alt Hacker NewsAI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
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"Steal an apple and you're a thief. Steal a kingdom and you're a statesman." - Literal Disney villain
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
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?
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.
Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage. [0]
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.
> 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."
> 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?
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.
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.
You guys have fun arguing. I'm gonna be building cool stuff.
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!
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.
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.
People were effectively copying websites (especially ecommerce tutorials) and beating the original authors at SEO decades before ChatGPT 2.
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!"
Isn’t it rather authorized plagiarism?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
>>"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!
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
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.
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.
I agree but AI is a) owned by rich people and b) (sadly) too useful for this to matter.
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.
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.
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-artist...
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.
> X is just Y but
Can't recall the last time a compelling argument started out like this
> AI ... do some "learning"
Is AI plural or is that a typo?
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???
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.
Recent thoughts, https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/distrust.html
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
It's a problem with only one practical solution: taxation.
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.
Reading is just unauthorized plagiarism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.