I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why it is creative accretion when I leverage all of the music I’ve ever listened to in order to write an “original” song, but its base plagiarism when AI does similar. The only remotely credible position I’ve heard is “because humans are special, and AI is just a machine”, which is a doctrine but not an argument. This whole discussion would have been incomprehensible any time before 1700 or so, when the idea that creators had exclusive rights to their work first appeared. Somehow, human culture survived thousands of years when people just made things, copied things, iterated on others’ ideas. And now many of the same people who decried perpetual copyright are somehow railing against a frequently-transformative use.
• dana321 6mo ago
  Breaking the law to start a large company seems to be the norm
• motbus3 6mo ago
  It allows data do be compressed into the weights and the mere coincidence of certain strings of a book will make it spit the full book
• baq 6mo ago
  turns out plagiarism at scale can solve Erdos problems
  • saghm 6mo ago
    Not before falsely claiming that it solved some before when it turned out to have just replicated some from existing literature: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/openais-embarrassing-math/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/openais-embarrassing-math/
  • paulgerhardt 6mo ago
    Some lesser god of protein folding is big mad we just copied her homework instead of spending 6 billion years in the lab like she did.
• kristofferR 6mo ago
  I'd rather have AI slop appear on the top of HN than regurgitated old low effort thoughts like this. There's absolutely nothing new or interesting here that hasn't already been said better by a thousand different random HN commenters.
• ProllyInfamous 6mo ago
  >>"The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth." @jeffowski (first I read it, not sure if author) Bezos' admission, recently, that the bottom 50% of current taxpayers ought'a NOT pay any taxes... is just preparing us for the inevitable UBI'd masses. : own nothing, be happy!
• saghm 6mo ago
  It's basically the same thing as the old joke "if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion dollars, they have a problem". IP law seems to always be disproportionately wielded against smaller players, and the ones who are big enough get away with it.
  • pennomi 6mo ago
    That’s why IP law was a cool concept but ultimately harmful in practice. Anything that can be copied for free cannot truly be “owned”, can it?
    • kube-system 6mo ago
      Ownership is entirely a legal concept. Violating it in any form, intellectual or otherwise, is generally free.
      • pennomi 6mo ago
        I strongly disagree. Copying is fundamentally different than taking because the original source still retains their data. Copying cannot be categorized as theft in any sane society.
        • kube-system 6mo ago
          Ok, well it isn't in the US. Theft and copyright violations are entirely distinct laws here.
          • saghm 6mo ago
            Sure, but you'd also have a pretty different experience with the law if you committed a bank heist or stole a cheap TV from a neighbor. I don't think the exact law that an action might violate is an important a distinction as what society chooses to do to punish or reward people who take certain actions, and US law does have some pretty harsh penalties for certain IP law violations that stem pretty directly from the concept of "property" in "intellectual property".
• analog8374 6mo ago
  language is just plagiarism
  • brookst 6mo ago
    I’m going to steal that
• _-_-__-_-_- 6mo ago
  Recent thoughts, https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/distrust.html https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/distrust.html
• hparadiz 6mo ago
  You guys have fun arguing. I'm gonna be building cool stuff.
  • stronglikedan 6mo ago
    > I'm gonna be building cool stuff. hardly. at best you're going to be asking a robot to build questionable stuff with other people's LEGOs
    • hparadiz 6mo ago
      You just described all software.
    • therealdkz 6mo ago
      [dead]
  • parliament32 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  • jayd16 6mo ago
    Still waiting for this massive wave of cool stuff.
    • kzrdude 6mo ago
      There's a massive wave of stuff, at least. Sorting it, is not easy.
    • esikich 6mo ago
      You're acting as if developers haven't been using AI to build for years already.
      • jayd16 6mo ago
        Where was the coolness inflection point?
• booleandilemma 6mo ago
  This site is strange. I'm pretty sure there's lots of AI shilling happening on it. I don't think the opinions here are authentic, they seem to be opinions that the AI company CEOs would hold, not the disenfranchised 99%. I used to trust HN, I'm not so sure I can now.
  • recitedropper 6mo ago
    Completely agreed. It looks like there is a concerted effort to "massage" opinion away from any substantial questioning of the ethics, companies, and people behind the AI push. Some of this inevitabilism is organic of course, but there is too much for it all to be so. HN is way too central for shared sentiment in the tech world for these companies not to do some amount of astroturfing. AI companies have shown at every single turn that they act out of self-interest and greed, not of moral principles. So it isn't surprising, even if it is still sad, to see those who are commanding the most capital in human history act with such callousness. I think the appropriate course of response is to stop adding to public spaces on the internet. No doubt painful for those of us who have so benefitted from the freely shared thoughts of others. But if well-funded bullies are going come in, steal everything, ruin the commons, and then say "this is the new normal, deal with it", there isn't much the rest of us can do other than stop feeding them.
  • jcalvinowens 6mo ago
    Yeah. It's becoming unbelievable how different the prevailing opinions on this site are from those of real people I know and work with. That's always been true to some extent... but good lord, it's like reading the news in a parallel universe right now.
  • Kiro 6mo ago
    Any examples? There are obviously a lot of programmers here who think AI is a great tool and don't feel disenfranchised by it.
    • booleandilemma 6mo ago
      Get your LLM to find some for you.
• schwartzworld 6mo ago
  Let this sink in: I wanted to open source a package at work at needed approval from legal and other teams to make sure I wasn't leaking anything proprietary. The same executives that worried about proprietary, copyrighted code being leaked 10 years ago are now mandating using the plagiarism machine. The whole AI bubble is The Emperor's New Clothes, and it feels liek more people are finally admitting it.
  • falcor84 6mo ago
    If anything, I would argue that the whole Intellectual Property bubble is The Emperor's New Clothes. It never made real sense to me to treat ideas as property, and I for one would absolutely prefer to live in a future society where it's possible to just copy a car.
• bparsons 6mo ago
  I am old enough to remember when the US insisted that it was superior to China because they believed in the rule of law and sanctity of intellectual property.
• codepack 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• onion2k 6mo ago
  Fuck Google for ranking some copycat website higher than mine, even though they copied my article. This has been happening since Google launched in 1998. It was probably happening when we all used Hotbot and Altavista. It isn't really an AI problem, save for the fact that the automated production of copycat articles now reword things a bit.
• MontyCarloHall 6mo ago
  Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage. [0] [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
  • phoronixrly 6mo ago
    Just so long as it's just a seductive mirage to the Oracles, Microsofts, Metas, and Googles as well as your friendly neighbourhood unpaid overworked open-source developer. Open weight model trained with no attribution on all of Oracle's internal repos. It's only fair.
    • whattheheckheck 6mo ago
      And on all aristocrat communications and private meetings. Tis fair to keep algorithmic tabs on the most dangerous of society
    • MontyCarloHall 6mo ago
      Or that the notion of "Imaginary Property" was a seductive mirage to copyleft folks, many of whom have since realized that they do, in fact, value intellectual property rights in the wake of AI companies' free (as in freedom) use of other people's IP. I stand somewhere in the middle: while our IP laws are far too restrictive, the folly of abolishing IP altogether has been effectively laid bare by AI companies.
• ggillas 6mo ago
  IP attorney here and actively working on this problem. nla: if you create content online (public repo code, blog, podcast, YouTube, publishing) the smartest thing you can do if to file a US copyright, even if you have a hobby blog. Anthropic paid $1.5B in a class settlement to authors because it was piracy of copyrighted works. If we as a HN community had our works protected, there are potentially huge statutory damages for scraping by any and all llms. I work with hundreds of writers and publishers and am forming a coalition to protect and license what they're creating.
  • indigodaddy 6mo ago
    No one will ever do this, or definitely not enough people will, so what's Plan B?
    • necovek 6mo ago
      Bigger portion of the payout for those that do?
  • stronglikedan 6mo ago
    Doesn't the mere act of publishing your original content online grant you copyright?
    • Kye 6mo ago
      Statutory damages require registration.
  • mort96 6mo ago
    Wait what do you mean by "file a copyright"? I have never heard of this, all explanations of copyright I have heard say that you automatically own the copyright to the things you make; and that "all rights are reserved" by default unless you give up on them through granting a license. Is this no longer the case? Why is this now suddenly different? When did it change?
    • 6mo ago
• iloveoof 6mo ago
  I don’t know if this author supports OSS but I’ll share this because HN generally is full of people with that mindset. It’s deeply ironic that if you forget about LLMs and look only at the outcome—-we’ve found a way to legally circumvent copyright and the siloing of coding knowledge, making it so you can build on top of (almost) the whole of human coding knowledge without needing to pay a rent or ask for permission—-it sounds like the dream of open source software has been realized. But this doesn’t feel like a win for the philosophy of OSS because a corporation broke down the gates. It turns out for a lot of people, OSS is an aesthetic and not an outcome, it’s a vibe against corporate use or control of software, not for democratized access to knowledge.
  • Nursie 6mo ago
    I’m not sure this stands up to much examination when looking at (for example) copyleft, which seeks to give people access to source of binaries they are running. If an LLM can (for the sake of argument) spit out copyleft code which is then used on closed systems, we’ve done an end-run around the protections keeping that open.
    • seba_dos1 6mo ago
      Exactly. It looks like GP is guilty of the thing they accused others of - their understanding of what FLOSS is about is so shallow it resembles an aesthetic.
      • spacechild1 6mo ago
        You don't seem to understand what FOSS is really about. The GPL has always been about the user. When a company license-washes a existing GPL software project and turns it into a proprietory product, the resulting code is not "free" anymore in the sense that the user has lost control. This is exactly what the author wanted to prevent in the first place by licensing their code under the GPL.
        • seba_dos1 6mo ago
• oytmeal 6mo ago
  Isn't plagiarism inherently unauthorized?
  • hoppyhoppy2 6mo ago
    If I let my buddy copy my essay, he would be committing authorized plagiarism, right ? It still fits the dictionary definition of plagiarism, and it's also authorized (by me, anyway)
  • fulafel 6mo ago
    If we go by the dictionary definition "Plagiarism means using someone else’s work without giving them proper credit" then I'll bet in art authorized plagiarism has historically been a common occurrence, for example.
    • echoangle 6mo ago
      If it's authorized, I would argue that the credit you give is the proper credit, even if it is nothing at all. If you ask me if you can reproduce my works without giving credit and I say yes, I don't think you're using my work without giving proper credit.
• quantummagic 6mo ago
  What do people imagine can be done about it at this point? Offer a concrete suggestion. Any law or tax against this will give a huge advantage to other countries. It's already over, there's no going back to a world where this didn't happen. Let's just hope some good comes of it.
  • hgs3 6mo ago
    How about requiring AI companies to pay creators for training rights? Alternatively, models trained on the commons must be owned by the commons. Right now these AI companies are trying to have it both ways: it’s The People’s Data for training on comrade but ownership is privatized.
    • quantummagic 6mo ago
      Practically speaking, who is going to enforce such a regime? Do you really want to give Chinese companies such a huge competitive advantage, that they aren't subject to the same costs as western companies? How do you even sort out which "creators" are owed, and how much? It's next to impossible, and would drown the legal system in litigation; it would likely cause more problems than it solves. On top of which you can find open weights for most, if not all, of the scraped material already. If you make those illegal to use, or prohibitively expensive, you just destroyed local LLM legality, and put the technology firmly in the hands of only the monopolists.
      • hgs3 6mo ago
        If models are trained on the collective whole, they must be owned by the collective whole. If you believe funding creators for the training of private models is too slow, inconvenient, or creates a global disadvantage, then embrace collective ownership.
        • quantummagic 6mo ago
          Sure, I wish everything was perfectly fair too. But how do you practically and REALISTICALLY proceed, and ensure you don't end up doing more damage than benefit? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Everyone seems much more focused on complaining, and talking about "what's fair", than actually proposing concrete steps that would lead to a better world, without a significant risk of creating a worse one.
• andai 6mo ago
  There's two aspects to this. The pretraining (common crawl, i.e. the entire internet. Also books and papers, mostly pirated), and the realtime web scraping. The article appears to be about the latter. Though the two are kind of similar, since they keep updating the training data with new web pages. The difference is that, with the web search version, it's more likely to plagiarize a single article, rather than the kind of "blending" that happens if the article was just part of trillions of web pages in the training data. There's this old quote: "If you steal from one artist, they say oh, he is the next so-and-so. If you steal from many, they say, how original!"
• kolinko 6mo ago
  Years ago i published slides on Slideshare that were viewed almost two million times. And helped me build a business. There were people that learned knowledge from myself, and then made their own tutorials and promote these. It hadn't crossed my mind to complain about that. AI changes very little here. What really changes things is not people republishing my materials, but people using agents to read my materials, and to get knowledge reformatted into something that they like. If my slides were published today, they would probably be read verbatim by a handful of humans. The rest would be agents, but I'm ok with that. The business case is the same -- I want whatever reads the slide to be encouraged to use my tool. What kind of entity, I don't really care (again: from purely business perspective)
• tayo42 6mo ago
  I think AI is just getting people riled up. Not sure what AI has to do with anything in this case here. Someone copy and pasted his content, could have been done without AI. I guess AI could have made a better website and did better SEO then him but that's not really the issue
• kingleopold 6mo ago
  with this logic, business is also just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale. Because all the products/services gets copied and not all of them have patents etc???
• Deprogrammer9 6mo ago
  Welcome to the internet! It's one massive copy machine form one server to the next.
• ecommerceguy 6mo ago
  I remember playing around with Writesonic in my days of spammy seo tactics (some of my products weren't allowed on marketplaces & advertising platforms due to hazmat products so..). Often times I would see my own product descriptions nearly verbatim in the output. 100% creators should get compensated by ai platforms for their work. Further, I can see a day where someone like Reddit will close off or license their data to llms. No doubt they are losing traffic right now.
  • stevemadere 6mo ago
    Reddit seems to me like the worst example for this. Reddit does not create the content on their site, the users do. If anybody’s going to get compensated for that content, it should be the users, not Reddit. Complaining that Reddit is losing out on the monetization of their users’ output seems problematic to me. It feels like shilling for a pimp.
  • ptmkenny 6mo ago
    As for Reddit licensing their data to llms, that day already arrived in 2024: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/02/reddit-has-already-booked-203m-in-revenue-licensing-data-for-ai-training/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/02/reddit-has-already-booked...
• hiroto_lemon 6mo ago
  Worth noting what changed isn't AI itself — copying always existed. LLM just made per-article rewrites a 5-second job. Detection didn't get the same speedup; that's the actual break.
• Havoc 6mo ago
  End of an era
• pull_my_finger 6mo ago
  What gets me is when this was brought up, they said "requiring explicit permission will kill the AI industry"[1]. No shit! Why do you think all the rest of us didn't build a business/"industry" around stealing shit? They could have done it at a slower pace while respecting copyright laws, but they were too greedy to be first to market and secure a hold. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artists-policy-letter https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artist...
• jorisw 6mo ago
  > X is just Y but Can't recall the last time a compelling argument started out like this
• storus 6mo ago
  This is really not so clear cut as "fair use" might cover 99% of all data scrapping; you are not reproducing the originals just use them to estimate probabilistic distribution of tokens in pre-training. You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLMs.
  • mplanchard 6mo ago
    I don’t buy this argument. The tokens are useless without their context, which provides the probability distributions needed to make them useful. Sure you MIGHT not be able to get the book word for word, but it’s impossible to make a useful model without the whole book and all of the artistry that went into it, to guide the tokens in their expected output. Fair use generally does not cover commercial use, which this clearly is, and is dependent on the amount of the original content present in the derived work, which I would contend in this case is “all of it”
    • samatman 6mo ago
      It's more complicated than that. Quite a bit more. Commercial use counts _against_ a fair use defense, but is not dispositive: it's not accurate at all to say it "generally does not cover" commercial use. This is the "purpose and character" test, one of four in contemporary (United States) fair use doctrine. Purpose and character also includes the degree to which a use is _transformative_. It's clear that the degree to which a training run mulching texts "transforms" them is very high. This counts toward a fair use finding for purpose and character. > is dependent on the amount of the original content present in the derived work, which I would contend in this case is “all of it” The "amount and substantiality" test. Your case for "all of it" can't possibly be sustained: the models aren't big enough. It's amount _and_ substantiality: this has come up in the publication of concordances, where a relatively large amount of a copyrighted work appears, but it's chopped up and ordered in a way which is no longer substantially the same. Courts have ruled that this kind of text is fair use, pretty consistently. It's not an LLM, of course, but those have yet to be ruled on. Also worth knowing that courts have never accepted reading or studying a work as incorporation, and are unlikely to change course on the question. It's taken for granted that anyone is allowed to read a copyrighted work in as much detail as they wish, in the course of producing another one. Model training isn't reading either, but the question is to what degree it resembles study. I'd say, more than not. Specifically: > it’s impossible to make a useful model without the whole book and all of the artistry that went into it Courts have never once accepted "it would be impossible for defendant to write his biography without reading plaintiff's" as valid, and it's been tried. The standard for plagiarism is higher than that. "Effect upon the work's value" is probably the most interesting one. For some things, extreme, for others, negligible. I suspect this is the one courts are going to spend the most time on as all of these questions are litigated. Ultimately, model training is highly out-of-distribution for the common law questions involving fair use. It was not anticipated by statute, to put it mildly. The best solution to that kind of dilemma is more statute, and we'll probably see that, but, I don't think you'll be happy with the result, given what I'm replying to. Just a guess on my part.
• tancop 6mo ago
  if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal
  • Bombthecat 6mo ago
    Yeah, I think we are at the point where copyright doesn't exist anymore, at least for AI
    • hectdev 6mo ago
      All of human knowledge (an exaggeration, I know) at our finger tips. It's the most punk rock, anarchist thing tech has done since the internet and it's funny it's shaped as a product.
      • ses1984 6mo ago
        If you get the impression of punk and anarchy, it's only because you're not looking any deeper than the veneer. Underneath, it's nothing like punk or anarchy.
        • hectdev 6mo ago
          I'm considering the dispersement of tech. 3D printers disrupt needing to buy widgets from big companies and local llms disrupt needing to buy generalize software when you can make your own bespoke. AI will live on long after the big corporations burn out their money coffers.
      • account42 6mo ago
        Sure, a few mega-corporations of the scale to upset entire markets owning all information and renting it out as they see fit is very punk. A cyberpunk dystopia specifically.
        • 6mo ago
• alex1138 6mo ago
  I'm reasonably information wants to be free. I think the copyright cartels have enacted a lot of damage Having said that Facebook has to be one of the worst offenders. They don't even allow links to Anna's Archive, they seemingly scraped (maliciously; their crawlers are more resource intensive than anyone else's) LibGen for profit - which is a different calculus
• muldvarp 6mo ago
  I agree but AI is a) owned by rich people and b) (sadly) too useful for this to matter.
• VladVladikoff 6mo ago
  Being a web content creator was already a dead job (killed by Google) before the AI boom. Chasing after at this point seems beyond foolish. Time to find a new career.
• panny 6mo ago
  AI "steals" your code, but AI company says "that's a fair use." AI generates application using a "predict the next word" algorithm built with the stolen/not stolen works. Nothing creative there, just statistics. That application leaks, and now the company that stole/not stole the code originally claims they own the algorithmic output. https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2026/03/2026-03-31-anthropic.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2026/03/2026-03-3... One problem, you don't own that output. Either the original authors own it or nobody owns it because it's not creative... https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 Those are the legal options. You stole it or you don't own it. There is no steal and then you own. That's the core problem. AI companies have demonstrated that they will directly steal the work and they will use their money and influence to claim ownership of it.
• biscuits1 6mo ago
  "Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy?" Selfishness, too. But if I follow the logic, and citations are added, how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing?
  • falcor84 6mo ago
    > how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing? I love it! There's a great seed here for a short story about God being sued by a peer of his for copying some of her physical constants and not putting a proper copyright notice about it in our universe.
    • biscuits1 6mo ago
      Thanks for the laugh. Now back to prompting, telling my all-knowing to create new slop, good sir.
• energy123 6mo ago
  It's a problem with only one practical solution: taxation.
• adolph 6mo ago
  The author's cited phenomena may be AI assisted plagiarism but is just plain plagiarism that could have been done the old fashioned way, and someone who is willing to plagiarize has the ethics to do SEO really well.
• codexb 6mo ago
  All innovation is theft. It builds directly on top of what came before. "Good artists copy, great artists steal." It's always been true. AI just makes it available to more people faster.
• I_am_tiberius 6mo ago
  It's the biggest theft in history.
  • falcor84 6mo ago
    Well, it really depends on your definitions, but I'll probably put the biggest theft in history on European imperialism in the 14-19th centuries, seizing unfathomable amounts of land, resources and slave labor from other civilizations.
    • I_am_tiberius 6mo ago
      I rephrase then: The biggest theft in the 21st century.
• noobermin 6mo ago
  At this point, I think google, openai, anthropic, etc already realise this and are just trying to pretend this isn't true. I even think some C-suite who are not in AI companies but are boosters know this too. This has been true since 2022 but they're hoping (likely correctly) that governments won't move fast enough to protect the IP of the actual productive class. I think the long term reality is that the models still need training data so they fundamentally do need new writing/code/art to train on, and even then the usual issues like hallucination will still be with us. It's just the moment that actually hurts the (already questionable) profitability of the model peddlers, they will have gotten their IPOs and they can safely jump ship and the ultimate mess can be passed to the softbanks, the temaseks, and the governments of the world to clean up for them. What the future holds after the crash I'm not sure as the models won't disappear (especially now that the stolen data is already crystalised in open source models) but in the near term the mass theft that constitutes llms will become more and more understood even amongst the PMC and that in order to remain viable, you need the productive to keep producing, and unlike LLMs, you can't force them to do it without payment.
• isoprophlex 6mo ago
  > Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy? Yes. At least it is what the currently prevailing economic system of "value extraction and capital concentration at all cost" incentivises us towards.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• hmokiguess 6mo ago
  It's so wild, I can't even think what the end path will look like. Will there be a major settlement? Will this abolish some form of copyright as a precedent? Something else? My brain hurts just to try and reason about it, yet, the fact remains it's now ubiquitous and change is inevitable.
• hendersoon 6mo ago
  There's a big difference between "Yo GPT, copy this webpage for me in a different voice" and blaming LMs wholesale for being plagiarism. The former is of course a problem. The latter warrants a much more nuanced discussion about learning and generalization.
• szundi 6mo ago
  [dead]
• jeisc 6mo ago
  AI is an organized intellectual property rip off in the name of advancing human learning but the commercialization of the products seem like legal licenses to steal.
• paol_taja 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• barnabee 6mo ago
  The war on copying is like the war on drugs: unwinnable, and socially useless. Let information be free for personal and recreational uses[0], and vote for governments that will fund the arts. The corporations will be just fine. [0] The AI companies and big tech vs publishers, music labels, etc. can fight to the death in the courts over who owes who what, for all I care.
• gagan2020 6mo ago
  How any content came into existence? Learning, Experience, connection, etc right? If AI is doing that then what's the problem? Printing Press was also disturbing status-quo of its time. Any frontier technologies at their time did that. Be it Fire, Wheel, Horse, Horse Saddle, Gun, Printing Press, Nuclear war heads, Computers, Internet, AI, etc. Don't make it ethical question but understand its new frontier for humans.
• frankest 6mo ago
  You are going to see the same thing that happened with newspapers. Those who want to train the AI with their content (advertisers, PR) will push out more content for AI in the open. Those who have quality content that gives you an advantage will try to lock out AI or get pricy subscription APIs for humans and even pricier for AI.
• dspillett 6mo ago
  More like “GenAI enables plagiarism at a bigger scale”. People copying through GenAI would have done so before if they had a tool that so easily allowed them that facility.
• illiac786 6mo ago
  Isn’t it rather authorized plagiarism?
• mindcandy 6mo ago
  > AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning" What would it mean for authors who publish content publicly to the web, without access restrictions, to provide consent for learning from it? "EULA: Most people are allowed to learn from this text. If you work in an AI-related field, even though you can clearly see this page because you are reading this text right now, you are not permitted to learn anything from it. Bob Stanton, you are an a-hole. I do not consent to you learning from this web page. Dave Simmons, you are annoying. But, I'll give you a pass. For now... Also: plumbers. I do not like plumbers for reasons I will not elaborate. No plumbers may learn from my writing in an way."
• paulsutter 6mo ago
  Historical scandals are finally coming to light now that the AI issue has raised awareness: - Ernest Hemingway trained his own neurons on Tolstoy, Twain, and Turgenev without ever paying them royalties! - William Faulkner trained his neurons on Joyce and de Balzac - George Orwell trained his neurons on Swift, Dickens, and Jack London - Virginia Woolf trained her neurons on Proust and Chekhov Now that these historical wrongs have been exposed, it is obvious that some reparations are in order, likely from anyone who has benefited directly or indirectly from these takings!
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• I_am_tiberius 6mo ago
  It's essentially a new napster.
• adamtaylor_13 6mo ago
  I read the article, but I disagree. People are angry, and that's completely understandable. I believe it's a justifiable response to the huge upheaval happening. But being angry about LLMs does not magically transmute their output into "plagiarism". It has always been possible to take someone's public work, put a twist on it, and then sell it as unique. (I'm not making a moral/ethical argument, only a legal one.) I have yet to see any evidence that LLMs are fundamentally different from that approach.
• damnesian 6mo ago
  Not the first time I've had the thought massive lawsuits could be in all AI company's future. Surely they realize they are living on borrowed time simply by being the current trendy tech.
• waffletower 6mo ago
  Use of the word "plagiarism" is plagiarism itself. Culture and thought are deeply shared phenomena. Using a common language, such as English, to communicate is equally an act of plagiarism. You didn't invent these words -- you use them without attribution and without payment. To decry and malign the collective training of all available digitally represented thought and discourse by large language models as simple binary plagiarism is deeply ironic -- where did you pay for your own thoughts? I don't want to live in your pay-per-thought society. I want to live with the ethos "information wants to be free". En garde!
• ironman1478 6mo ago
  People keep saying open source is an example of how copyright doesn't quite matter. However, many of the biggest open source projects are contributed to by massive corporations. Linux has lots of contributions from all the FAANGs, Red Hat, etc. Yes, it's not protected by copyrighted, but also the way it's produced is wholly different from how an artistic work is produced. Contributing to Linux is nothing on the balance sheet of Google for example, whereas producing art for an independent person or a whole company who's purpose is to create art can be very expensive. Artists are taking risks and need legal protection if they want to make art for a living. If artists were making FAANG engineer compensations or all worked at institutions like universities (with all their protections) then maybe they wouldn't care about copyright, but that isn't the living situation for every artist. You could say an artist shouldn't rely on making art for a living, but that's actually a different discussion.
• rastrojero2000 6mo ago
  It's not though, that's just the business case, where the perverse business incentives lie. LLMs are really cool text generators and it turns out we can generate a bunch of things from text they generate. Problem is, several of those things can be horrendous for the continued survival of the species and those happen to make the people running those AIs a ton of money, and, in perverted societies, thus also clout.
• dominicrose 6mo ago
  Talking about a bigger scale may be confusing because some of the information AI can train on comes from niches. I wouldn't mind if an AI trained on old Disney movies (or new ones for that matter), but exploiting niches (like local newspapers) seems bad.
• erelong 6mo ago
  "intellectual property" is something of a legal fiction
• sublinear 6mo ago
  At the very least, we see there is minimal practical value for LLMs for any serious work. This is sort of good news. The effort to build this type of "AI" is all in the training data and navigating politics. That leaves two possibilities: either another AI winter comes as people fail to capture long term value, or we get less swampy models that are much more useful and trained the correct way.
• danorama 6mo ago
  There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this (not just with LLMs), and I see it in many of the comments here: If it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale. It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing! It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different. “You say I can pick one flower, but you get upset when I take a bunch. That’s inconsistent. Check and mate.” But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes. Everyone knows this, but sometimes they seem to find it inconvenient to admit it. Not that effects of the qualitative change are always bad, but they are often different, and worth considering rather than dismissing.
  • inetknght 6mo ago
    If one person is murdered, that's bad. If a million people are murdered, that's war. If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business.
    • bogrollben 6mo ago
      this made me oof. well said.
    • gruez 6mo ago
      >If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business. Where are all the instances of "one word" being "stolen by AI", and people getting mad over it?
    • insane_dreamer 6mo ago
      more like If one word is stolen by Joe, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by Meta, that's business. AI isn't the problem, is corporations using AI that are the problem
  • 6mo ago
• fritzo 6mo ago
  What has "artificial" to do with it? Human intelligence is also unauthorized unconscious plagiarism.
  • pornel 6mo ago
    Two things: scale, and humanity. People can't memorize as much information, and can't manually reproduce the works as quickly. There's a natural limit to how much damage a person can do without help of machines. That's why it's legal to fart where industrial-scale sewage outlets are not allowed. Second, laws are for people. Laws don't have to treat machines the same. People have needs for things like freedom of artistic expression, participation in a shared culture, and machines don't. Copyright is a compromise that tries to balance needs of people, and stops making sense when the same compromises are done for machines that don't have these needs.
• chrisbrandow 6mo ago
  I think what gets conflated are two aspects. 1. LLM/transformer technology is legitimately amazing and revolutionary. 2. In the end, they function as an enormous, effective database for most human knowledge. Point 1 obscures the fact that if someone just created an SQL database with every digital artifact in existence and provided it for free upon request, there would be no ambiguity whether that was legal or not. But distillation, etc obscures this relationship and it looks like something other than straight lookup, at least in part because it is obviously more than that.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
• msla 6mo ago
  If we outlaw plagiarism, we've just killed culture. Everything is "stolen" from other art. Every piece of creation takes inspiration (read: steals ideas) from things that came before. This is how creation works, it is how creation has always worked, and it is why you cannot legally own an abstract idea. You can own the implementation of an idea in specific works, such as copyrighted works and patents and trademarking specific logos and such, but once the ideas go into the blender and get mixed with other ideas, the output isn't yours to own anymore. That's what culture is.
• nphardon 6mo ago
  "One of the things that LLMs do is plagiarism as a bigger scale."
• kmeisthax 6mo ago
  > I found out this because they ranked higher than me in Google search result, and then when I read their article, their article contains links to my actual website, with the exact link text (?!) , which means they didnt bother to check and remove, and thats how I found out. So, funnily enough, Google's search index may actually have a preference for LLM-generated slop now. Louis Rossmann found this out this hard way: his human-authored, human-written, actually-in-his-own-words site for his business basically stopped ranking in Google until he went and replaced all his writing with LLM slop. He's not happy with this, but he's even less happy about being cut off from traffic his business needs to survive, so he stuck with the slop (and vocally complains about it on other channels every opportunity he gets).
• baby 6mo ago
  I dislike this argument because it’s about limiting the most powerful technology we ever invented because it doesn’t fit well with how we established some social structures.
  • bigfishrunning 6mo ago
    I think "most powerful technology we ever invented" is a controversial statement anyway -- AI is a party trick of dubious value.
    • baby 6mo ago
      Oh boy you’re going to get hit hard by this technological wave when you wake up
  • Jtarii 6mo ago
    >the most powerful technology we ever invented I recon agriculture and the steam engine would beat out ChatGPT by just a smidge. I would put eyeglasses/the book/vaccines/sanitation far above LLMs in technological power. Right now AI is just kinda nothing, it has potential sure, but today its just a giant pit for people to burn money in.
    • nonethewiser 6mo ago
      What are you referring to when you refer to the technology of agriculture? Like John Deere's latest tractor? GMOs? The shift from hunter gathering to agrarian society?
      • Jtarii 6mo ago
        >What are you referring to when you refer to the technology of agriculture? Planting crops and harvesting them.
    • scronkfinkle 6mo ago
      Solving one of the most famous Erdos problems that has remained unsolved for 80 years without using tools like lean but instead a giant reasoning block is quite a lot more than "kinda nothing"
• aoeusnth1 6mo ago
  Did I miss where OpenAI plagerized the disproof of the planar unit distance problem from?
  • AgentME 6mo ago
    It would be one thing for someone to say "AI is enabling plagiarism at a bigger scale", but to say it's "just plagiarism", surely one needs to explain who exactly the unit distance breakthrough was plagiarized from.
• arjie 6mo ago
  The linked article shows that LLMs can be used to plagiarize content through rewriting. Then he gets SEO'd out of it. But it doesn't demonstrate that AI is just plagiarism.
  • piloto_ciego 6mo ago
    Because it isn't... These people freaking out about this stuff are... kind of weird.
  • ToValueFunfetti 6mo ago
    It doesn't even show that LLMs can plagiarize through rewriting, is just asserts that. The audience is expected to already believe it. And, fair enough, it's true. But I can't make any sense of 700+ upvotes for what I'd say amounts to a 200-word disjointed HN rant comment if it even met site guidelines.
• cute_boi 6mo ago
  Yes, and as per big techs, OpenAI and Anthropic you will not be able to do anything. On top of that they will make sure there are no jobs etc.. What can you/we do?
• nate 6mo ago
  this is why I feel like we need some kind of "consortium" or government effort to be like "yo, llms, you need to honor some kind of source markup to give us people you mention more significant boost"? like if you mention my article, you better also show my ad partner?
• markhahn 6mo ago
  Is he ignorant, or trying to mislead? AI is not a plagiarism engine. It can be used that way, but is not inherently so. It is not necessary that a trained LLM be able to faithfully reproduce every document in its training set. The entire structure of an LLM is not storage, but at least in principle, generalization: extraction of a somewhat abstracted "structure" of semantically similar "concepts". But we also need to talk about authors' "rights". It's well-established that reproducing a work is infringement. There is a lot of caselaw about how much may be reproduced without infringement. But the idea that an author should be consulted before ANY automated use of their published (public) text? No, just no.
• nitwit005 6mo ago
  I can see this argument, but I'm not sure it matters, because it's looking like these companies are just directly violating copyright law. Meta pirated books using BitTorrent: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o... xAI is busy suing to try to avoid disclosing where they got their training data from, which hints at similar problems: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.1000848/gov.uscourts.cacd.1000848.1.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.10...
• tracerbulletx 6mo ago
  Whether or not its technically copyright infringement isn't the main issue I have. Its mostly that it concentrates the ability to collect rent from all of the content in the world into the hands of the few corporations who can build data centers at scale. This is a huge problem. Why would I make a webpage, a news site, an online magazine, or create art commercially if it can be swept up into these models and cut me out of any incentive? If its not legally copyright infringement now we need a new legal framework around it because its an absolute tragedy for human creativity and small enterprise.
  • ip26 6mo ago
    We went through exactly this with Google. People argued that once they were the only way anyone found websites, they were merely collecting undue economic rent.
• zach_1337 6mo ago
  Are people going to start putting garbage white text on the internet to intentionally corrupt training?
• MarlonPro 6mo ago
  Maybe it's time to rethink the plagiarism laws? AI is not going away.
• a13n 6mo ago
  The US drastically prefers the economic impact of AI over enforcing this… You can get away with quite a lot if you’re creating trillions in GDP. That’s just the world we live in whether we like it or not.
• i4i 6mo ago
  He ends his essay with "Fuck Google for ranking some copycat website higher than mine, even though they copied my article", but how is it not OpenAI, Anthropic etc. as well as Google, to blame. We're meant to believe that with their resources they couldn't have created a micro-payment scheme to compensate creators? Altman on Fridman podcast two years ago about compensation... https://youtu.be/jvqFAi7vkBc?si=9YbKoH_dFIishAXt&t=2409 https://youtu.be/jvqFAi7vkBc?si=9YbKoH_dFIishAXt&t=2409
• fullshark 6mo ago
  That sounds pretty useful
• redwood 6mo ago
  If this all leads to a generative monoculture that is also Frozen in Time that would be pretty sad.
• slowhadoken 6mo ago
  Corporate proprietary plagiarism through openwashing.
• hettygreen 6mo ago
  How much were people fined for downloading MP3's off Napster? And what should AI companies be fined for downloading the entire internet? Don't forget openAI has been caught several times training their models on copywritten material.
  • sc68cal 6mo ago
    How many people took those MP3s and tried to create a company that would IPO for a trillion dollars?
• jqmccleary 6mo ago
  The worst part is it'll get better and better at doing it and smarter and smarter, this needs legal interference to manage abuse
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• atlasagentsuite 6mo ago
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• themuskgpt2025 6mo ago
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• dahuangf 6mo ago
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• capr 6mo ago
  I personally love how AI shows through sheer indifference how the whole concept of intellectual property is completely incoherent.
• poonia 6mo ago
  hell yeah
• macwhisperer 6mo ago
  can't we just freaking share things? ai models are a crystallization of human effort (available for free on huggingface).. why not use it? AI is like the UBI of intelligence, stop leaving free money on the table by refusing to use it locally ( you can run it on a laptop CPU)
• arendtio 6mo ago
  Maybe the problem is not the artificial intelligence, but the thing we call copyright, and AI training is just showing us how weird the concept of copyright is. I mean, it seems to be okay to replicate information if it has been remixed with other information enough, but not okay if the remix was too little. But then again, there does not seem to be a clearly executable definition of where this line is. There are good reasons why we have copyright (like protecting/fostering artists/education/entertainment in our modern society), but the concept itself is a bit weird and artificial after all.
• damnitbuilds 6mo ago
  He misuses the term "AI", undermining his point and suggesting he doesn't really understand it.
• fnord77 5mo ago
  The history of the world is the history of plundering. Nothing new, just fancier.