alt Hacker NewsAI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
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To answer the author's question: Yes, progress IS largely built on the shoulders of those who came before.
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!
Recent thoughts, https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/distrust.html
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.
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
Reading is just unauthorized plagiarism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
End of an era
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.
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.
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/2026/03/2026-03-3...
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 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
Breaking the law to start a large company seems to be the norm
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!
Welcome to the internet! It's one massive copy machine form one server to the next.
If i tell my friend a synopsis of a book, i am not stealing from the author, what is this take lmao
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.
Is this a new and original thought?
it's a spiral into a finite hall of mirrors, where at the end is somebody with a gun
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.
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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
> Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy?
Apparently yes.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 ..
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)
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.
It's a problem with only one practical solution: taxation.