alt Hacker NewsIs this not a good example of how generative AI does copyright laundering? Suppose the image was AI generated and it did a bad copy of the source image that was in the training data, which seems likely with such a widely disseminated image. When using generative AI to produce anything else, how do you know it's not just doing a bad quality copy-paste of someone else's work? Are you going to scour the internet for the source? Will the AI tell you? What if code generation is copy-pasting GPL-licensed code in to your proprietary codebase? The likelihood of this, the lack of a way to easily know it's happening, and the risks it causes, seems to me to be being overlooked amidst all the AI hype. And generative AI is a lot less impressive if it often works as a bad quality copy paste tool rather than the galaxy brain intelligence some like to portray it as.
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> What if code generation is copy-pasting GPL-licensed code in to your proprietary codebase?
This is obviously a big, unanswered, issue. It's pretty clear to me that we are collectively incentivised to pollute the well, and that it happens for long-enough for everything to become "compromised". That's essentially abandoning opensource and IP licensing at large, taking us to an unchartered era where intellectual works become the protected property of nobody.
I see chatbots having less an impact on our societies than the above, and interestingly it has little to do with technology.
If you actually care about having that sort of discussion I’d suggest a framing that doesn’t paint anyone that doesn’t agree with you as succumbing to AI hype and believing it has “galaxy brain intelligence”. Please ditch this false dichotomy. At this point, in 2026, it’s tiring.
There are countless examples. Often I think about the fact that the google search AI is just rewording news articles from the search results, when you look at the source articles they have exactly the same points as the AI answers.
So these services depends on journalists to continuously feed them articles, while stealing all of the viewers by automatically copying every article.