Thread

Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

955 points · 841 comments · pluc

jacquesm · 1789726316 · focus · HN ↗
It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
1. TeMPOraL · 1789734845 · focus · HN ↗
  > It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up.
  Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.
  Whether the end result threatens the form in which culture is created, at least beyond just threatening the business models of the gatekeepers, is a separate discussion, but you can't draw the heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" arguments there so easily.
  And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.
  There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".
  1. wjnc · 1789735359 · focus · HN ↗
    Creators are unwillingly and contra to economic systems that have evolved over a few millennia entered in the Borg or the Matrix. So their achievements are reused for private and public benefits without their permission. Piracy is theft. And this piracy is a bigger theft than piracy on an individual download basis. Was there any doubt? (Linguistically I agree that you can’t “rob culture”. You can rape or reap culture though, and that is the point at hand.)
    mrngld · 1789736547 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    TeMPOraL · 1789737142 · focus · HN ↗
    Also,
    The crowd: "Knowledge should be free! Culture belongs to all of us! Information must be democratized!"
    AI companies *proceed to copy literally everything and put it through virtual blender, until an universal general-purpose problem-solver tool comes out, then give it out for free or serve for peanuts to literally everyone on the planet with Internet connection *
    Crowd: bbb..buuut not like that!
    GlacierFox · 1789738106 · focus · HN ↗
    There's some nuance there you're purposefully/ignorantly supressing to create a more impactful fundamentalist observation, completely contrary to the comment you described above as :
    "heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" argument"
    I think the water is very muddy in regards to this topic and comments like yours really highlight the distain some people have for others that have talking points about with things they create being thrown into a gargantuan 'blender' as you called it.
    AgentOrange1234 · 1789739066 · focus · HN ↗
    "Give it out for free or serve for peanuts" is doing a lot of work here. The crowd should be skeptical that this will continue given how many times we have seen enshittification unfold before.
    Before LLMs, "knowledge should be free" was a call to preserve an open playing field where everyone has the ability to access the intellectual labor of humanity so they can contribute, instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit.
    As knowledge is walled off behind these models, rent seeking will expand, "safety guardrails" will become more onerous, and the masses will lose their access. There are wonderful parallels between this and enclosure in Britain.
    WarmWash · 1789739606 · focus · HN ↗
    >instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit.
    I cannot repeat enough that that is not true, or even remotely close to true.
    When ChatGPT helps me fix my toilet, saving me a $300 plumber call, I don't cut OAI a check for $300 instead.
    It is unbelievably easy to harvest more than $20 of value from all the basic plans. Right now, users are overwhelmingly capturing all the value. Even if they triple the price, it's trivial for most workers to easily justify it.
    We can project any future scenario we want, but right now the labs are only capturing a tiny fraction of the value they are creating. Especially for the crowd here on HN.
    jacquesm · 1789740787 · focus · HN ↗
    Utilitarian arguments and ethics don't mix.
    TeMPOraL · 1789765979 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure they do. In fact, I'd tentatively claim that if you cannot easily find an utilitarian argument backing an ethical one, it's a good sign the ethical argument is some flawed ideology that will be used to justify suffering and control.
    (Obvious caveat: utilitarian argument should not be some nonsense straw man that's narrow-scoped and ignores the time dimension.)
    AgentOrange1234 · 1789752266 · focus · HN ↗
    It's good pushback and you're right to call that out.
    I think consolidation and centralized control are coming fast. Already some models are "too dangerous" to let everyone use, competition from open-weight models are being targeted as "lacking safety," distillation is under attack as "cheating," opting out of data sharing is now an enterprise-only feature, etc.
    TeMPOraL · 1789766153 · focus · HN ↗
    Right. But the neat things against current evolution of LLMs is that "open-weight" models are still tracking SOTA by 3-6 months, so even if all the commercial operators shut down access tomorrow, everyone would still have access to SOTA from half a year ago - which already is tremendously useful, very much in range of "saving $300 by telling you how to fix your toilet" - at the price of inference. That's because model weights are still just big bags of floating point numbers; once released, they cannot be unreleased.
    oefrha · 1789741877 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    TeMPOraL · 1789764498 · focus · HN ↗
    The $200/mo version you're paying for today is the one that will be ~free for everyone in 6 months. You're only paying to use the bleeding edge of technology that improves so fast, and drops in costs so fast, that the entry-level free offering today is better than most expensive tier a year ago, and beyond science fiction just three years ago.
    I swear most people dissing AI with such arguments must perpetually live in a moment and have zero concept of passage of time.
    oefrha · 1789778042 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    watwut · 1789743204 · focus · HN ↗
    Except that no one is freeing or democratizing the knowledge. We all know that the plan is to take it, destroy original sources and then become the solo monopoly provider. The plan is to extract staggering amounts of money from the rest of us - they have to pay those debts. Plus, it is not an universal general-purpose problem-solver either.
    I mean, actual plan is to "make humans obsolete", "make everyone unemployable" and create weird techno fascist utopia from Thiel money. I personally don't find those sci-fi parts likely to happen. But these people do actually mean them, so.
    It is just a few months ago when they were dancing victory dance about how they destroyed all the film makers and artists (practically they did not), as if that was something praise worthy or aspirational.
    convolvatron · 1789743976 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm anti IP in theory and practice. If this results in undermining vengeful protection of the Annas and the Schwartzs of the world, I'm all for it. But it's not, is it. If the corpus and the models were all free, that would be lovely, and qualitatively quite different.
    but its not, the old IP model is still intact, except these guys get an exception. and they get to scream bloody murder about distillation. they get to use their massive funding to try to draw a moat around that knowledge and expression with the goal of rent seeking from this point onwards. I'm not supposed to be able to access the original works anymore, but instead the proprietary, newly biased, blender output that contains a little bit of it.
    also not at fan of what its doing to the creative process, but you're right here. that's on us for being so easily seduced and not being able to limit ai usage to solving rote problems instead of creative ones.
    qahr16 · 1789737458 · focus · HN ↗
    Amodei: Check out my 1000 Exabytes torrent collection, which I weaseled out of with a $1.5 billion bribe.
    The usual human reading information on the internet does nothing with it. They don't adapt the style, they don't translate, they don't reblog a modified version. The ones that do have been criticized for stealing blog posts already before AI.
    NateEag · 1789737656 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, in a huge crowd of people, you will get differing opinions.
    Do you have any other obvious facts you'd like to pretend are somehow relevant?
    WarmWash · 1789739316 · focus · HN ↗
    Because of the nature of upvoting on social media, we can pretty accurately dial in on what the crowds consensus is.
    Your response makes sense when we are pulling random marbles from a bag, like old school forums, but social media abandoned that style of commentary long ago.
    NateEag · 1789784218 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think that holds at all.
    There are so many variables that go into upvoting and downvoting, and we can't even see the actual scores on HN posts.
    The data you refer to isn't available, AFAIK, and even if it were we'd have to account for the hundreds of confounding variables that contribute to post scores being what they are.
    tmcb · 1789738945 · focus · HN ↗
    People with a 132TB media collection don’t usually act as if they wrote and directed The Godfather.
    AI steals by lacking the ability to properly do either attribution and citation, whether this is accidental or by design.
    Downloading an existing PhD thesis without permission is very much different from submitting an existing PhD thesis as yours.
    duskdozer · 1789741465 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd bet if you asked a bunch of people off the street, you'd have a number of different takes on the ethics of stealing a loaf of bread, depending who stole it, from whom, and why.
    sham1 · 1789741732 · focus · HN ↗
    An individual pirate is morally a lot less objectionable than the capitalist class pirating from literally everyone else.
    Yeah sure, it's on the open Internet, but then again, the capitalists could also actually adhere to the licensing terms of the free software they're hoovering up and all that. These are the same people who want to enforce all kinds of EULAs against the commons, employing measures such as DRM to protect their "intellectual property", so why is it suddenly okay to not comply with IP when it's them doing the infringement?
    pbhjpbhj · 1789746102 · focus · HN ↗
    Aside from other issues, do you not see a difference between a company committing copyright infringement at global scales never before seen (except with Google Books), who then use the fruit of that to sell a service at a high cost, VERSUS an individual person watching media at home with no profit (where it has been shown that _as a class_ these sorts of infringers spend more on media than other people).
    Yes, HN often has cliques wth opposing views, but I don't even think that's necessary to recall in order to see a problem with corporations who, in order to make their product, commit copyright infringement of billions of works.
    These opinions are entirely my own personal views. I do not support tortuous infringement.
  2. [deleted] · 1789735436 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  3. tripzilch · 1789735540 · focus · HN ↗
    What do you mean, it's already robbing me of the ability to discuss techniques with a number of my peers since they decided the mediocre output of LLMs is good enough instead of understanding what they are doing.
    In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly, and discuss techniques except in spaces they can be sure it's a one-on-one with a human being.
    Some things already got lost.
    phoronixrly · 1789735695 · focus · HN ↗
    I still do open-source. You just get the code on a CD like the good old times!
    IAmBroom · 1789736191 · focus · HN ↗
    You're discussing your peers' behaviors, not AI.
    It's the same as saying "People don't kill people; guns do." Maybe guns(AI) should be regulated, but the primary problem is murderers(lazy peers), not weapons(AI).
    malfist · 1789736561 · focus · HN ↗
    Just like with guns, AI is a crime of scope.
    I can be a murderer with a knife, sure, but how many people can I kill? How many people can I kill if I have a class three license an a full auto gun?
    I can pirate a news article here or there, sure, but how many news articles can I pirate? How many news articles can I pirate with AI?
    TeMPOraL · 1789736998 · focus · HN ↗
    > How many news articles can I pirate with AI?
    Not much more than with a bash/curl loop. Which, on one hand, AI can write for you, but on the other hand, AI will make you no longer need to pirate those articles in the first place.
    Also it's not end-user piracy being discussed - it's the act of training AI itself that's accused here to be "robbery of our culture".
    ndsipa_pomu · 1789739267 · focus · HN ↗
    Yet countries that have strong regulation of firearms have significantly less murders (and accidental shootings) than countries that don't regulate them.
    That does suggest that along with murderers, the easy accessibility of firearms is a problem (assuming that the ratio of murderers in different populations is approximately the same).
    FromTheFirstIn · 1789740388 · focus · HN ↗
    If this is your stance on guns, I’m not surprised by your calloused take on AI
    TeMPOraL · 1789736551 · focus · HN ↗
    That's people problems though, namely:
    1) Lazy peers, and
    2) Spiteful peers with "dog in the manger" mentality.
    The latter case personally irks me, mostly because this often involves personal benefit (economical or moral) due to them claiming to give away knowledge for altruistic reasons, which later behavior reveals was a lie, mislabeling proprietary as open and free, to reap unfair gains.
    But that's all off-topic for this thread anyway.
    gwbas1c · 1789738879 · focus · HN ↗
    > Spiteful peers with "dog in the manger" mentality.
    Last night my daughter told me her friend (a boy) signed up to take the last spot of a baking class at camp just to spite his sister, who wanted it.
    Turns out he liked baking!
    ---
    I think this whole discussion shows that there's a lot of Calvinball going on with IP, where the creator keeps trying to change the rules as a way to defend their power and social order.
    3ash87 · 1789739379 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    shimman · 1789740299 · focus · HN ↗
    This may blow your mind but people have different value systems than the single one where only making money matters in our incredibly short lives. Some people believe in things other than accumulating money and immiserating workers.
    Your failure of imagination doesn't limit the actions people can take to shape society. We all have equal voices in that respect.
    I truly feel sorry for those with your mindset. It speaks volumes on the lack of community and friends you have where you think fucking them over to make money is a worthy pursuit.
    They use to banish greedy people from society in the before times, maybe we should start again as these people have no problem in destroying society for religious fanatical reasons. We shouldn't be accepting of them, especially when they're actively killing us all or making us miserable.
    iu123 · 1789741189 · focus · HN ↗
    You are preaching this is response to a comment that mocks the notion that creators are the evil people while OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX exploit them?
    The comment was clearly satirical.
    shimman · 1789741367 · focus · HN ↗
    Nah, some tech people really believe this. You need to get out of your bubble and realize a nontrivial percentage of tech workers are very anti-human.
    gwbas1c · 1789746633 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, one of the articles on HN a few days ago pointed out that a lot of the wealthy spend a lot of their time and energy preserving the social order. (It was a long article trying to predict what people will do when they don't need to work.)
    To be quite blunt: I really don't think anyone who sells (or gives) IP to the general public has any right to control what happens to that IP after a fair period of time. That's why I say they're playing Calvinball: Changing the rules as they go for their benefit, so they can preserve the social order.
    shepardrtc · 1789738978 · focus · HN ↗
    People creating free software for everyone to use, only to pull it away when suddenly there's a technology that can instantly let everyone use it at the drop of a hat, is not something I quite understand. If you're doing it so you show people, hey I made this, then you can still do that. If you're doing it to help the world, then that's very much happening. Of if you're doing it just for fun, that's possible too, though I totally understand how much less fun it is when AI can rip it out in a few minutes.
    3ash87 · 1789739440 · focus · HN ↗
    IT HELPS THE TRILLIONAIRES YOU MORON.
    Retric · 1789739948 · focus · HN ↗
    People have multiple motivations at the same time. Many OSS contributors have moved on after LLM’s and that’s completely consistent with their motivations.
    Some of the major OSS licenses require attribution when someone copies the work in question, AI companies fail to do so. People getting annoyed when others break the social contract has nothing to do with any other motives they can always benefit the world by doing something else.
    You may prefer someone continue maintaining infrastructure you use but they could be just as happy delivering food to the elderly. The desire for people to continue helping you is little more than entitlement here.
    antihipocrat · 1789741474 · focus · HN ↗
    Some of it might be loss of external validation, no more stars in github. Some of it might be an aversion to a non-consensual contribution to the end of their chosen profession as a means to make a good living.
    Much of it might be because their license (MIT, BSD etc) was ignored completely.
    latexr · 1789744985 · focus · HN ↗
    > is not something I quite understand
    I can only speak for myself, but right now working on open-source is even more thankless and shitty. Now any douche-knuckle comes to your repo and starts spamming you with bad PRs or issues as if their favourite LLM du jour has some fantastical insight they have to share with you, when it has already been explained ad nauseam that what they want is out of scope, or isn’t technically possible, or has tradeoffs XYZ.
    You had lazy people before, sure, but those interactions were less frequent, shorter, and for each person I used to craft a careful response that would explain everything in detail and teach those I interacted with. But why would I waste my time crafting a reply that the person on the other side is just going to shove into their LLM and learn nothing?
    Regarding open-source, LLMs make people more disrespectful of the people doing the work. And if you’re sharing your expertise for free to be disrespected, why bother?
    nz · 1789746435 · focus · HN ↗
    People were always able to "instantly use it at the drop of a hat" (paraphrased). What people are objecting to, is instant use without any acknowledgement or attribution (the minimum courtesy). They also object to being mistreated by people who have never actually had to type characters of code into a text-editor, or figure out how to use a build-system and version-control-system. And finally, they object to having their _free_ and _generous_ labor turn millionaires into billionaires (and billionaires into trillionaires), while they themselves still have to pay that one mortgage they have, and medical bills, and tuition, and so on.
    They object to the systematized devaluing of their work. They object to becoming a class of invisible laborers (who only become visible when there is need to blame someone).
    tripzilch · 1789816894 · focus · HN ↗
    First of you're framing the conversation here by assuming we're talking about "free software" (according to whichever definition).
    There's people saying they'd rather talk to an LLM than to me.
    I dunno how else to say it to you, but when somebody happily announces that they'd rather talk to a computer than to you, and they are happy this is the future.
    That carries certain connotations beyond "external validation".
    The person in the top of this thread was claiming "nobody has been robbed".
    There's people in these communities that I will never have an intelligent conversation with, again.
    I'm not talking about being able to pay bills or anything, I'm just talking about being replaced by a computer program, in a social sense.
    latexr · 1789744164 · focus · HN ↗
    > That's people problems though
    And the people make the culture. So, in effect, the culture suffered. I think you’re taking the original comment too literally with your “piracy is theft” comparison. Obviously you can’t literally rob culture¹, because culture is a concept. But you can lose something from it, and that loss can have a cause you can point to, so in a way elements of it can be “robbed”.
    That’s what I get from the original comment when I steelman it, anyway.
    ¹ Sounds like the name of a Rob Zombie associate.
    tripzilch · 1789816441 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not only off-topic, there's also no reason to be so harsh about groups of people, communities, scenes and entire industries you clearly have no idea of, or how they even work.
    The world is bigger than your weird, entitled view.
    You basically just told everyone that the existence of the demoscene "irks" you. And you consider this being "irked" somehow more relevant than these actual communities being torn apart by the existence of LLMs.
    Oh no you called it "unfair gains", unfair according to those rules??
    nradov · 1789740529 · focus · HN ↗
    The majority of code has always been proprietary and never published. But there's also more open source code being published than ever before.
    6510 · 1789742867 · focus · HN ↗
    > a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly
    Stopped publishing anything and stopped creating anything.
    But in all fairness this started long ago. I remember a conversation where I asked someone who read a niche blog every day why he never posted a comment. (the blog had zero comments) If you like what they wrote and have thoughts about it, why not "honor" them with a few words? How is that to much to ask? They clearly just never bothered to but in stead made up all kinds of excuses.
    Imagine having to explain that you can respond if someone talks to you? If there was a culture surely it ended there?
    burningChrome · 1789745056 · focus · HN ↗
    >> In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly,
    A lot of my peers who have been in tech for more than a decade are all doing this. They're effectively backing out of the industry. Their attitude now is they're ready for retirement in their 40's. They're only building and working on side projects and only sharing with people they know, nobody else.
    One thing I'm seeing right now is the amount of institutional and domain knowledge being lost is a on a massive scale. The more startling fact is nobody seems to care - as if vibe coding and LLM's are going to fill this gap.
    rpdillon · 1789746084 · focus · HN ↗
    It's interesting to me that the actual motivations for releasing code open-source were very different than I had assumed for the past ~30 years. I always liked to give stuff away so folks could play with and try stuff. As far as I can tell, the only reason not to still give away code is the desire for credit, which was never all that interesting to me.
    But then again, I haven't devoted my life to developing and releasing a huge open source project used by millions, so perhaps my opinion should be discounted accordingly.
    TeMPOraL · 1789763518 · focus · HN ↗
    No, I don't think your opinion should be discounted. It just turns out that a bulk of open-source movement had ulterior motives, and were actually in this for credit or downstream opportunities, not to actually give things away in a pay-it-forward fashion.
    The reaction to LLMs pretty clearly revealed who was giving things away, and who was indirectly selling them and using "giving away" for unfair advantage.
    tripzilch · 1789817042 · focus · HN ↗
    Wow you're really "irked" by the existence of people writing software for reasons you apparently cannot comprehend, aren't you?
  4. enraged_camel · 1789735878 · focus · HN ↗
    Agreed. Jacques is usually a good poster with insightful comments. This one fell short of that mark. It is suprising.
  5. 907qz-qwt5 · 1789735913 · focus · HN ↗
    > it's still there
    There are many refutations to this fallacy from the Slashdot era, but with AI it is even simpler than with music:
    Clankers are only useful for current events (which most people use them for) by scraping the web and rewording it. This results in direct financial and notoriety losses for the original authors of the websites.
    To use another Slashdot cliche: "But you knew that already."
    bcye · 1789741052 · focus · HN ↗
    > which most people use them for
    Citation needed
  6. anal_reactor · 1789736619 · focus · HN ↗
    AI didn't steal any culture. It just made mediocre culture more accessible. Turns out, most people do like mediocre culture. Previously, public TV channels could at least pretend that people enjoy educational content or classical music. AI exposed that lie. And now we're shocked that the emperor is naked.
  7. MattDaEskimo · 1789737692 · focus · HN ↗
    If we ignore the massive amount of books being destroyed, the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure), the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter, and lastly ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs, I would agree.
    skarz · 1789738004 · focus · HN ↗
    Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster.
    [Edit] Here's an article from 2003 talking about how Random House destroyed up to 25,000 books a day: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephenmoss" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephe...
    lenkite · 1789741722 · focus · HN ↗
    The scale is completely different. It is like comparing an Ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. OpenAI destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. Its like comparing a conflict where people broke their nails to the world wars.
    <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
    rpdillon · 1789742349 · focus · HN ↗
    > They are destroying the foundations of civilization
    No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory".
    If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.
    lenkite · 1789743578 · focus · HN ↗
    Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ?
    Here is what was signed by Judge Alsup at <a href="https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3%3A2024cv05417/434709/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...
    > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals.
    Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web.
    And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
    <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-quest-to-destructively-scan-all-the-worlds-books/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-que...
    rpdillon · 1789747619 · focus · HN ↗
    They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
    But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training.
    When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each.
    So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period.
    This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it.
    Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.
    autoexec · 1789750628 · focus · HN ↗
    > They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
    By your reasoning, if I could afford to buy every surviving painting by Van Gogh and Rembrandt and I burned them in a bon fire I wouldn't be taking anything from human culture and nobody should care at all about what I do with my belongings. Destroying something that is rare or one of a kind and valuable does matter. Doing it so that you can exclusively profit by charging people for regurgitating what was lost back out along with random errors makes it even worse.
    jacquesm · 1789751731 · focus · HN ↗
    More so because their digital copy increases in value because of the destruction.
    rpdillon · 1789753243 · focus · HN ↗
    Only in a world where we can't make new copies, which does not seem to be this world.
    rpdillon · 1789753225 · focus · HN ↗
    In your scenario, the bug is letting someone control all of that in a private collection. But that scenario is completely divorced from what is actually happening, so I don't think it's worth discussing too deeply here.
    If you actually object to the concept that people that own a physical object get to decide how to dispose of it, that would be an interesting discussion to have because it would fly in the face of property ownership rights.
    calf · 1789754237 · focus · HN ↗
    Why such a blinkered argument, I own the soda can I just drank but it is still, arguably, wrong of me to chuck it in the trash instead of the recycle bin. Yes, you have the "right" to dispose of things you own but there's more to what's right than that. There's human decency, consideration, awareness of the environment, the spirit of the laws, cases the laws were not designed for in mind etc.
    Like, tell your mother or HS teacher you decided not to recycle because you own your trash. See how well that clever argument goes.
    8note · 1789762459 · focus · HN ↗
    if the recyclers really think the aluminum in that can is valuable, theyll fush it out if the garbage or the dump to get it.
    putting that sorting and disposal on end customers was a business way of offloading their making single use trash problems on somebody else.
    point any blame for cans in the trash where it belongs - can makers
    8note · 1789762210 · focus · HN ↗
    you should indeed be able to, but maybe buying art shouldn't be allowed at all, with people only being allowed digital recreations.
    why do you need more than a picture of the rembrandt? there's so much good artwork easily available that the rembrandt is only worth money because hoity toity people want to store their money in it and in the future sell it again
    lenkite · 1789760765 · focus · HN ↗
    Many were out of print or were used copies, so they weren't books you could simply order new from a publisher. They are out of print. Anthropic deliberately sourced large quantities through used-book sellers such as Better World Books and World of Books and destroyed the physical copies after scanning them.
    If you find this a "breathless emotional take", then I don't even know what to say. Nothing will meet your criteria in your fawning of corporate destruction.
    tbrownaw · 1789747846 · focus · HN ↗
    > There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
    If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.
    TeMPOraL · 1789738287 · focus · HN ↗
    > the massive amount of books being destroyed
    Surely that's not about AI? Or you mean the small fraction of that that's result of "destructive format shift" process[0], which itself is a consequence of copyright regulation that would otherwise prevent anyone from accessing these works?
    > the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure)
    That's assumed to be AI companies for some reason, even if they have no real incentive to do that, while the usual business underbelly of people scraping web for whatever reasons (which now may include some AI upstart wannabies too, to be fair) is forgotten about. Not helping is people confusing AI agents acting as user-agents and doing one-off fetches with "AI scrappers".
    > the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter
    It was never public, and they started locking down before AI, when both platforms (as well as all other social media platforms) run out of VC subsidsies and realized they need to start monetizing; first step they did was to wage a war on third-party clients and API users. AI came later.
    > ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs
    You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? I can understand that, it's usually much better experience (particularly on sites like StackOverflow - they dug their own grave here, and they know it; there have been memes about this way before LLMs were a thing).
    You're also not considering the amount of questions answered that would not have been asked otherwise. I for one don't ask many questions on-line, so anything I ask LLMs that they solve for me, is a question that would've remained unanswered for me otherwise. Not everyone is gregarious online, many people are more self-reliant and only answer questions, but solve their own problems without asking for help (it's probably not optimal thing to do, but that's another topic).
    --
    [0] - Digitizing and retaining physical copy is clear infringement, digitizing but destroying the physical original can be argued to be fair use.
    watwut · 1789742925 · focus · HN ↗
    > You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online?
    Oh, please, AI is single most hated technology to the level we did not seen before. And that is after staggering propaganda going out of these CEO that hiding behind human agency is beyond lie. It was pushed on us, whether we like it or not, because people with a lot of money are the only ones who matter.
    And people with a lot of money have that weird cult belief in emerging AI god and singularity, so they dont care what they destroy in the process.
    ch4s3 · 1789738359 · focus · HN ↗
    Your talking about a bunch of books that are out of print and sat unsold for years in a warehouse somewhere. The rights holders could print another run tomorrow if they wanted, or better yet digitize them but they don’t. Where’s your ire for the rights holders who sit on these books and don’t do anything with the ?
    lkjdsklf · 1789738964 · focus · HN ↗
    > Where’s your ire for the rights holders who sit on these books and don’t do anything with the ?
    Why would I have ire towards someone for doing what they want with their IP?
    I make things that I don't release or show to anyone all the time. Why would I expect others to be any different?
    shimman · 1789740564 · focus · HN ↗
    "Yes we are destroying books but it's your fault!"
    Can't believe this is the brain trust of the tech world. It really speaks on how poor SF + VC are at US politics.
    [deleted] · 1789741512 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    BeetleB · 1789743347 · focus · HN ↗
    They legally bought the books they are destroying.
    I have every right to burn all the books I possess. And so should they.
    shimman · 1789743876 · focus · HN ↗
    "Shut up, we have the right to destroy cultural artifacts because we have money."
    lol this is even stupider than the previous comment. Yeah golly gee, I wonder why the majority of the American electorate distrust tech companies, tech leaders, and tech workers?
    Y'all need to do some mutual aid and get your humanity back.
    BeetleB · 1789750629 · focus · HN ↗
    They have no more right to destroy cultural artifacts than you do. It's a red herring, as no one has demonstrated a single loss of a cultural artifact. What was destroyed, that satisfies:
    1. You cannot obtain elsewhere
    2. That anyone cares about
    Destroying a copy of a Harry Potter is not a loss of a cultural artifact if I can still buy the book at a store.
    Go ahead and start a campaign: For all who are upset by this, list your physical address, and tell everyone to mail their unwanted books to those on the list instead of destroying them.
    The catch is the recipients are not allowed to destroy them. Then we'll see how much those complaining value culture.
    GuinansEyebrows · 1789743889 · focus · HN ↗
    the argument of some hypothetical "right to burn all the books i possess" is not really the topic of discussion here. it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
    BeetleB · 1789750342 · focus · HN ↗
    > it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
    When you take a pitchfork against all the libraries out there who either refuse donations, or destroy the donated books, then we'll talk.
    As plenty of people have pointed out, no one has shown that anything of value has really been lost. Either the works are still available for you to obtain (i.e. they didn't destroy the last version), or they are things no one wanted.
    prophesi · 1789751077 · focus · HN ↗
    Someone needs to write an updated version of Fahrenheit 451, maybe titled Fahrenheit-451GB-A32.
    BeetleB · 1789751169 · focus · HN ↗
    The version where it's legal to own books...?
    prophesi · 1789752297 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm thinking more of a future where big tech successfully moves the overton window for AI, people gradually rely on getting information from LLM's more than books, then it can follow the regular plotline of 451 with the public voting to ban books.
    ch4s3 · 1789763032 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s their fault they don’t print more of them pr digitize them, yes. The fact is though, most of these books weren’t selling and no one wanted them.
    MattDaEskimo · 1789746002 · focus · HN ↗
    It's the collective action of losing access to information that's the issue, not the potential of the book itself.
    Regardless, these books were available. Researchers, hobbyists - many people have and will find value.
    Justifying the destruction of information for a for-profit company is bizarre.
    rpdillon · 1789746943 · focus · HN ↗
    Destruction of books is normal and totally OK. Publishing houses do it daily in the thousands. When you own something, you can choose how to dispose of it. Come back when you title of actual valuable rare books that were bought and destroyed. The 404 article was not well researched in this regard.
    The emotional reaction we're conditioned to have harkens back to 1940s Germany, where the goal was to have people burn all the copies of existing works. But this is not that. They are going for "one of each book" so they have a comprehensive corpus of works to train from. They are willing to buy books to obtain this corpus. It sounds like the system working exactly as intended, with even the book sellers selling these books saying they are "dead inventory".
    There's a time to be breathless about "destroying all of humanity's knowledge", but let's wait until it's actually happening.
    Again, I'm am very anxious for anyone to come forward with credible information about any valuable/rare/irreplaceable book that was destroyed in this process. So far zero people have been able to do this, probably because they are buying the books in bulk and want to obtain them as cheaply as possible. Book sellers will know the value of an actually rare/valuable books, and would charge accordingly, which would be pointless for e.g. Amazon to pay. They don't need some crazy first edition, they just need some copy to digitize. The incentives just don't add up to "Amazon is buying priceless art and burning it!" the way the narrative suggests.
    ch4s3 · 1789771441 · focus · HN ↗
    The publishers and rights holders still have the text, and the books themselves weren’t being accessed just sitting in a warehouse. This is a trivial problem to solve, digitize them.
    internet101010 · 1789739031 · focus · HN ↗
    Eh, StackOverflow deserved to go.
    BeetleB · 1789743636 · focus · HN ↗
    Most of these things are bad. None of them is robbery, though. Some are of questionable legality, but most are not.
    People need to face reality. The old Internet was fragile and couldn't have lasted long. It was dying slowly due to closed social media and LLMs are accelerating that death.
    I'd rather it die quickly and be replaced by something more robust than decay slowly. I was sick of how it was before LLMs even came among.
  8. cranberryjoe · 1789737973 · focus · HN ↗
    Don’t copy that floppy!
  9. GPerson · 1789738657 · focus · HN ↗
    A distinction without a difference.
  10. lkjdsklf · 1789738708 · focus · HN ↗
    > Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.
    This logic only works if you believe that IP has no value. Which is, of course, utter nonsense.
    Microsoft doesn't believe this. Nor do any of the AI labs. Otherwise, they wouldn't have needed to scrape the data in the first place as it had no value. All of their software (and other products) would be developed in the open as there's no point in protecting the IP.
    They work very hard to protect their own IP so they obviously believe that IP is worth protecting.
    pfortuny · 1789740200 · focus · HN ↗
    Yep: the problem with IP is exactly the "Property". The texts are economically (even if only for leisure) valuable, so the producer deserves a fair comoensation unless he has explicitly dismissed it.
    So paying a price for an intelectual product is reasonable. Nothing to do (per se) with property.
    jacquesm · 1789740910 · focus · HN ↗
    And if attribution is their coin then they should be properly attributed even if they aren't paid.
  11. nickjj · 1789738851 · focus · HN ↗
    > Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.
    It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been.
    I spent 20 years working as a freelancer and 10 years selling tech video courses. I made enough to have a happy life (not a lot but enough to survive), as long as the income kept flowing every month.
    Nowadays I make nothing from a business I've built up for 2 decades because AI took away most traffic to my site which was the entry point to my business. I actually lose money because course sales have been impacted so heavily that I pay more for hosting than I get in sales.
    AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet. Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.
    shevy-java · 1789739012 · focus · HN ↗
    > It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been.
    There actually was theft. See how some big corporations slurped data from Libgen and Anna's Archive. Where did they pay for this?
    See also this article:
    <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/03/meta-has-stolen-books-authors-to-protest-in-london-against-ai-trained-using-shadow-library" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/03/meta-has-stole...
    And similar articles.
    It is theft - there is no denying in that.
    All these companies owe us a ton of money. But Trump protects the AI mafia so we won't get compensation for the damage they cause here.
    shagie · 1789755487 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    avaer · 1789739298 · focus · HN ↗
    > It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been.
    It's literally stolen IP.
    One minus epsilon of the corpus did not give informed consent, or get compensated. The fact that it's laundered doesn't make it any less literally stolen.
    nz · 1789763651 · focus · HN ↗
    Someone once told me, any illegal thing can become legal if you add extra steps. This is not _legally_ true, but it is _practically_ true. Evading a tariff is illegal, until you start using a proxy-country. Firing an employee, and not giving them severance is illegal, until you find a way to make their job so miserable, that they quit on their own. Really, if you can turn signal into _noise_, it becomes difficult and expensive for the enforcement organs to actually enforce their own rules.
    It is unclear to me just what percentage of tech-companies, are in the business of adding extra steps to an illegal process, of turning signal into noise. For example, the vapes made by Juul are a kind of hack around public health laws. The Amazon marketplace shields merchants who sell counterfeit goods. Uber and Lyft bypassed the local laws that applied to taxi services and the medallion system. Airbnb did something similar with the laws governing hotels, and delineating who owns and who rents.
    It is a special kind of disappointment, to be someone who loves technology, and to have to work in the technology industry -- because it appears to be run by people who hate everything that is not money.
    TeMPOraL · 1789766933 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm sad to hear your business model didn't survive the march of technology, but at the same time, this is what's been happening to everyone ultimately. And rightfully, no one is entitled to a business model working in perpetuity.
    I know this is a real harm to individuals, and bringing this up is not some kind of anti-technological thinking (the luddites were OG with that, and I always argue in favor of them - they had a very valid point).
    I also realize that in a few years, I very well may be in the same position here. So will most of us.
    But that's a different argument than GP was making, different one from what I replied to. That was about losing culture, and losing a business model is not losing culture.
    Also I was with you all the way until the last paragraph:
    > AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet.
    AI is doing exactly what users want it to - what I too use it for - it bypasses the spam and scams that stand between the user and the solution to their problem. Good riddance, in this.
    > Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.
    And that is just bullshit. AI is not "taking everyone's content and selling it back to users", and the vendors are definitely not "keeping all of the profits" - on the contrary, they haven't even begun to figure out how to monetize almost any of the value their inference services provide, because they have zero visibility into how much any stream of tokens ends up being worth for their customers. They cannot tell whether the plumbing advice the LLM generated unclogged my toilet, or prevented a restaurant from having to close for the day; they cannot tell if the code their agent wrote won me a beer from a friend, or unblocked $2 000 000 dollar opportunity for my business. They capture none of the value from this either way.
    nickjj · 1789919966 · focus · HN ↗
    > And rightfully, no one is entitled to a business model working in perpetuity.
    I know, I worked very hard for 20 years to build up this business. I easily put in tens of thousands of hours to document, record and open source pretty much everything I learned and experienced in tech for free to help build up an audience.
    It worked great up until AI, then everything went downhill very fast which is solely related to nothing but less traffic coming to my site. I imagine this will affect everyone, not just me.
    > And that is just bullshit
    It's not, whether or not they are profitable isn't important. The takeaway is AI creators consumed all of this content then they turned around and are actively selling that information to other people. This is the only part of the pipeline that matters, whether it's profitable on a balance sheet for them isn't important to everyone who had their content scraped, stolen and sold. The damage is already done at that point to the original content creator.
    To pour even more salt in the wound, the AI creators actively cause content creators to directly lose money on hosting because every time they scrape your site that costs bandwidth. If your hosting provider is metered, then you're paying directly out of pocket.
  12. shevy-java · 1789738950 · focus · HN ↗
    > Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed
    No, theft has been documented already many times. See how Facebook etc... slurped up data from Anna's Archive, Libgen and so forth. And many more examples here. The law classifies this as theft. Even digital theft is theft according to the law. Since corporations have too much money, nothing will happen, but we all see that this is theft. It is not clear why you do not see this.
  13. copemaxxxing · 1789739371 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    cindyllm · 1789740461 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  14. cowanon77 · 1789739565 · focus · HN ↗
    I only see 2 consistent world views: either intellectual property is real, or it is a false concept and all information should be free.
    If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft.
    If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information.
    The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.
    qarl · 1789739809 · focus · HN ↗
    > I only see 2 consistent world views
    Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.
    Instead we should try to find the most practical solution that has the most benefit - which will probably be more complex than yes/no.
    [deleted] · 1789741150 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    palmotea · 1789741444 · focus · HN ↗
    > Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.
    Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do).
    qarl · 1789741791 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, that's why I said property (not just IP) is a social construct.
    palmotea · 1789742024 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, I'm agreeing with you.
    qarl · 1789742480 · focus · HN ↗
    OH. Cool.
    montagg · 1789742186 · focus · HN ↗
    We made it up. We made all this up. We do it for an outcome.
    Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation for more intellectual property. That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely. That’s why IP to rights expire at some point, or have fair use that doesn’t harm the IP rights holder. Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.
    I think AI training falls most likely in the fair use category: there is some societal benefit* that requires no actual harm to the IP holder, therefore it’s a good trade-off for society if we poke a hole in the social construct of property to get that benefit.
    *Let’s put aside the question of whether AI is good for society or private ownership is good for society. Important questions but separate from the theory. IF IT IS GOOD, it follows the above. If it is not good, then of course it does not.
    tenuousemphasis · 1789743695 · focus · HN ↗
    This is going to blow your mind, but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. IP laws are nothing but rent seeking.
    palmotea · 1789744736 · focus · HN ↗
    > This is going to blow your mind
    No. it won't blow anyone's mind. Not a single person.
    > but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed.
    ^^^ cherry-picked, incomplete reading of history.
    joquarky · 1789767567 · focus · HN ↗
    ^^^ unsubstantiated claim.
    intended · 1789747611 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    qarl · 1789750656 · focus · HN ↗
    Those guys painting on a cave wall were part of a secret society?
    ndiddy · 1789744491 · focus · HN ↗
    > Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property.
    The idea of IP as an economic tool to foster creation comes out of the UK and subsequently the US. In mainland Europe, IP comes out of the French Revolution and the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something. This viewpoint has de facto won out because as global commerce and global culture has become more and more widespread, everybody has standardized on the longest durations (the standard has long been "life + 50 years" in Europe) so one country doesn't have to worry about freeing up its works for "exploitation" by another country.
    joquarky · 1789766545 · focus · HN ↗
    > the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something
    Nope. "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts" is the foundational purpose. At least in the US.
    ndiddy · 1789769532 · focus · HN ↗
    Please read the entire sentence you're quoting, then ask yourself if that sentence is referring to the US, or to somewhere else.
    palmotea · 1789745640 · focus · HN ↗
    > That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely.
    All property is fundamentally about exclusion and control to allow for private exploitation. That common bit of rhetoric about copying misses that point. The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied.
    > Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.
    You should note that you misread me: I didn't say they were identical in every respect, I said their "reality" is the same. They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other.
    bit-anarchist · 1790112450 · focus · HN ↗
    > The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied.
    Both things can be true at the same time. Land being economically scarce necessarily means that whatever use is thrusted onto it will produce private exclusion. Today, we give this relationship of private exclusion the name of "property" or "private property", but that doesn't mean you have to formally recognized private ownership in law to suffer its effects - socialists regimes stand as a testament to that. Thus...
    > They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other.
    The first sentence is reductive, while the second is innacurate, if not outright wrong. Physical property is primarily predicated on real scarcity, while intellectual property is purely predicated on social control, which, when analyzed more closely, lays claims (even if partially) of ownership over other resources, including peoples' bodies and mind. It's fair to say that one is more fundamental than the other.
    dnautics · 1789745149 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished
    Hear me out. Property rights exist to assign stewardship and use rights over rivalrous goods. goods where the use of the good precludes the use of that good for its purpose by another party. If you take my bike, I cannot ride it to work. This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons (see the highly successful fisheries rights, NOx and SOx emissions markets as propertization schemes)
    "Intellectual property" (except for trademark if you want to get pedantic), is not rivalrous, and its primary purpose is to be shared, not hoarded. Therefore intellectual property isn't a thing, creating it as a legal construct was a mistake that has hamstrung society for a long time.
    kmeisthax · 1789753114 · focus · HN ↗
    Copies are not rivalrous, but the underlying creativity absolutely is. If I pay someone to draw a picture, that's labor, and they've got a finite number of hours to sell. Except it's also very inconvenient to pay for creative works this way: drawings and artists are not fungible with one another. More importantly, quality and desirability of the work is incredibly variable. The buyer of the art is bearing the risk of the art being bad.
    What copyright lets you do[1] is offload that risk onto a publisher[0]. Instead of having to pay to commission every piece of art, a publisher can do that, and then sell the now-monopolized copies of whatever art turns out to actually be valuable.
    A lot of hay was made during the Piracy Wars over filesharing tools breaking this bargain. A bunch of data hoarders with an interest in sharing media made it possible to just get the shit for free. This created a social dynamic where artists were annoyed about it, but publishers were Fucking Pissed. You could even measure how publisher-brained an artist got by how angry they were over Napster[2].
    AI generated art also breaks this bargain, by making creative labor nearly non-rivalrous. The only cost is electricity and GPUs. This has created nearly the opposite reaction: artists are pissed while publishers don't care, because AI is to publishers like tort reform is to insurance companies. A publisher that gets art for free doesn't care if everyone else has it, because they have the payola dividend: they can push whatever slop they want onto the market and the market will eat it because they're big and powerful.
    > This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons
    The copyright maximalists would argue that free reuse of creative works is a tragedy of the commons. I certainly remember hearing that phrase bandied about a lot during the Piracy Wars.
    It's also important to note that "tragedy of the commons" is not a natural law, but a specific framing that is used to justify antisocial ends. The communal ownership so decried worked perfectly well in England for hundreds of years until the ruling classes found it inconvenient and abolished it. The kind of ecological collapse the tragedy attempts to invoke did not happen because there were already communal means of preventing overuse of the land. In fact, an emissions market is probably closer to communal management than enclosure.
    Also none of this changes the underlying logic that AI companies are trying to enclose the intellectual commons, and that their business model relies on being able to replace human brains with machine intelligence they can rent out by the megatoken.
    [0] Individuals who self-publish included.
    [1] To be clear, copyright was created as a censorship regime, it just happens to be useful for other things.
    [2] In Lars Ulrich's defense, they weren't just angry that Metallica songs were on Napster, they were specifically angry that Napster had their latest album before it was in stores.
    joquarky · 1789768064 · focus · HN ↗
    You have a reasonable take on this.
    > AI companies are trying to enclose the intellectual commons,
    I am curious about this part though, isn't this moot since the technology can't be monopolized due to (basically) the "attention is all you need" paper being published?
    dnautics · 1789858568 · focus · HN ↗
    You're confusing a primary use from a secondary (the right to make money/exchange for labor). In the case of "drawing a picture", being able to "make money from a picture" is not primary
    zdragnar · 1789741497 · focus · HN ↗
    > Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.
    That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. Taking a utilitarian approach here is exactly what the sam altman / effective altruist crowd is doing (or claiming, at least).
    Believe it or not, but there are different philosophies. The US Constitution, for example, is written under the framework that all rights are innate, and the government merely endorses, not grants, those which are described. This framework creates a moral basis to rights, such that things like property are not merely social constructs but moral goods. To violate them is itself an immoral act.
    qarl · 1789741916 · focus · HN ↗
    > That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category.
    AH. Given that framing, then I suppose anything that varies from "these axioms are perfect there can be no others" must fall into the "not real" category.
    But isn't there some debate about the moral axioms themselves? A space that is much more complex than "yes/no"?
    EDIT: I always wonder, when I get two downvotes in the same moment, if someone is cheating. It happens so often.
    EDIT2: And now! 3 upvotes in the same moment. I daresay someone is confessing.
    yndoendo · 1789744459 · focus · HN ↗
    Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy.
    Most people want a clean environment while the current US administration is pulling back environmental regulations to allow for more pollutants. The current US Supreme Court has taken gifts from those that have invested interest in the outcome of their judgements.
    Social axioms are mutable while mathematical axioms are immutable.
    Human trafficking is bad. How many of the wealthy that partook of Epstein's trafficking have been prosecuted? This shows that human trafficking being bad is mutable based on wealth and power.
    qarl · 1789744661 · focus · HN ↗
    > Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy.
    Well... no. I'd say that most of the social constructs I'm thinking of predate wealth. Most likely shaped by evolutionary pressures.
    > mathematical axioms are immutable
    I invite you to Google "the axiom of choice" to see a lively debate.
    zdragnar · 1789745210 · focus · HN ↗
    So long as there have been people, there have been those who had more than others, be it material goods or power, which gains more material goods, which begets power. I'm not really sure there it's true that any society predates wealth, ergo no social construct predates wealth.
    qarl · 1789745593 · focus · HN ↗
    Right. I think I'm thinking of social behaviors that predate humans.
    zdragnar · 1789748632 · focus · HN ↗
    Territory and hunting grounds are a form of wealth, in that it is a form of control over shelter and natural resources like food and water.
    Money is a social construct for trading value, but is not itself a prerequisite for the accumulation of value (wealth).
    qarl · 1789749506 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you missed my point. Let me try again:
    > ergo no social construct predates wealth.
    What about the social behavior of group child rearing?
    zdragnar · 1789759333 · focus · HN ↗
    Easily argued to be a natural, biological instinct, and not a social construct.
    qarl · 1789767303 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, most social contracts do stem from evolved strategies. That was my original point.
    And parenting in humans varies from culture to culture. That's what makes it a social construct.
    pixl97 · 1789746970 · focus · HN ↗
    >ergo no social construct predates wealth.
    How wealthy is your dog?
    zdragnar · 1789748465 · focus · HN ↗
    Compared to feral dogs, quite wealthy indeed. They've claimed sleeping and feeding spots that are very valuable for being both safe and climate controlled, and have a number of chew bones and toys that are free of dangerous splintering wood, animal bone, parasites and fleas. These are things that are valuable enough to fight over and will contribute greatly to their lifespan.
    If you think the only measure of wealth is money, you have it backwards- money is a polite fiction representing an abstraction of value, and is only good for use as an exchange into another more concrete form of value.
    qarl · 1789749398 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you missed his point - that social behaviors exist outside and before human societies.
    zdragnar · 1789760216 · focus · HN ↗
    You've missed the point of my response- wealth, as in the accumulation of value- is not uniquely human. It is born out of the inability to see into the future, gathering resources to survive times of hardship. It is securing the most desirable mates, controlling territory, being the first to get the choicest fruits or bites of prey.
    It is this biological imperative that pushes humans to desire ever more, and only higher order thinking- social behavior, religious discipline, whatever floats your boat- that suppresses those instincts into virtue, altruism or civility.
    So, when I replied to the following:
    > Well... no. I'd say that most of the social constructs I'm thinking of predate wealth. Most likely shaped by evolutionary pressures.
    I'm pointing out that the social constructs were shaped as a reaction to our nature, which includes a intrinsic, if subconscious, understanding of the concept of value and wealth.
    qarl · 1789767607 · focus · HN ↗
    It sounds like you're redefining wealth as evolutionary advantage. That's fine - but it's not what most people mean by the word.
    zdragnar · 1789949252 · focus · HN ↗
    I defined it in the first sentence of the comment you replied to.
    qarl · 1789953108 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, I know. But you're using it as I described.
    yndoendo · 1789763693 · focus · HN ↗
    "The Axioms of choice" is talking about a mutable set of sets that contain immutable axioms.
    The number 4 in a set is immutable, 4 == 4 under all stances, while it can be taken out or added to the selected set. Objective reasoning.
    Example: The OS function that applies IP port assignments. Application may utilize one or more port numbers. When the application is done, they are moved back into the unused set.
    Social axioms are mutable because subjective reasoning is being applied.
    Example:
    Ask a person if they support domestic abuse. They most likely will so no. Ask them if they ever funded a performer that committed acts of domestic abuse after the facts were revealed. There is a high chance they did and write it off by saying, "don't look at their character, look at how well they perform. That was a good show, movie, book, ..."
    Ever hear someone use the phrase, "that is different" when describing two equal scenarios that apply to two different people?
    Kanye West still selling out shows highlights that people are willing to reject objective reasoning in a social environment.
    qarl · 1789767019 · focus · HN ↗
    My point was - mathematicians still argue about whether the axiom of choice is a good idea or not. They probably always will.
    So mathematical axioms are in flux.
    yndoendo · 1789794426 · focus · HN ↗
    Axioms are not in flux, set of axioms are in flux. Axioms are fixed and finite. This is how software works.
    Gödel's incompleteness theorems is built around this. By saying axioms change then one could create an universal math theorem. Since axioms are finite in definition and applied in a finite space, functions, there cannot be an universal math.
    Example: Fibonacci sequence only works with positive integers and zero. It will work with negative integers wrapped in absolute value. The axioms of Fibonacci did not change while wrapped in absolute value. Rational and irrational numbers can work with Fibonacci too by applying another function bound to absolute value.
    qarl · 1789804666 · focus · HN ↗
    > The axioms of Fibonacci...
    Hmmm. I'm afraid we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
    You have a nice day.
    RunSet · 1789748057 · focus · HN ↗
    > Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy.
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg
    yndoendo · 1789762594 · focus · HN ↗
    That is a micro level analysis versus macro. By that logic the current wealth gap should not exist between CEO and average worker in the USA.
    paimapi · 1789746493 · focus · HN ↗
    no, I think people are just annoyed that you're trying to have an irrelevant and kinda cheesy 'is epistemology really real - think about it bro' conversation
    I'm also a fan of nuance and non-black&white thinking but that is quite literally not how the rule of law generally works
    qarl · 1789746643 · focus · HN ↗
    No - I'm specifically calling out that the total changes abruptly. As if someone were using multiple accounts. But I'm sure no one here would ever dare do that, so I should take it back.
    paimapi · 1789746751 · focus · HN ↗
    that's cool - I downvoted you because I was annoyed and I am an independent entity. hope that helps :)
    qarl · 1789747202 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course! My only suggestion is - if you're using multiple accounts to do it - that would be naughty.
    paimapi · 1789752998 · focus · HN ↗
    that seems very anti-social and immature, like throwing a tantrum. you get a singular downvote from me for one comment but I do like how reasonable you're being about all of it :)
    nostrademons · 1789744732 · focus · HN ↗
    Your wording is pretty revealing:
    > This framework creates a moral basis to rights
    The Constitution (and the thinkers that it was based off of) creates a moral basis to rights. At the time the Constitution was written, this was a pretty radical idea. The most prevalent moral framework at the time was the divine right of kings, the idea that the king was ordained by God to rule and anyone who questioned that right was speaking heresy.
    zdragnar · 1789745662 · focus · HN ↗
    My wording was actually wrong, as the constitution recognizes a divine source for the rights, it doesn't create the moral basis. Perhaps 'establishes as the formal basis' would have been more appropriate.
    You're right that it was a relatively radical idea at the time, but not without precedent. The Dutch, Venice and Genoa were republics, the Swiss Confederation was a union of cantons and territories, for example, not to mention the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy, John Locke, Montesquieu, and the assorted Greek and early Roman city states.
    markhahn · 1789748871 · focus · HN ↗
    although the US Constitution does make reference to deities, the copyright section does not. its formalization is entirely pragmatic, utilitarian.
    zdragnar · 1789752695 · focus · HN ↗
    All of the powers granted to the government are through the constitution, and copyright is a form of property right... hence the phrase "intellectual property".
    embedding-shape · 1789754877 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    nz · 1789744838 · focus · HN ↗
    Funny how, when Aaron Swartz did the exact same thing (in a much narrower and more focused way), he was driven to suicide by the US government, but when Sam and Dario do it, people argue about whether (or not) "IP is real".
    Note that society is more about justice than it is about philosophy or logic. Whether you believe that IP makes logical sense or not, is not terribly relevant through the lens of justice. To allow the Altmans and Amodeis of the world to escape the kinds of consequences that Swartz could not (despite having purer intentions than either -- despite being a genuine utilitarian, instead of an aspiring oligarch _pretending_ to be one), would be the height of injustice.
    It would be a grotesque and cruel insult to all the people who remember Swartz, and share his values and optimism about the internet and computers.
    zdragnar · 1789746134 · focus · HN ↗
    The funny thing about having a divine source for rights is also recognizing that humans are fallible and thus inevitably going to be unable to live up to that standard. This argument is the basis for people who want government to have limited powers- the less power it has, the less it can abuse it.
    There's a flip side to this as well- President Lincoln famously suspended habeus corpus unilaterally in violation of the Constitution, outright ignoring a Supreme Court ruling in the process. It became moot when Congress retroactively approved the suspension and allowed it to continue for the remainder of the civil war. Lincoln remains celebrated, despite what could rightfully be argued as blatantly unconstitutional power grabs.
    pixl97 · 1789746909 · focus · HN ↗
    reality > rights
    The use of the term divine at the time was more of an aftereffect of most people having some kind of belief in god and using that as a casus belli to redistribute power. The actual causal reasons seem more technological and more of England spreading themselves too thin. Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights, it's the distribution of power and information that defines the rights you have. The Constitution is simply a piece of paper, not an agent.
    We see this happening again in our modern world. Technology has allowed us to concentrate information like never before. If you believe knowledge (hence processing of information) is power then we've created new power structures that must change society.
    Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information" but the other party can simply disagree and say it's my divine right to. You're at an impasse unless you plan on taking up a path to violence (any and every legal action is implied violence).
    zdragnar · 1789750160 · focus · HN ↗
    > Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights,
    This is a straw man that nobody is arguing.
    > Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information"
    Again, nobody is arguing that "concentrating information" is bad. They're arguing that the expression of ideas in a specific format is a type of property, and that what AI companies are doing is immoral theft. Further, states and the federal government have the means and impetus to prosecute theft according to the powers given them by the Constitution. The only thing that is stopping them from doing so is that the claim that theft has occurred is contested, and the method in question has not been successfully tried in court in the broad.
    joquarky · 1789760135 · focus · HN ↗
    If people don't want their data stolen, then they should make backups. It's pretty trivial these days to set up.
    pixl97 · 1789746152 · focus · HN ↗
    What happened to Swartz was injustice.
    Why would I want it to happen to more people? This is, at least to me, an insane point of view.
    "Oh my god, the police just shot a black man for no reason. To make this fair they should also shoot more white people for no reason". Do you see how absolutely unhinged that sounds?
    jraph · 1789747230 · focus · HN ↗
    The parent comment highlights the double standards, they are not campaigning for pushing people to suicide.
    pixl97 · 1789750791 · focus · HN ↗
    I disagree.
    >To allow the Altmans and Amodeis of the world to escape the kinds of consequences that Swartz could not ... would be the height of injustice.
    Simply put, he's demanding two injustices. Let's break this down with a imaginary law.
    "If you do not wear your hat you will be beheaded. This includes the poorest man and the king himself".
    In OPs definition, this kind of equality is justice. But I do not consider this justice at all, simply equality.
    "If you do not wear your hat you will be fined $1. This includes the poorest man and the king himself".
    This is something much more close to justice as the punishment fits the crime.
    bch · 1789752344 · focus · HN ↗
    > This is something much more close to justice as the punishment fits the crime.
    True, but to put a still finer point on it, still fantastically more harmful to that poorest man than the king.
    jacquesm · 1789753793 · focus · HN ↗
    The real injust is that the poor man does not have a hat. Whereas the king most likely has a whole room dedicated to them.
    pixl97 · 1789753889 · focus · HN ↗
    Again I agree, this is why some countries have scaling fines. If a rich person gets a speeding ticket they still don't execute them.
    bch · 1789756041 · focus · HN ↗
    We're on the same page.
    matheusmoreira · 1789752416 · focus · HN ↗
    There are two injustices here. The first injustice is the sheer existence of this notion of intellectual property. The second injustice stems from the selective application of the associated laws.
    Intellectual property should not exist, but since it does, one can and should expect it to be applied consistently in all cases. Just look at what they did to Kim Dotcom, that's what should happen to Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. Anything less is an insult to previous enforcement victims.
    Inconsistency robs authorities of all credibility. Selective enforcement exposes them for the arbitrary tyrants they are and delegitimizes their decisions.
    irri11 · 1789754623 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you brain dead?
    Intellectual property should exist as if it doesn’t investment activity would not take place.
    You folks are deluded.
    pixl97 · 1789757936 · focus · HN ↗
    "For my friends, everything. For everyone else, the law."
    And
    "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
    joquarky · 1789754987 · focus · HN ↗
    It sounds unhinged because it's a straw man.
    GPerson · 1789791613 · focus · HN ↗
    I usually shit post on this website because it’s full of amoral idiots who just want to make a lot of money and don’t care about others, but I want to suggest to you that arguing using extreme analogies is almost never a persuasive rhetorical device. The other person almost always just sees the way it doesn’t accurately apply to the situation.
    TeMPOraL · 1789761154 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn't want to bring up Aaron Swartz myself first, but now that you did and proved the point I did not want to post first, I nevertheless will:
    It's a cruel and sad irony that people invoke Aaron Swartz to argue opposite worldviews depending on prevailing fashion, making him into some kind of perpetuum mobile in his grave.
    I personally doubt Aaron would be against AI companies doing what they did on the grounds of intellectual property. There's plenty of things to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but this is not it.
    tzs · 1789746788 · focus · HN ↗
    You are assuming that social constructs are not real.
    qarl · 1789747430 · focus · HN ↗
    Not at all.
    LordDragonfang · 1789750787 · focus · HN ↗
    "A social construct" and "not real" are not the same thing. Money, laws, countries, gender, even civilization itself are all social constructs. More importantly, all forms of ownership are social constructs, and that doesn't provide any information as to whether we should respect them or not.
    joquarky · 1789766860 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps you need to look up what "real" actually means.
    Inches aren't real. Laws aren't real. Language isn't even real.
    Have you ever tripped over a line of longitude?
    LordDragonfang · 1789779459 · focus · HN ↗
    > Perhaps you need to look up what "real" actually means.
    On the contrary; I think. Nearly every definition disagrees with the claims you're making. It's not a mere synonym of "concrete" or antonym of "abstract".
    <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/real" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/real
    And regardless, the usage here was clearly in the context of GP's (false) dichotomy between "real" or "false concept", so obviously the definition you're trying to prescribe doesn't apply.
    underlipton · 1789752662 · focus · HN ↗
    Who decides what's a right? By what criteria?
    AlexandrB · 1789745182 · focus · HN ↗
    Property is a social construct in the sense that anything is a social construct. Like, sure, the fact that I "own" this spoon is societally constructed, but it's so foundational that almost every other aspect of human society is more abstract. Even animals have some sense of "property" - whether that's territory they defend or their stash of food. The social construct part is that we respect each other's property rights (mostly) without resorting violence, where animals resort to individual violence or threat displays.
    qarl · 1789748145 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, no, the physical laws aren't social. An apple falls whether there is a social group to see it or not.
    And yes! Animals are a perfect example. Mother Nature came up with a nice strategy for maximal benefit in a social group, and she encoded it in our instincts and intuitions.
    But that doesn't mean it's perfect. I have an instinctual fear of fire - but it's still better to cook my own food.
    newyankee · 1789745910 · focus · HN ↗
    Sovereignty is the ultimate form of property ownership in a funny way.
    kiicia · 1789756246 · focus · HN ↗
    while you mentioned how tribal property management looks like in some places (that things are dynamically moving between who needs them at the time), it does not help to solve issue at hand, that is how to call what ai companies did:
    - amassed then destroyed/denied largest knowledge corpora seen so far
    - poisoned knowledge for decades to come, deliberately or not, which would stop new developments by independent teams
    - now they are crying that they are being robbed of their precious models, which - at this point in time - are neither truly good not economical (not to mention actual environmental and social impact)
    this is truly first of a kind situation, that was never seen nor heard before
    pton_xd · 1789741273 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, this whole "we're being attacked by China, they're distilling our models!" thing is completely and utterly absurd. Insulting, even.
    Either IP exists and should be respected or it doesn't. And if model training is fairly "transformative" of the source work, then so is distilling. As Garry Tan suggested recently, we need to encourage a US distillation regime. Everyone should be free access and transform this information however they see fit.
    RyanHamilton · 1789742789 · focus · HN ↗
    Let me introduce you instead to the one golden rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules.
    twoWhlsGud · 1789745624 · focus · HN ↗
    Let me introduce you to the power of cynicism to normalize corruption...
    AlexandrB · 1789743508 · focus · HN ↗
    IP is obviously not "real" like physical property is real. Moreso, IP is a restriction on free speech as it walls off some expression as "Copyrighted" so you can't legally express it yourself without paying someone for the privilege.
    That's not to say that IP is useless, but treating IP infringement as "stealing" was always a problematic shorthand. Previously, calling IP infingement "stealing" was the domain of corporate interest groups like the RIAA or MPAA, but with AI the winds have turned and supposed anti-corporate lefties are keen to treat IP infringement as theft to attack AI companies. There's very little intellectual consistency on either side of aisle here.
    tenuousemphasis · 1789743764 · focus · HN ↗
    It's actually worse than that. IP laws trump property laws because they prevent you from using your property in ways you would otherwise be able to. It's nothing more than base rent seeking.
    nostrademons · 1789744567 · focus · HN ↗
    There are a wide variety of middle-ground views between them. Copyright law itself is one of them: it provides exceptions for transformative "fair uses", and there are some courts that have ruled that AI is one of them. Another might be Harbinger taxes on IP.
    verelo · 1789745158 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the blend of the two is that value added to any information, such as the first time its distilled or positioned in a certain way, that's IP and should be real.
    When an AI company takes that type of value, and doesnt provide value back to the person who made it, thats theft.
    Information / facts are real and free. But those who helped us get here should choose how to license their work, and an AI company picking it up and re-selling it is clearly unethical.
    joquarky · 1789772536 · focus · HN ↗
    > But those who helped us get here should choose how to license their work
    I can reasonably wrap my head around the idea that an author should be compensated for their work, but where in the social contract does this power to control how that work is used come from?
    It's so destructive and tangles up courts and makes contracts complicated and we lose the original versions of the work because e.g., they have to change a background song due to complicated licensing.
    I can respect protecting copy rights, but it should never be conditional; if you choose to make a work available to the world, you have a legal right to defend the unauthorized copy of it but you should not have a right to say how it gets used.
    It reminds me of manufacturers like John Deer.
    toobulkeh · 1789745416 · focus · HN ↗
    Both can be true. IP is real and they created new IP off of stolen IP.
    lxgr · 1789745506 · focus · HN ↗
    Intellectual property is a legal fiction, not an empirical fact about the universe. It's as real as societies want it to be, and that view can change over time.
    ericmay · 1789745751 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information. It has been this way since civilization as we know it started, I believe.
    If you are freely posting sentences like this was on the internet you are giving away your IP for free. Anyone can read the sentence. If someone can make money off of it then that’s just markets at work. I can’t make money off of what I write here, for example.
    But I also don’t think pirating a movie is theft either. You haven’t proven to me you’ve lost money. Maybe wouldn’t have watched it anyway.
    Fun topic
    simoncion · 1789746264 · focus · HN ↗
    > It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information.
    That's what contracts and licenses [0] are for. Or perhaps you're arguing for a world where the only possible protection is the practice of trade secrets.. that once protected information is made public by any means anyone can do anything they wish with it? If you are, then this quote [1] seems relevant:
    If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft. If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information.
    [0] ...which are contracts in disguise...
    [1] <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448>
    ericmay · 1789767695 · focus · HN ↗
    Those contracts and licenses are just a form of protection enforced by the State. In general once knowledge or information is widely available it's also freely available. Whether someone can further protect the distribution or the usage of that knowledge to some ends is up to them.
    I disagree with both of those premises.
    IP is real, and scraping freely given comments or published material on the Internet and doing something economically useful with it doesn't entitle you to retrospectively go back and decide that you are owed some money. If that were the case you have to prove material damages. How much is my post here worth? one quadrillionth of a cent?
    I think it can become different if, for example, a book was scraped or cataloged but that's primarily because it's likely that you can enforce or make a case within a given legal system to enforce your copyright or IP claims. But what if I read a book and then thought the main idea was my own, or just spoke to someone else about it and they spoke to someone else about it and it winds up in an LLM? There's nothing wrong with that or anything you can do.
    To expose information is to put that information at risk of being used by others. It's up to you to protect that information or enforce claims on it. If Reddit's public site gets scraped and OpenAI does something economically useful with it, well, that's just life. You can't put information out in the public for free and then demand payment later. Reddit comments are freely accessible by the public, yes? Companies are part of the public.
    simoncion · 1789779357 · focus · HN ↗
    > Those contracts and licenses are just a form of protection enforced by the State.
    Yes, that's how property works most anywhere that has stable government. Societies where The State has a monopoly on violence are usually far more stable and pleasant to live in than ones where vigilantism is how correction of injuries is done.
    > Reddit comments are freely accessible by the public, yes?
    In exactly the same way that the books in my local public library are freely accessibly to the public, yes. I'm sure that you're aware there are so many things you can't legally do with books in your local public library. Reddit isn't substantially different... go read the "User Agreement" contract that governs use of the site when you get a free hour or two.
    > To read this post you must pay me $5. Please leave your contact information...
    You can totally prevent me from -among other things- making many sorts of commercial uses of your post, but -as I'm sure you know- the made-up system you're gesturing at not how software licenses have worked for roughly as long as software has been a thing that was commonly licensed.
    Anyway. It sounds like you want a return to "publish nothing, keep everything of worth secret to anyone not in the guild, and do what needs done to people who the guild suspects has betrayed its secrets". Those were the really bad old days, and the awfulness of that system was why the US adopted the patent system back in the late 1700s. It's also part of why it adopted the copyright system [0] as well as limited term lengths (fourteen years, with an option for fourteen more if the work's author was still alive and explicitly requested an extension).
    [0] Though, you had to explicitly register your work with the relevant authorities to get protection... unregistered works received no protection. Things stayed this way for roughly two hundred years, and -IMO- should have stayed that way.
    ericmay · 1789845847 · focus · HN ↗
    > In exactly the same way that the books in my local public library are freely accessibly to the public, yes. I'm sure that you're aware there are so many things you can't legally do with books in your local public library. Reddit isn't substantially different... go read the "User Agreement" contract that governs use of the site when you get a free hour or two.
    I don't think those user agreements are really enforceable or should be enforceable given how the public utilizes them. That's a digression though.
    With respect to your library example, the difference is the author made the big with an intent to sell. There is a market for the book, it has some value as evidenced by the sale of the book. Public Reddit comments have no marketable value on their own. If Reddit doesn't want the public to use them, they must protect them. Potentially via the State, but generally they would have to take some other protective measure.
    > You can totally prevent me from -among other things- making many sorts of commercial uses of your post, but -as I'm sure you know- the made-up system you're gesturing at not how software licenses have worked for roughly as long as software has been a thing that was commonly licensed.
    How things work now or in the past can change. Maybe you're just slow to adopting a new paradigm? I can't prevent you from doing anything with my post unless you go on to make enough money that it is worthwhile. But if you just use it for your own private coffee cup there's nothing I can do nor is there anything the State is interested in doing about it. Similarly you can deconstruct Reddit comments into individual ones and assess the value, but the value is 0. Aggregating those into something useful is economically useful and Reddit doesn't really own the data if they are publishing it for free, the users do, despite what either party says.
    It's similar to how copying != stealing. First you have to prove I'd have bought the movie. Second of all you have to enforce cases where I might accidentally see it I was walking down the street and someone was playing it in their living room. If you can't enforce it, you don't really own it.
    Information economics is difficult because it's a mix of different things.
    newyankee · 1789745863 · focus · HN ↗
    You would not download a car, would you ?
    Hell if a car was downloadable why would I not ? Your capability to make endless profit should be capped somewhere, if indeed it is Profit
    Aurornis · 1789746263 · focus · HN ↗
    > If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft.
    It’s called Derivative Work and it’s a good feature for IP law: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
    You wouldn’t like a world where companies could copyright knowledge and then prevent anyone else from making a derivative of that knowledge.
    Imagine Wikipedia being taken down for sharing knowledge that another company wrote about first. It’s a bad idea.
    EagnaIonat · 1789746811 · focus · HN ↗
    > It’s called Derivative Work
    That would be on what the AI model generates, not what it is trained on.
    The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument. So much so that some companies are not using stolen information to build their models.
    IBM for example indemnifies its models for its customers and has detailed information on where the sources came from to train them.
    Aurornis · 1789747664 · focus · HN ↗
    > The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument
    It has been tried in court several ways already. Remember the lawsuit that forced Anthropic to use physical books? They tried to argue that the books couldn’t be trained on at all. It failed.
    porkshoe · 1789749433 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. That judge misunderstood badly, and made a bad ruling.
    ragequittah · 1789754136 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure I understand this argument. If I go to the library every day for 10 years and learn everything there is to know about subject x I shouldn't be able to sell my skills to the world about it later because I didn't give the creators of the books I read any money?
    Arguably LLM companies could have made large-scale deals with libraries and got the exact same knowledge (much, much more slowly). I wonder if people would have the same issues then? My guess is probably. Goes back to the meme that if libraries were proposed today there's no way they would ever be allowed.
    EagnaIonat · 1789792763 · focus · HN ↗
    > I'm not sure I understand this argument.
    Your analogy is flawed because you are saying the information was free to begin with.
    That analogy works for IBM granite models because the information they trained on is free to use.
    The major LLMs did not do that.
    kiicia · 1789756525 · focus · HN ↗
    it's of wrong scale, you cannot claim derivative work when you literally ingressed sum of knowledge while destroying it in the process so your "competitors" cannot do the same
    ang_cire · 1789747157 · focus · HN ↗
    Objectively, IP exists and is acted upon, so IP is real, obviously, but IMO it is bad, and should not exist.
    People tend to forget that IP was not originally about digital distribution at all (copyright), it was about giving inventors exclusivity periods to profit without competition (patents).
    It was a misguided attempt to stop sometimes literal theft of designs from rival inventors, by tying the design to the person instead of whoever possessed the schematic.
    It's also a regime that in its modern incarnation protects businesses, not artists.
    GuB-42 · 1789749291 · focus · HN ↗
    There are nuances.
    AI scraping for the goal of making a commercial LLM service is different from, say, a commercial file sharing platform.
    The first difference is that LLM training is highly transformative. Let's say your LLM ingests the Harry Potter novels during its training. What you get at the other end is not the Harry Potter novels, it is a LLM that can talk to you about Harry Potter, it is not the same thing, and going from one to the other requires a significant amount of work, very expensive work in this case.
    Not only that but there is no direct competition. People won't stop buying the Harry Potter novels because a LLM trained on it exists. If you want to read the books, you buy the books, you don't ask a LLM about it. A file sharing service on the other hand competes directly against the official channels, if you want to read the books, you can download it from this service instead of buying it on the official channels.
    So, about how free you should be to get these weights from the AI companies. If you just share a 1:1 copy of the weights, that's the "file sharing" situation, not transformative, you took their work, didn't do any of your own. Usually considered unacceptable by IP laws.
    Distillation is a more interesting case, you are using a LLM to train your own, it is transformative work, but you may also be competing directly against the LLM you are distilling. So, in a sense it is worse than scraping, but still, despite how much the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are complaining, it seems to be legal.
    So it is somewhat consistent: 1:1 copy and distribution is not allowed, be it source material or LLM weights, and training is, be it source material or another LLM (as in distillation).
    ndiddy · 1789749329 · focus · HN ↗
    > The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.
    This is how IP has always worked. It has never protected the little guy. Draw a picture and then people start putting it on t-shirts and posters without paying you? Great, you can't do anything about it unless you have enough time and money to hire a lawyer to go after them. Self publish a book and then people start uploading PDFs of it? Better hope your real passion is filing takedown requests instead of writing.
    LordDragonfang · 1789750228 · focus · HN ↗
    And by constructing that false dichotomy, you're failing to see the actual truth, which is that Intellectual Property is just a legal construct to turn ideas into Capital, with the goal of incentivizing its creation.
    Nothing more and nothing less, and all of the normal debates about what should remain Capital and what should be The Commons apply.
    amelius · 1789750534 · focus · HN ↗
    It is basically the P=IP question.
    matheusmoreira · 1789751770 · focus · HN ↗
    IP could be real and LLM training could be considered fair use. IP protects published information, so even abolishing all IP would not help us since the LLM weights are secret.
    Nothing short of a global revolution can fix this. Proprietary LLMs should be illegal. Either we achieve post scarcity within this generation or it's literally over.
    charcircuit · 1789758017 · focus · HN ↗
    Intellectual property rights only protect against certain things. IP can be real while there exists fair use like training AI models.
  15. ChiperSoft · 1789740472 · focus · HN ↗
    > Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen
    Considering its become exceptionally difficult to search for things that used to be easy to find, I have to disagree with you there.
    The web has been polluted with trash, covering up all the original media with messy imitations.
    nradov · 1789740884 · focus · HN ↗
    LLMs have made it easier than ever so search for things. I remember fumbling around with Google, trying different combinations of search terms and never hitting useful results. Now I can give a vague or even partially wrong prompt to an LLM and it sort of magically figures out exactly what I actually want and takes me right there, along with a helpful summary and analysis.
  16. testbjjl · 1789740596 · focus · HN ↗
    Content creators are taking steps to prevent bot from walking away without compensation for their visit as if they’d been stolen from. At least Google, in the beginning sent traffic back that could potentially be monetized by the creator.
    somenameforme · 1789741240 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps some. But I'd wager orders of magnitude more are using LLMs to brainstorm if not outright generate content for them, which they are then reframing as their own creation.
    TeMPOraL · 1789768786 · focus · HN ↗
    > orders of magnitude more are using LLMs to brainstorm if not outright generate content for them, which they are then reframing as their own creation
    I doubt it, those are the same group of people anyway.
    Orders of magnitude more people are using LLMs to brainstorm or generate content for them, which they are then using to solve their own problems and carry on with their life, increasingly solving many more problems for themselves this way, and not publishing any of it.
    The world isn't made of "content creators" flinging crap in hopes of monetizing it. Most people have actual jobs.
  17. Lambdanaut · 1789740862 · focus · HN ↗
    Here's the thing. If any of my work is in their model, then I co-own their model as well as everything it makes.
    I guarantee it's scraped our work.
    So where's our paychecks.
    TeMPOraL · 1789770847 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know, and I don't care. Scaled proportionally to actual contribution, it'll be like $0.000001 / year, and I'm not going to begrudge the AI companies for not paying me a fractional cent, and I'm definitely not going to cry foul and demand stopping progress over that fractional cent they plausibly owe me.
    Not the least because I'm already getting many orders of magnitude more value each day from them providing me inference as a service.
    Lambdanaut · 1789820879 · focus · HN ↗
    I'll gladly take your disowned share.
  18. micromacrofoot · 1789740900 · focus · HN ↗
    It is robbery because you're not paying the person that produced the knowledge, you're paying the person that took the knowledge and put a chatbot interface on it.
    It's different from search engines because you're not even getting the chance to monetize it yourself, you lose the ability to even show some ad for a pittance. Hell you don't even get credited most of the time. Many many people didn't give permission for the data to be ingested and used this way.
    We've come out of decades of copyright infringement takedowns and pirating lawsuits only to end up in a position where people doing similar things as a corporation are making billions of dollars.
  19. [deleted] · 1789740978 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  20. blks · 1789741240 · focus · HN ↗
    We got? We didn’t get anything last time I checked, we are offered to pay rent to access this intelligence, at a discount
    rpdillon · 1789742388 · focus · HN ↗
    Why does everyone ignore open-weight models in these discussions?
    TeMPOraL · 1789768553 · focus · HN ↗
    We have free plans and open-weight models you can host yourself, or pay someone for hosting, or host yourself and sell others to recoup the costs.
    All of these lag SOTA by ~6 months on average, so yes, indeed, the thing you could only pay for half a year ago, is now free for entire world forever, and it only keeps getting better with time.
  21. highspeedbus · 1789741776 · focus · HN ↗
    >it's still there
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
    The past is still there, but our culture, being a live thing, is pretty much being affected by AI. We now have an artificial intelligence in this loop of exchange of ideas. Slopifying everything in its way.
    It's a robbery of our future culture, at least.
    TeMPOraL · 1789766434 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's a robbery of our future culture, at least.
    That is a different argument entirely, though. Not the one GP presented.
    On this, I have no concrete views. Sloppifying is real, and AI is short-circuiting "this loop of exchange of ideas", for sure. On the other hand, we had several precedents on this within last 700 years - the printing press, the radio, and the Internet to name the largest three - and culture turned out fine. Different, but fine. AI feels more than this, though, so I'm not putting that much stock in argument from history here.
  22. palmotea · 1789741902 · focus · HN ↗
    > Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form.
    But there's a real [1] transgression there, and attempting to lawyer it away is disingenuous. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's sort of like if you blocked off the sun, and a farmer complained you stole his land, and then you retort "your land has not been stolen, you still have title and can occupy it." Your actions damaged him. Again, not a perfect analogy, but I think our efforts should go to recognizing the transgression instead of trying to deny it.
    > And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.
    We don't have a society where "we got back" anything, and if you weren't aware, this "intelligence" is definitely getting metered. If anything "we" got undercut, and "our" assets lost a lot of their value, while others will get very rich from that loss. Come back with communism, and then maybe you'll have a point.
    [1] Fuck you, Claude, for making me wince at that.
    bit-anarchist · 1790113742 · focus · HN ↗
    What's the transgression here, though?
    For your example to be trivially valid, the farmer would need to be entitled to the sun, but the sun is not property of aynone as of yet. There might be an argument to this (especially if more context is given), but, in this general case, I find it unlikely.
    Still, even we accept your example as valid, what would be the equivalent to "sunlight"? Labor, maybe? But labor isn't something that is owned nor it's a persistent property of material resources, it's human-derived transformation. It's inconcrete by itself, even more so than light, more akin to work (in the technical physics sense). It just so happens that it "produces" a material outcome.
  23. franczesko · 1789742206 · focus · HN ↗
    Yet IP is processed (without permission, nor payment) and the software benefiting from it has a monthly fee
  24. conartist6 · 1789742838 · focus · HN ↗
    Usually that stance means that you're not one of the people making culture.
    It isn't you that AI communism is stealing from.
  25. philipov · 1789743092 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is the hypocrisy. They scrape, but don't want others to scrape them. If they act like they've been stolen from when they get scraped, that is a confession of guilt to when they did it themselves. They should be punished according to the same rules they wish to impose on others.
    rpdillon · 1789746192 · focus · HN ↗
    I really agree with this critique! It's very hard (without hiding behind ToS) to claim that creating the models was A-OK, but distilling them is some sort of ethical breach or attack.
    TeMPOraL · 1789768461 · focus · HN ↗
    That I can't argue with. "Distillation is theft" is one of the silliest and most hypocritical things uttered in any of the debates surrounding AI.
  26. Betelbuddy · 1789743403 · focus · HN ↗
    >> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there
    This is good, but will not fly in court. Your honor... I only moved the Picasso...it is still there...
  27. AlecSchueler · 1789744652 · focus · HN ↗
    > the culture has not been stolen - it's still there
    It's there in much diminished market, one that has been saturated overnight on a scale previously unfathomable. Their art is still there but it has been used against them to obliterate the playing field.
    > nor are the people involved selling it back in any form.
    Aren't all of these AI companies selling subscription models for people to create derivative art?
    > And let's not forget what we got back for this
    Get back for what, exactly? Didn't you just argue that no theft or sellback has occurred?
  28. augment_me · 1789744696 · focus · HN ↗
    This is true but it gets people who tied their value to outcomes, wealth accumulation, status accumulation upset. The road for this has closed.
  29. jordanb · 1789745276 · focus · HN ↗
    "It's still there" only in a technical sense because it's being buried by the automatic slop machines.
    It used to be that, no matter what you want to do, there's a video on youtube of some guy who knows what he's doing showing you exactly how to do it. It could be, like, compressing a rear disc brake cylinder on a car or matching fiberglass gel coat colors, or carving a statue out of marble.
    Theoretically those videos are still in there somewhere, all 15 years old at this point, but you'll not find them with youtube search instead you'll find a million AI slop videos no matter what you query.
  30. boothby · 1789746122 · focus · HN ↗
    > There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".
    There's a way that many people fear this is true: what you're getting for "free" has some external cost that you aren't taking into account.
    Cost 1. The environment. Tech companies were once significantly interested in efficiency, their carbon footprint, etc. With the advent of LLMs, this was thrown out the window. Concerned people are now thinking about water footprint, heat footprint, noise footprint, and probably more. These things are hard to put a dollar figure on in a short comment, but the sustanability of a liveable climate for the billions living on this planet is literally priceless.
    Cost 2. Employment. We face a significant cull of employability -- graphic artists, programmers, mathematicians, paralegals, and more are rightly fearful for the end of their career. If we're getting intelligence for "free" in 2026 dollars, but we can't get jobs in 2030, will all that content still be affordable in 2035?
    Cost 3. Infinite investor dollars. The AI companies are burning cash at a historically unprecedented rate. This has attracted a lot of attention from traditional investors, like pensions, banks, etc. If all of this ends up in a free product, that doesn't sound like it'll return those investments. And that can crash the economy -- I ask again about real affordability in 2035.
    thewebguyd · 1789746953 · focus · HN ↗
    > Infinite investor dollars
    This has another side effect in that it breaks the power that consumers have in the market to have a say in how resources get allocated, by voting with their wallet.
    The entire AI buildout is non-consensual. Individuals have zero say. We could all refuse to buy AI subscriptions and it would not matter because businesses will still buy, and, investors have decided that we are moving forward with this no matter what, seemingly whether anyone is actually buying or not.
    AI isn't necessarily unique here, but it is one of the biggest new examples of wealth inequality and how society at large are no longer the ones who get to decide how resources are allocated under a capitalist system, especially when the investor dollars behind it amounts to the GDP of a small nation.
    intended · 1789747695 · focus · HN ↗
    And Businesses will buy, because the AI promise is a promise to automate workers away.
    SoftTalker · 1789747792 · focus · HN ↗
    > the sustanability of a liveable climate
    And this is fuel for climate change denial. See? Are the wealthy and powerful people acting like they are concerned about the climate? No. They are doubling down on energy use and consumption. It's all a fraud!
    TeMPOraL · 1789768031 · focus · HN ↗
    The idiocy of those arguments around AI and climate are indeed a fuel for climate change denial, because the only consistent views are that either the AI is not an environmental disaster, or the whole climate change thing must be overblown. The numbers don't add up, but if you're so blind with hatred towards "AI companies" while still desiring to have a remotely consistent worldview, it's seriousness of climate situation that has to go.
    porkshoe · 1789749989 · focus · HN ↗
    Item 2 is the big one. Because not only is AI about to destroy jobs wholesale; it's doing so in an environment that abhors wealth and income redistribution that could blunt the harms.
    TeMPOraL · 1789763894 · focus · HN ↗
    2. and 3. I agree with.
    1. is mostly bullshit that's used by anti-AI crowd to gather further support. Data center companies did not stop caring about footprint, they're still pursuing that for the same reason they did it before: it aligns with overall lowering of costs. AI added an extra incentive to improve efficiency because the demand far outstrips supply of compute.
    For 1., also the general argument stands: yes, these data centers use energy, just like everything else humans do. What matters is the value it provides to people, and in case of AI, it's one of the most objectively useful expenditure of watts on compute (your point 2. notwithstanding).
    boothby · 1789796959 · focus · HN ↗
    I heartily disagree on 1, and you've taken a cheap out on that point. What I said was, the environmental externalities are not in your cost model, and you've said nothing to even acknowledge that. Your point about efficiency is particularly obtuse: efficiency doesn't mean burning less fuel, it means burning fuel faster and getting more compute per Joule.
    I'm not even sure I agree that demand is outstripping compute -- nvidia's circular demand-inflating investment/buildout/loan situation certainly muddies the waters on that, see my point 3.
    TeMPOraL · 1789809820 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm saying that environmental externalities are hugely overblown[0] and to a large extent are part of the cost model. Datacenters are not like the legacy industries, they have to pay for the land and energy they use.
    > Your point about efficiency is particularly obtuse: efficiency doesn't mean burning less fuel, and getting more compute per Joule. Not reducing the overall carbon footprint, but accelerating the burn rate as fast as we can build.
    Efficiency does mean getting more compute per Joule. They are doing that. They are also building out as fast as they can, because both of those address the same problem: demand for compute outstripping supply for it. They can't just pursue the build-out strategy, because hardware production is now supply-constrained too - that's where the "RAMpocalypse" came from.
    Yes, this is a huge build-out, and little to none of that is 100% carbon-neutral, so ecological footprint adds up. But that's normal and expected and a kind of tradeoff humanity has been making forever: building new stuff, be it hospitals or airports or data centers, has an environmental footprint, and we only hope what we get from it is more important to us on the margin, and that we can offset the environmental costs some other way.
    > I'm not even sure I agree that demand is outstripping compute -- nvidia's circular demand-inflating investment/buildout/loan situation certainly muddies the waters on that, see my point 3.
    I'm not talking about financial "demand". I'm talking about real demand, for compute. There's nothing to doubt here, it's pretty clear that all major AI players are constantly running at capacity - it's obvious in the very structure and limits they place on even the highest tiers. Unless you believe half the data centers are just spinning busy-loops and burning energy to inflate stock prices and generate a fake reason to build out more compute capacity - if yes, then I don't know what to tell you.
    --
    [0] - Like the water story, where the reported datacenter usage numbers look big in isolation, but once you relate them to "how much water is there" and "how much is used by other industries", it turns out to be a nothingburger. The only numbers that survive are those showing the story is really about those other industries having a competitor for cheap water now, and having to pay a bit more than they're used to.
    boothby · 1789823751 · focus · HN ↗
    > reported datacenter usage numbers look big in isolation, but once you relate them to "how much water is there" and "how much is used by other industries", it turns out to be a nothingburger.
    Water scarcity is a problem around the world; even my rainy hometown of Vancouver had steep water restrictions this year. The question "how much water is there" is incredibly disingenuous, to the point of feeling like a motte and bailey: yes, the universe, or the earth contains vast oceans of the stuff but datacenters are using drinking water which is quite scarce. Just because "other industries" use a lot of water doesn't make it okay -- I level exactly the same criticism at other industries which waste water at such an egregious degree.
    To be clear: if data centers only charged up a pool of water to use as coolant, that's fine. But when the weather is warm, they run millions of gallons of tapwater down the drain just to cool off. And heat spikes are happening with increasing frequency, severity and duration.
    We as a species need to conserve water and emit less CO₂, full stop. The tech industry doesn't get a pass just because other industries are dirty.
  31. snypher · 1789746999 · focus · HN ↗
    >real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits
    Again with the weasel words. Real people, including individuals? Pretty clear this is written from a pro-business perspective and can be safely dismissed.
    >"robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".
    Well, it is that. Why is it criminal for me to steal a big-business-movie for personal use, but they can just take all my blog posts and sell their deritives to others?
  32. nunez · 1789747708 · focus · HN ↗
    > Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen
    I respectfully request that you get all the way outta here with this take.
    Artists have caught AI generating literally their own work, for free, at scale. There have been tons of articles on this website about the AI hyperscalers slurping up books, copyrighted works, etc through legal and questionable ways. Even TFA says that the NYT suffered absolutely devastating CTR drops.
    If you create a blog post about something super esoteric, it will guaranteed end up in the training sets for every big-lab frontier model within 24 hours (probably less) and probably show up in Google's AI Summaries at around the same time. It's also well-documented that their spiders don't honor robots.txt either and blocking them is basically impossible unless you give Cloudflare protection money (since spiders can super easily solve Anubis hashing challenges).
    If that doesn't sound like theft-as-a-service to you, I don't know what to tell you. All I know is that hosting content ANYWHERE AI labs can get a hold of it is rapidly becoming a fool's errand, and we will all be at a loss for it.
  33. samus · 1789748081 · focus · HN ↗
    Stealing in this case is not about physically removing something from one's possessions, but more about disguising attribution and in many cases also reducing a future income stream.
  34. taurath · 1789748158 · focus · HN ↗
    I have artist friends - asking AI to draw something similar to subjects they've drawn ends up making, line for line, the exact image they created, hallucinated alongside a couple others. They spent decades getting good at their craft. They spent so many years getting paying patrons and customers to commission them.
    You'll never agree but I think you underestimate how many people consider all that the AI companies have done to be the wealthy stealing and selling things back.
    > nor are the people involved selling it back in any form
    I am convinced that the longer one works in AI the less one has any grasp on reality
    > too cheap to meter
    Its the most expensive buildout in human history - you can't just split half the cost. The spending is the only significant growth in the US economy. Unless you think that all the datacenters and all that capex are for training?
    augment_me · 1789748532 · focus · HN ↗
    I have horse & wagon friends - they spent decades understanding the ins and outs of roads, some of them also creatively made up their own routes and roads.
    However ordering a car with Uber through your phone just gets people to the destination faster, cheaper, more comfortably and reliably using those same roads.
    This is theft I made up the route first >:(
    taurath · 1789769235 · focus · HN ↗
    Yknow, I guess you’re right, human creativity really has no place in your world.
  35. antisthenes · 1789748406 · focus · HN ↗
    > Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there
    It's actually not there. See how many websites have now closed doors or ceased to operate because of constantly being hammered and bombarded by robotic scrapers. For others, it made websites that turned a small profit into unsustainable money pits.
    Sure, their content might now be ingested into an LLM training set sitting somewhere on proprietary servers. But the site itself (the origin of truth) now does not exist.
    So no. It actually isn't there. Resting on this falsehood, the rest of your retort makes not much sense.
  36. fwlr · 1789751927 · focus · HN ↗
    reified intelligence on a chip, almost too cheap to meter,
    “Reified intelligence” is stretching the truth. It is certainly closer to intelligence than anything we’ve come up with before, it can certainly match or beat actual intelligence in some domains, but just as certainly it clearly lacks many features and capabilities of intelligence.
    “On a chip” is also stretching the truth. The kinds of models that you might point to in support of “reified intelligence” run on things the size of a desktop computer and cost more than a car, which is way off from the scale that “on a chip” suggests.
    And “almost too cheap to meter” is aggressively false. Users of this service are known to talk incessantly about being metered, it is a daily fact of life for them. Individuals who have free usage for a project commonly report that, had they paid, it would cost five or six figures. Companies have seen enormous bills, some approaching the size of their payroll. And all of this is true for tokens that are dramatically subsidized, by one of the most intense and largest concentrations of capital in history. It is the polar opposite - “almost too expensive to even do, and absolutely must be carefully metered”.
    In summary, let us indeed not forget what we got back for this: extraordinary distortions of reality evenly intermingled with bald-faced lies.
    TeMPOraL · 1789770556 · focus · HN ↗
    > It is certainly closer to intelligence than anything we’ve come up with before, it can certainly match or beat actual intelligence in some domains, but just as certainly it clearly lacks many features and capabilities of intelligence.
    It's not complete or that well-rounded. But it's something that was the domain of speculative science fiction only 5 years ago, and it's rounded enough to be applicable to ~everything to some degree.
    > The kinds of models that you might point to in support of “reified intelligence” run on things the size of a desktop computer and cost more than a car, which is way off from the scale that “on a chip” suggests.
    By "on a chip" I meant more "in silica" than literally on a single chip" - though this actually is* true, but those chips aren't cheap.
    > And “almost too cheap to meter” is aggressively false. Users of this service are known to talk incessantly about being metered, it is a daily fact of life for them.
    You are looking at power users that use LLMs in agentic coding sessions. Most people just run off free tier of ChatGPT, which is free for them. There are equivalent open-weight models at this level, and while hardware to run one for yourself is expensive even for most westerners, the marginal inference cost is literally dirt cheap, which is why you can get that for near-free from smaller inference providers - or pony up some money, rent a bunch of compute with friends, and become an inference provider yourself.
    (It's only a tough market because the major vendors are giving out better models than you can run for ~same or lower price than you can offer. Which either way is too cheap to meter in terms of solving useful problem for real people. Again, developers are a special case of power users, as usual.)
  37. tgv · 1789753001 · focus · HN ↗
    > because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.
    Not problems, laziness. The way I see students and colleagues use it is to get their work done with less effort. That's its selling point. There are not many real problems LLMs address.
    > no one has actually been robbed
    In our society, people get paid for work. If you think society is wrong, fine, but you must state so first. Under common assumptions, all that data has been produced through work, and that work represents value. Taking it for free is therefore theft.
  38. Ydarbleoj · 1789753601 · focus · HN ↗
    > reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West.
    I think this is quite the pollyannaish perspective and very much inline with those that think if you can take, then take and only apologize when caught.
    TeMPOraL · 1789766265 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not a perspective, it's a literal fact.
    We won't get anywhere in these discussion if good chunk of participants cannot admit to the trivially observable facts about the actual objective reality in which they live in.
  39. globular-toast · 1789754730 · focus · HN ↗
    It's become a bit clichéd to say it but I think it's different this time.
    The kind of "piracy" you're talking about wasn't depriving the authors of anything because you could always make the argument you weren't going to pay for it anyway. If, on the other hand, you were making copies and charging people for them, you could definitely say you were depriving the legitimate authors of that revenue. AI companies are very much doing the latter, not the former.
    The other part of it is it's not just copying. Previously, if I decided to make a copy of a work without paying, I'm only copying the work, not the author's whole writing style. Now the AI companies are depriving authors of revenue from works they haven't even made yet.
    If they were able to create a model de novo then they could truly claim it hasn't just been lifted from existing culture.
  40. xingped · 1789755269 · focus · HN ↗
    Every time AI is used it is a theft from artists, programmers, writers, and all creative workers whose work was used to train it without permission or compensation and are now unable to find work or buyers. It is absolutely theft and you're being intentionally disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

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