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.

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.

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?

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!"

Yes. At least it is what the currently prevailing economic system of "value extraction and capital concentration at all cost" incentivises us towards.

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.

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.

People copying through GenAI would have done so before if they had a tool that so easily allowed them that facility.

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.

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.

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."

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!

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artist...

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?

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.

The whole AI bubble is The Emperor's New Clothes, and it feels liek more people are finally admitting it.

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.

Is AI plural or is that a typo?

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.

Can't recall the last time a compelling argument started out like this

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

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.

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.

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/2026/03/2026-03-3...

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

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.

I guess AI could have made a better website and did better SEO then him but that's not really the issue

- 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!

There's absolutely nothing new or interesting here that hasn't already been said better by a thousand different random HN commenters.

Apparently yes.

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.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

It's always been true. AI just makes it available to more people faster.

Don't make it ethical question but understand its new frontier for humans.

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 ..

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)

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.