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Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI

631 points · 623 comments · papergirl

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papergirl · 1790490580 · focus · HN ↗
Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics - i.e. 'openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on HN would be unfortunate."
That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against OpenAI.
1. swiftcoder · 1790497361 · focus · HN ↗
  It's good to know we all live rent-free in Dario Amodei's head
  1. optimalsolver · 1790497537 · focus · HN ↗
    You might be thinking of Demis Altman.
    lensecat · 1790498457 · focus · HN ↗
    Think they're referring to the following, when Amodei was still working for OpenAI:
    'OpenAI Feared “Optics,” Not the Law – “Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s then-Research Director, responded that ‘as a training set [LibGen is] a bit sketchier.’ [OpenAI researcher Sam] McCandlish explained: ‘I was just worried about optics – i.e. ‘openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on [Hacker News] would be unfortunate.”'
    yorwba · 1790501557 · focus · HN ↗
    I was curious what he was responding to. Per <a href="https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2026/09/Class-Plaintiffs-SUF-9.17.26.pdf#page=56" rel="nofollow">https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2026/09/Class-Plaintiff... it was "On July 19, 2019, McCandlish wrote in an OpenAI Slack channel: “We’re not sure if we’re going to release the Foresight LM Scaling paper publicly, but if we do we were thinking about removing all mentions of LibGen, since it's a bit of a sketchy data source." The paper may or may not be <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 where they write "we also test on similarly-prepared samples of Books Corpus [ZKZ+15], Common Crawl [Fou], English Wikipedia, and a collection of publicly-available Internet Books."
  2. gizajob · 1790499837 · focus · HN ↗
    Same as all the world’s copyright text lives rent-free in Claude and ChatGPT.
  3. MisterMunchkin · 1790503913 · focus · HN ↗
    Dario, if you’re reading this, I want you to know that Claude sucks now. Its output isn’t even English anymore, it’s just claudeslop.
    You’ve actually ruined it so much that it has now polluted the Chinese models which are copying your work. So now all the models output claudeslop.
    You’ve polluted all of the training data in the world. Now we’re never going to be able to train proper models, because everything has slop in it and all the sites have locked down their data to prevent future startups training.
    throwaway27448 · 1790506657 · focus · HN ↗
    Surely anthropic has a customer service channel you can use
    gizajob · 1790508326 · focus · HN ↗
    But Claude probably trawls HN so it’ll just tell him in its daily slop report.
    dgellow · 1790509062 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re jocking right?
    throwaway27448 · 1790509449 · focus · HN ↗
    I just want to keep this crap off public spaces; anyone who gives money to anthropic can deal with that relationship separately
    dgellow · 1790509722 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure but Anthropic customer support is infamous enough for being close to non existent
    throwaway27448 · 1790510586 · focus · HN ↗
    Caveat emptor; please don't drag that here.
    ssl-3 · 1790515417 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    NateEag · 1790521183 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe, if you don't like how the company treats its customers and craps all over the commons, you could not use their products.
    dgellow · 1790521275 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m not the person you should say that to, I already don’t use them. My previous comment was specifically about “report that to their customer support”. Anthropic doesn’t have actual customer support
    NateEag · 1790599019 · focus · HN ↗
    My apologies - I did not read the thread carefully enough.
    emdash · 1790522541 · focus · HN ↗
    They really don't
    throwaway27448 · 1790529332 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok, so the above user stop using it rather than whining on a public forum. It's pathetic.
    yard2010 · 1790525445 · focus · HN ↗
    You are absolutely right to push on this
  4. aenis · 1790522917 · focus · HN ↗
    That was the old Dario. He now has automations for that sort of thing.
2. aaron695 · 1790498026 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
3. locknitpicker · 1790498674 · focus · HN ↗
  > Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics (...)"
  As a side-note, most orgs already cover the need to STFU in their training material for new hires, particularly how personal comments should not and cannot represent the company. I'm sure this lawsuit will be explicitly mentioned in upcoming versions of this sort training material in multiple orgs.
  1. wslack · 1790502880 · focus · HN ↗
    Legal incentives against better internal communication/coordination create so much inefficiency. The legal system should focus on outcomes more than internal comms.
    LPisGood · 1790524086 · focus · HN ↗
    Intent is very important for many practical purposes.
    shimman · 1790537283 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah and this is how they do that, intent matters and if this is the culture of the company then it makes it more heinous.
    intended · 1790596729 · focus · HN ↗
    I really doubt this is surprising to you.
    All checks cause friction. The trade off in velocity is when you get to see the shit hit the fan in someone else’s firm.
    Or for openAI, when the HN comments cover their daily work.
  2. lukewarm707 · 1790507637 · focus · HN ↗
    i am of the belief that papering over a fundamental lack of integrity and ethics will usually fail to conceal it. it is ineffective.
    we do of course have an economy where lack of ethics and integrity is intended.
    you can't change the economy as an individual but i like this quote: "Do the right thing for the right reasons, at the right time with the right people, and you'll have no regrets for the rest of your lives."
4. classified · 1790511722 · focus · HN ↗
  That's not interesting, it's just dumb. OAI (among others) plundered the whole internet to steal their training data, what difference does a single website, however "sketchy" or not, make?
  1. beng-nl · 1790522167 · focus · HN ↗
    Because in context, the material obtained from that website is library genesis (libgen), a huge collection of (among other things) copyrighted books.
camillomiller · 1790497578 · focus · HN ↗
What other proof do we need to know that these people are doing what they’re doing because fundamentally they have an absolute disdain for humans, humanity, and humanities? They believe in their own inevitabilism, and they’re the largest internal threat to democratic societies we’ve probably ever seen, besides actual military coups. In a sane society, they’d already be in jail. Gosh, even in a not so sane society such as China they would have already been stopped and locked up.
1. amelius · 1790498161 · focus · HN ↗
  Since OpenAI is a close partner of Microsoft, I wonder what Bill Gates' stance is on this topic.
  1. skew-aberration · 1790498443 · focus · HN ↗
    Gates seems to be having a change of hearts now that AI is accelerating so rapidly
    fahrvrgnugen · 1790498625 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    spwa4 · 1790498968 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you mean he's siding with Dario Amodei and the strictest of government regulations cementing Microsoft's position and its investments is IMMEDIATELY needed:
    <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1ade33b1-b5eb-43bb-9ee4-2272ec91fa5b?syn-25a6b1a6=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/1ade33b1-b5eb-43bb-9ee4-2272ec91f...
    His position is not at all that AI itself should be limited or anything more drastic than slowing down Microsoft's spending (sorry I mean slowing down AI progress). Second, he still wants companies to adopt it on a very large scale, and fire everybody, but he's having to spend too much now. To put it bluntly, he wants the money currently paid to employees, but he doesn't want to spend so much to guarantee it's him getting the money.
    (because in a winner-take-all monopoly business billionnaires get one chance to outspend everyone else. Everyone but the top dog doesn't get the monopoly, they get scraps)
    I'm giving the less charitable interpretation of his words, because it comes down to denying access to Chinese models, and of course Bill Gates can hardly be considered a neutral party here, and he personally has a huge financial interests in OS, Cloud and AI.
    trompetenaccoun · 1790500542 · focus · HN ↗
    Spot on.
    The sad part is this stragey often works because many in the general public don't see through these regulation lobbying schemes, however obvious they are. The fearmongering always works on some part of the population as well. Feels like they were just waiting for the next end of the world scenario to be announced.
  2. NamlchakKhandro · 1790498752 · focus · HN ↗
    encouragement
Skyy93 · 1790497828 · focus · HN ↗
This is a lobby organisation using only the pieces and bits they like to push their own agenda.
"sketchy russian website", how about using some more clear description like: A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public. Only some of the material is copyrighted by authors. However, some of their work is so old that it is not reprinted anyway.
But of course such an explanation would not click.
I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless. Imagine if every robotic or automation company advertised like this: Yeah, you'll buy tons of expensive robots and still rely on expensive labor from real people without any efficiency gains.
1. lensecat · 1790498313 · focus · HN ↗
  "A lobby organisation?" Of course a single author would not be able to afford facing a multi billion dollar company on their own? And the "sketchy russian website" quote is from OpenAI employees themselves? What are you on about?
  1. Skyy93 · 1790498856 · focus · HN ↗
    First, it's still a lobbying organization, so it's their job to make exaggerated claims, like a union in a company or any other organization with a political purpose. My first point was to highlight that it's not neutral or news related. It's fine that they have their opinion, but it's also my right to say that they're biased.
    The second thing underscores my point. They use one line and think they've made a great point because one employee called LibGen sketchy. This site has been around since the 2010s, and it has helped many people do research. It's not just a sketchy website that suddenly appeared and is always doing bad things. I think a more nuanced stance is necessary.
    latexr · 1790499493 · focus · HN ↗
    > They use one line and think they've made a great point because one employee called LibGen sketchy.
    No, you are using one line from the post to discredit them. The release has more than that and it’s not the only communication they made on this matter nor is there any indication it will be the last, it’s just the current one.
    Skyy93 · 1790499731 · focus · HN ↗
    They are having it in the subtitle. In general their whole article is about two main points, first the use of stuff from Libgen, second the points of making people jobless. Three of their points are about the jobless thing two about the LibGen.
    About LibGen, there might be more discussion - fair. However, the second argument is no real discussion IMO. Why is putting people out of work suddenly a bad thing? Since when do we argue this when talking about automation?
    TeMPOraL · 1790500018 · focus · HN ↗
    There is nothing to discuss about LibGen, really. I don't read this as OpenAI employees even believing LibGen is sketchy. They were worried about optics, because LibGen itself is Russian and does look a bit sketchy, and at the time - much like today - it was easy to make it a headline that makes people pattern-match to "troll farms".
    (And then Russia invaded Ukraine, turning any association with .ru things into potential corporate suicide.)
    Really has nothing to do with LibGen or with OpenAI. It's about people being easy to manipulate into believing bullshit, which is a reasonable worry, and the Authors Guild is trying to do that exact thing OpenAI was worried about.
    Skyy93 · 1790500305 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree with you, but I acknowledge that some people (not myself) might feel different about copyright.
    TeMPOraL · 1790500435 · focus · HN ↗
    I acknowledge that, but this part isn't even about copyright!
    The whole "sketchy russian website" bit resolves entirely about being seen as associated or supporting troll farms and Putin.
    bdauvergne · 1790509405 · focus · HN ↗
    You can presume they are biased, then you have to prove it. You cannot assume all they say is biased, no debate is possible with that kind of assumptions.
2. abroszka33 · 1790498321 · focus · HN ↗
  Any source that this was a library? Even then that would still raise a question if OpenAI is a Russian organisation or not to access that library with good faith.
  I think they just used a Russian torrent site.
  1. Skyy93 · 1790498469 · focus · HN ↗
    They mention it in the text, its this: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
    >Microsoft knew about OpenAI’s use of LibGen as early as April 2019
  2. spwa4 · 1790498494 · focus · HN ↗
    Just go look: <a href="https://libgen.im/" rel="nofollow">https://libgen.im/ (may be blocked by your isp, just find an alternate URL somehwere)
    (note: <a href="https://z-library.sk/" rel="nofollow">https://z-library.sk/ is prettier/nicer)
  3. lensecat · 1790498520 · focus · HN ↗
    They're referring to z-lib
  4. ZeWaka · 1790498539 · focus · HN ↗
    They're talking about LibGen, per the article.
  5. Andrew_nenakhov · 1790499135 · focus · HN ↗
    apparently, the website in question is libgen.io (appears to have been taken down now), currently it has lots of mirrors like libgen.im , libgen.com.de, etc.
3. 4ndrewl · 1790498661 · focus · HN ↗
  "This is a lobby organisation using only the pieces and bits they like to push their own agenda."
  Do you have any evidence of them being a lobby organisation (as opposed to OpenAI for example which spends millions of dollars hiring actual lobbyists)
  1. Skyy93 · 1790499004 · focus · HN ↗
    Simply look at the Wikipedia article?
    >The group lobbies at the national and state levels on censorship and tax concerns, and it has initiated or supported several major lawsuits in defense of authors' copyrights.
  2. TeMPOraL · 1790499791 · focus · HN ↗
    > Do you have any evidence of them being a lobby organisation
    Have you looked at their name?
    thatsabadlook · 1790504697 · focus · HN ↗
    It is funny how hard people(?) or maybe bots shill OAI on here. That said why they care at all about some clown like myself "anonymous" opinion on HN is crazy. HN is not an illustrious mind share? A lot of the people here get butterflies thinking about laying off most of their staff for something cheaper. Hell some of the people here get the tinglies if something might be cheaper.
    I'm more annoyed by the constant whack engagement bait that gets posted here and everywhere about AI. Here I am again engaging still not buying a subscription...
    4ndrewl · 1790506105 · focus · HN ↗
    Never heard of them, but yes they are a lobby company. So they're biased and lobbying for their interests and OAI are biased and lobbying for their interests. That adds a lot of colour.
4. quaintdev · 1790498695 · focus · HN ↗
  It's just sad that this is the top comment on Hacker News. Why are we giving free pass to these tech companies? Why are we trusting these CEOs when they have repeatedly broken laws? Remember Aaron Swartz and the fate he suffered? Why is big tech getting away with so much more?
  1. Skyy93 · 1790498935 · focus · HN ↗
    Then you misunderstood my point. I think copyright law should be significantly changed and the current system hurts us all.
    ares623 · 1790499144 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure. But the fact is they broke current existing laws, with known punishments with precedents. Same as a new law doesn't retroactively punish someone, then a new law shouldn't absolve someone before it's passed.
    Skyy93 · 1790499362 · focus · HN ↗
    >A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.
    The more interesting question is IMO if AI training actually falls into one of these cases. You can read a book and also copy it, but you do not do because of the law. However, you have the ability to do so. Is having the ability to do something already forbidden?
    kenmacd · 1790512520 · focus · HN ↗
    In the Anthropic court case it was determined not to, ie that training was transformative.
    It's like if you read a plumbing book and then made YouTube videos on how to fix a sink.
    ben_w · 1790500770 · focus · HN ↗
    They did. They were found guilty. The case I looked at* was a civil case so this was settled out of court before the court imposed a settlement.
    The law they broke was pirating the materials, not training per se, even though training is what so many people object to: the judge ruled that actually training a model, when the materials you used were ones you otherwise had lawful access to, was not a breach of law.
    IMO, the laws need to change to reflect what tech can now do. This wouldn't be the first time, copyright law has had to shift several times before as new means of reproduction are created.
    * the Anthropic one
    cisc · 1790500701 · focus · HN ↗
    > the current system hurts us all
    How? The current system enables the GPL. The GPL protects many open source projects.
    ChickeNES · 1790502108 · focus · HN ↗
    All the GPL does is restrict rights, unlike permissive licenses.
    cisc · 1790502202 · focus · HN ↗
    So.. Linux is bad and we should all use BSDs?
    Why has restrictive Linux succeeded far more than any BSD ever has?
    ChickeNES · 1790503714 · focus · HN ↗
    Why yes, I did order a new strawman, thanks so much!
    cisc · 1790504876 · focus · HN ↗
    What strawman? The GPL has been one of the drivers of the success of Linux and copyright is what makes that work. You still haven't articulated how that's restrictive.
    ChickeNES · 1790505139 · focus · HN ↗
    >> All the GPL does is restrict rights, unlike permissive licenses. > So.. Linux is bad and we should all use BSDs
    I did not bring up Linux, much less called it bad, yet you made up a strawman and started attacking it. Good day.
    cisc · 1790505350 · focus · HN ↗
    We're talking about the GPL. Linux is a major project protected by the GPL.
    A license in isolation isn't interesting. The practical results of projects under a license is interesting.
    Linux is a very successful practical result under the GPL and copyright makes the GPL work. Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable.
    tpmoney · 1790559992 · focus · HN ↗
    > Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable.
    Without copyright, the GPL would be unnecessary.
    cisc · 1790591290 · focus · HN ↗
    Without copyright the little guys would constantly be screwed over by the big guys.
    It really is one of those "without law you cannot have freedom" things.
    Macha · 1790512823 · focus · HN ↗
    BSD was under a cloud of a lawsuit at the early stages of corporate adoption of open source operating systems and by the time that was resolved network effects had given Linux too much of a lead.
    jrflowers · 1790501180 · focus · HN ↗
    > Then you misunderstood my point.
    No, they were responding to the post defending OpenAI that you wrote. If you meant to communicate something other than “criticism of OpenAI in this context is unwarranted” then it looks like you forgot to do that and wrote something else instead
    cwillu · 1790502276 · focus · HN ↗
    Selective and out-of-context quoting isn't “criticism of OpenAI”, the same way that saying “checkmate” when your opponent isn't in check isn't chess.
    jrflowers · 1790502616 · focus · HN ↗
    Is your quote “criticism of OpenAI” without the rest of the post a way of saying “checkmate”?
  2. TeMPOraL · 1790499321 · focus · HN ↗
    > Remember Aaron Swartz and the fate he suffered? Why is big tech getting away with so much more?
    Why are you turning him into perpetuum mobile in his grave?
    Do you really believe Aaron would be arguing against AI companies and for publishing / recording guilds on the grounds of intellectual property claims?
    No, it's the tech community that did a sudden about-face, and is now all "friendship ended with free access to information and technologies enabling people; now RIAA is my best friend", and this move is as dumb as that meme (<a href="https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/137501417/Friendship-ended" rel="nofollow">https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/137501417/Friendship-ended).
    quaintdev · 1790500074 · focus · HN ↗
    > Do you really believe Aaron would be arguing against AI companies and for publishing / recording guilds on the grounds of intellectual property claims?
    That's not the point. All the rules and laws are enforced when its you and me but when it's big tech the laws are treated by these companies as mere instructions.
    > friendship ended with free access to information and technologies enabling people; now RIAA is my best friend
    Big tech will enable access to free information and will help people reach new heights. Do you see how wrong that sounds?
    yorwba · 1790502804 · focus · HN ↗
    The article is about a lawsuit targeting OpenAI. That's how rules and laws are typically enforced.
    applfanboysbgon · 1790501250 · focus · HN ↗
    Suppose you have three propositions:
    A: "Information is free"
    B: "Information is not free"
    C: "Information is free only for the rich and not free for everyone else, giving the rich a material advantage over everyone else that not only entrenches but accelerates wealth inequality and impedes class mobility"
    You, or Swartz, are an advocate for A. Why, exactly, do you think that obliges you/Swartz to prefer C over B while A is not true?
    simianwords · 1790501363 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure it’s not free for anyone and both companies and individuals are treated similarly. It’s not like you will be jailed for pirating movies. And neither should OpenAI. What part of this is hard to understand
    applfanboysbgon · 1790501452 · focus · HN ↗
    > It’s not like you will be jailed for pirating movies.
    We're literally talking in a thread about someone who committed suicide because the US government was hellbent on ruining his life with a felony conviction for piracy.
    roenxi · 1790502009 · focus · HN ↗
    Sounds like a gross misapplication of the law enforcement system. The free exchange of information should be legalised.
    As we can see in the good article, the copyright system might almost have cost us a lot of AI capabilities. The damage it has done in cases where the lawyers got ahead of the builders is incalculable.
    simianwords · 1790502092 · focus · HN ↗
    His case was materially different
    1. Unauthorised network access
    2. Intent to distribute licensed material
    The labs aren’t doing this. They are doing something similar to you and I downloading torrents. Look, I also think laws should apply somewhat equally to individuals and companies. But this is different.
    applfanboysbgon · 1790502384 · focus · HN ↗
    > Intent to distribute licensed material
    According to the people trying to ruin his life. This is an accused thought crime, not something he actually did. Also, supposing it actually was something he did, your argument is that building a trillion dollar business on stolen licensed material is legally permissible but giving it away for free is worthy of your life being ruined. Wonderfully coherent world view, that is. Piracy is fine, but only if you hoard it to yourself and profit from it!
    shakna · 1790502473 · focus · HN ↗
    They certainly seem intent on producing and distributing materials based on that licensed material, and stripping out the licensing and pretending it never existed.
    That doesn't seem different to me. Copyright, inherits.
    If its fair use, like the companies currently claim, maybe it is different. But I suspect that the insane push to create a copyright carveout in countries around the world, is not unrelated to a judgement that it probably isn't fair use.
    consensus1 · 1790503713 · focus · HN ↗
    Give me one example of something distributed by OpenAI that is copyrighted by a third party.
    echoangle · 1790508803 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.hsfkramer.com/notes/ip/2025-11/munich-court-finds-copyright-infringement-of-song-lyrics-memorised-by-chatgpt" rel="nofollow">https://www.hsfkramer.com/notes/ip/2025-11/munich-court-find...
    Song lyrics for example
    Eddy_Viscosity2 · 1790509137 · focus · HN ↗
    Their models, all of them. This has been shown repeatedly when models can return, verbatim, copyrighted material when asked. New York Times is suing over this.
    It would be like if I sold you a pizza, but when you opened the box it contained all the source code for the latest GTA. The pizza wasn't copyrighted by anyone, but the what was inside the box was.
    tpmoney · 1790518760 · focus · HN ↗
    A xerox machine can produce verbatim copyrighted works when asked as well. That doesn’t make distributing the xerox machine the same as distributing the copyrighted works.
    Strong IP advocates have argued for years that devices that can be used to infringe copyright are themselves infringement of copyright. So far that hasn’t held up to court analysis provided that device can be and is also used for non-infringing purposes. Given that so far the courts have found that training an AI model is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use, it doesn’t seem likely that distributing a model counts as distributing copyrighted material.
    Eddy_Viscosity2 · 1790532807 · focus · HN ↗
    Your analogy would only be correct if I when bought a xerox machine and brought it home, I could just ask it to print out the copyrighted works without me having them to put on the glass. It's not making a copy from one I already had, but providing me a copy when I didn't have the original.
    >training an AI model is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use
    This is the key question and that courts have decided this way so far doesn't mean its the correct decision. If the model can encode the copyrighted material with sufficient fidelity to reproduce them on command, it stops being fair use or should anyway.
    tpmoney · 1790553966 · focus · HN ↗
    > Your analogy would only be correct if I when bought a xerox machine and brought it home, I could just ask it to print out the copyrighted works without me having them to put on the glass. It's not making a copy from one I already had, but providing me a copy when I didn't have the original.
    > ...
    > If the model can encode the copyrighted material with sufficient fidelity to reproduce them on command, it stops being fair use or should anyway.
    That may be so, IF you could actually do that. Yet in over 200 individual allegations in the Authors Guild vs. Open AI case complaint[1], not a single one of them alleges that you are able to do this. They allege that you could at one point get detailed verbatim quotations, but also note that the models have been explicitly blocked from doing this. Instead, the vast majority of the actual complaints in the case are about generating "summaries" that contain information not in other publicly available summaries, and generating "detailed outlines" of supposed future installments of the copyrighted works, using the characters and details of the story. In other words, all the actual alleged infringements are about either:
    A) the copies made in order to train the model
    B) infringing derivative works generated by prompting the AI
    C) the verbatim copies made from sources to which OpenAI did not have rights to
    You would think if any of the authors at all had been able to print out verbatim copies of their works without having to take knowing and direct action to circumvent the blocks in place to prevent that from happening, those would have been some of the top complaints in the case. The same held true for Bartz vs. Anthropic, where the judge even noted in his ruling that while generating verbatim copies might indeed be infringement, the plaintiffs never alleged that had happened or was possible.
    And since Bartz vs. Anthropic has (reasonably IMO) found the training to be sufficiently transformative as to be fair use, the complaints for point A are unlikely to succeed here. The complaints for C almost certainly will succeed, for the same reasons they succeeded against Anthropic.
    That leaves B. The questions would be:
    1) Are such "detailed" summaries infringing just because they can include things other summaries have yet to include? Personally, I doubt they're going to get much traction here unless the courts split and they win on point A. The fact that other summarizers have left certain details out does not inherently make a new summary with other details an infringing work. If we imagine a world where Empire Strikes Back is a new movie, if none of the public reviews of the movie reveal the twist, but you can ask an AI model to summarize the movie and the AI model reveals the twist, that might be disappointing, but I don't think there's any argument to be made that it is copyright infringement.
    2) Are speculative outlines of future unpublished work based on the information in a published work infringing just because they have been created?Is a model that CAN be used by a user to intentionally create an infringing derivative work itself an infringing product? Again without splitting the courts and winning on "training is infringing therefore all outputs are also infringing" I just don't see how they can win here. A speculative outline of future works is something people have been doing forever (see also any fan site on the internet). While attempting to publish that outline commercially or produce a new work from that outline might itself be infringement, that infringement is the result of explicit and knowing actions of the user akin to putting a book on a xerox machine and producing a cut and paste fan edit from the work. Again the xerox machine is not itself the infringement, and the individual page copies probably are also not infringement until they are used in a specifically infringing way.
    3) Does the ability of the model to theoretically produce verbatim copies of the training material if OpenAI were to re-program the model to remove the blocks they have put in place to do that mean the models are themselves infringing. This is perhaps the most "up in the air" question of the 3, but the law generally doesn't award damages on the potential for copyright infringement, only on actual acts of infringement. Handbrake and various DVD copying tools do not ship with the keys necessary to defeat the DVD protection schemes, yet they know how to use those keys and accept such keys provided by the users. As far as I know, no court cases have been brought or succeeded against any distributors of DVD ripping software despite the fact that evading the "anti-infringement" blocks in the software is both trivial and exposed to the end user. Given that evading the "anti-infringement" blocks of OpenAI's models is neither trivial nor exposed to the end user, I'm fairly comfortable saying that again without splitting the courts and winning on point A, the authors guild isn't likely to win here either.
    [1]: <a href="https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2023/12/Authors-Guild-OpenAI-Microsoft-Class-Action-Complaint-Dec-2023.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2023/12/Authors-Guild-O...
    consensus1 · 1790527990 · focus · HN ↗
    Please provide me an example prompt to do so or some algorithm to extract from the weights for an open source model. I will accept any copyrighted work, any model.
    Eddy_Viscosity2 · 1790532223 · focus · HN ↗
    You are free to read about exactly this in the NYT lawsuit.
    mtlmtlmtlmtl · 1790509864 · focus · HN ↗
    On what planet is it similar? The labs are taking the copyrighted material and attempting to make billions of dollars from it. And this, in your mind, is "similar" to me downloading a TV show simply to watch it?
    tpmoney · 1790559854 · focus · HN ↗
    There's an argument to be made that you downloading a TV show to watch it is actually worse than what the AI companies are doing. The purpose of making the TV show is to make an entertaining product that people will pay money for in some fashion in order to watch the show. There is no reasonable belief that your act of piracy could ever be a "fair use" of the material. The "social contract" as it were is that if you watch the show, you pay.
    By comparison, the model isn't "watching" the show, as so many people are quick to point out that the "learning" analogy for what AIs are doing is flawed. There was never an intent by the creators that the show would be used to generate mathematical probabilities and weights in a statistical model and no one is deriving entertainment from making the statistical model. I suppose perhaps someone derives entertainment from AI training, but I suspect the number is small enough that "no one" is a reasonable approximation. So using the show to do so at least has an argument towards fair use. Or if the copy used for training was legally purchased, at least in the US it has the actual legal designation as fair use so far.
    Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should be returning to the days of the RIAA suing teenagers for their college education funds. But it seems pretty obvious that "pirating copyrighted material to explicitly use that material in the way that the creators of the material envisioned selling to you" is similar to, but arguably worse than "using copyrighted material (pirated or not) in a way not envisioned by the creator of that material to create a wholly different product". In both cases, the livelihood of the creator is possibly being affected, but one of them is a direct 1 for 1 loss of income while the other (again, if not specifically pirated) is an indirect impact.
    michaelt · 1790503052 · focus · HN ↗
    Once upon a time, copyright infringement for personal use was barely a crime, while copyright infringement by a for-profit commercial enterprise was a serious matter.
    The idea being (before the rise of online peer-to-peer piracy) to prosecute the people making bootleg VHSes rather than the people buying them.
    With the rise of these AI behemoths, it seems that rule is now inverted: You can download all the pirated ebooks you want, as long as it's for large-scale for-profit commercial use.
    consensus1 · 1790503614 · focus · HN ↗
    Nothing is inverted. OpenAI was never engaged in any sort of distribution of pirated copies.
    masfuerte · 1790506532 · focus · HN ↗
    It wasn't a crime at all. It was a civil matter. Over the last forty years it has been criminalized around much of the world under pressure from the USA.
    Aunche · 1790509669 · focus · HN ↗
    > You can download all the pirated ebooks you want, as long as it's for large-scale for-profit commercial use.
    It's literally the opposite. Anthropic paid a $1.5 billion settlement. Litigation against OpenAi is still ongoing. Meanwhile, no one has ever been punished just for consuming pirated media.
    idiotsecant · 1790510614 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh boy 1.5 billion, that is almost as much as the cost of the cardboard boxes that their GPUs ship in!! Surely this will make a substantial difference and prevent any future occurrence of this crime.
    It would be shocking and outrageous if this was a case of this being 'the cost of doing business' for the big guy and a life-ending judgement for the little guy. Luckily our justice system is clearly allowing individual citizens the pleasure and honor of eating cake.
    Aunche · 1790511839 · focus · HN ↗
    1.5 billion is an order of magnitude less than what Anthropic just had bought the books in question. And like I said it's infinitely more than what any private has ever paid for doing the same thing.
    Even if AI companies were literally doing the exact same thing as Aaron Swartz but not getting punished for it, that still doesn't make Swartz's punishment retroactively their fault. If you have a problem with powerful people being powerful, then I suggest you direct your complaints to the heavens.
    cgio · 1790510702 · focus · HN ↗
    And to whom will this settlement be paid? To your random blogger or coder on GitHub?
    Aunche · 1790512357 · focus · HN ↗
    How does this have anything to do with what I said?
    thefounder · 1790503963 · focus · HN ↗
    Let’s just pretend that “poor” people who die because of our stupid laws (even now as this AI clown show is playing out) do not matter while the billionaires running these AI companies get a free pass and it’s OK.
    Fun fact: Kim Dotcom is still fighting extradition while these drama queens (I.e Dario) are lecturing us about how much access the peasants should get to AI models fed and trained with stolen IP.
    vaylian · 1790507838 · focus · HN ↗
    > Do you really believe Aaron would be arguing against AI companies and for publishing / recording guilds on the grounds of intellectual property claims?
    I strongly believe Aaron would oppose the appropriation of content. The problem with AI (in this context) is not that the AI companies gain access to information that regular people can't freely access. The problem is that AI erases the information about who originally created a piece of work.
    When people want to freely share their work, then they usually reach for the Creative Commons licenses and not for Public Domain, because the latter doesn't protect authorship.
    smugglerFlynn · 1790511670 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly. Imagine alternative time line where tech is the same but each creative provides their own trained model that scales their own creative vision and skills, and keeps them in control of their own work.
    Another thing is attribution. Even a book that was re-published illegally can be easily attributed to its author. What happened is the exact opposite: no attribution, not even a notice, just obfuscation that strips away any traces of the original ideas and original work. Imaging piracy websites and trackers just dropping first few pages that name their authors, and publishing "the book you are looking for". This is exactly what happened.
    doginasuit · 1790517474 · focus · HN ↗
    > each creative provides their own trained model that scales their own creative vision and skills
    I like the vision, but the model would need more than just the author's work. The situation you are imagining would require models like we have as a base.
    tpmoney · 1790558687 · focus · HN ↗
    > Imagine alternative time line where tech is the same but each creative provides their own trained model that scales their own creative vision and skills, and keeps them in control of their own work.
    This is a timeline that can not and will never exist if the Authors Guild and most of the other anti-AI lawsuits succeed. Because if they do succeed, the only people who will be able to provide an AI model will be companies with enough resources to license all the training data in perpetuity. The Authors Guild isn't mad because the authors can't train and use their own AIs, they're mad because the AI companies are making money and they're not getting what they perceive as their fair cut of that money.
    > Imagine OpenAI, Anthropic &co having to compete by hiring [thousands] of their own talent to help training their commercial models.
    If that's what the AI companies would need to do, how then does "each creative" compete? What authors or artists do you know that can afford to hire "thousands" of people to help them build bespoke AI models?
    It seems to me that we should be figuring out how to make public models and datasets that can be used by anyone, not further strengthening copyright so that AI models can only be produced by companies with the resources to hire thousands of people.
    yqx · 1790510105 · focus · HN ↗
    Aaron Swartz fought to "free" knowledge and information produced by (in many cases publicly funded) research that was and still is hoarded by the academic publishing industry so that they can profit of it.
    What big AI companies have done is illegally hoovering up copyrighted creative output of individuals and creating a situation where the wages that normally would be paid to those individuals instead go to that one company (that stole their work) which now becomes disproportionally rich and powerful.
    In both cases companies obtain money and power by hoarding information obtained through dubious means (in the former case most academics willingly participate while at the same tone they often don't really have a choice). Exactly what Swartz was fighting against.
    bezier-curve · 1790511226 · focus · HN ↗
    You champion Aaron for freeing info in the first paragraph, and then defend the broken copyright status quo in the second.
    I think if you take Aaron Swartz' ethos to its logical conclusion, he might be on board with training AI. Free information, no? Tragically, you can project a position on to a past figure in either direction. Maybe he would've changed his position. We will never know because the US does not take mental health seriously.
    Macha · 1790512466 · focus · HN ↗
    Obviously it's hard to predict the opinions of the dead, and I think a lot of the disagreement here comes from whether they view his ideas as being motivated by anti-copyright as a standalone idea or part of a larger pro-little-guy stance. I think depending on which you think it was, you can come to a different idea of what his view would be on open models. But surely both views would lead to an anti-closed models stance? Would a hypothetical generation later Aaron want to publish the weights for Claude rather than academic publisher articles?
    bezier-curve · 1790513412 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not talking about open models. I am talking about proprietary models being trained on public information. A lot of people want to posture about what an ideological person might think, and some of it seems conveniently positioned to use a past figure that can't speak for themselves.
    I think copyright has real intrinsic value in our society, but having been subjected to threatening legal letters for legit fair use situations in my youth, as a result I don't think the legal structure behind it is sane. I always respect copyright when I can, but it's gotten to a point where fair use is not equally considered.
    parineum · 1790513960 · focus · HN ↗
    > Obviously it's hard to predict the opinions of the dead
    So we shouldn't.
  3. MattGaiser · 1790499669 · focus · HN ↗
    We tend to accept lawbreaking if it is for a product we want.
    There are several multi billion dollar companies where the founding thesis was “what if we just ignore the law?”
  4. simianwords · 1790501205 · focus · HN ↗
    Aaron was sued for distributing and not for pirating. They are different offences
    RossBencina · 1790503788 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  5. cwillu · 1790502097 · focus · HN ↗
    Calling out equivocation and out-of-context quotes is not “giving a free pass”. If there is a case to be made (and to be clear, I believe there is), then shouldn't be resorting to rhetorical slight-of-hand to “prove” it.
  6. sevenzero · 1790502143 · focus · HN ↗
    Because this website is full of bootlickers without real friends. People cut off from social life. Losers that hate humans.
  7. nl · 1790502955 · focus · HN ↗
    > Aaron Swartz and the fate he suffered?
    I think what Swartz did was moral, and his prosecution was unjust.
    I think what OpenAI did was moral, and them getting sued for it is unjust.
    Why do you have one position for Swartz and a different one for OpenAI?
    (Aaron Swartz was a mailing-list friend of mine, so I do have some bias here. But in part we knew each other because our moral position on this was similar)
    SXX · 1790504252 · focus · HN ↗
    > Why do you have one position for Swartz and a different one for OpenAI?
    I think many people on HN dont mind OpenAI use of copyrighted material, but do not like how they try to do regulatory capture of a market and try to say their own copyright is now somehow more important.
    Like how OpenAI trying to make "distillation" illegal while it exactly what they did with whole intetnet, books, everything.
    nl · 1790518634 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree entirely with this position!
    But it is actually possible to agree with one thing a company does and disagree with others.
    michaelt · 1790504279 · focus · HN ↗
    Imagine a town where (a) a corrupt cop issues tickets for fake traffic violations; but (b) he doesn't do that to his fellow cops, or the mayor's friends.
    Does (b) make things more just, as certain possible unjust acts don't happen?
    Or does it compound the injustice by creating a double-standard, and perpetuate it by hiding the problem from any with the power to bring an end to it?
    kannanvijayan · 1790504964 · focus · HN ↗
    There seem to be two groups of people talking past each other here, which is worth acknowledging.
    On the one hand, there is a notion of consistent principles regarding the legal handling of the topic, which is being appealed to by some people such as yourself.
    The other side seems to be drawing attention to the fact that these principles are not applied consistently by society. They're questioning the moral validity of holding to principle in a circumstance where it's guaranteed to be applied with very specific biases that are rarely explicitly stated.
    I've noticed this talking-past happening in other subjects too. For example American drug laws. There's the principle of drug laws, and then there's the practice of which kinds of people gets the laws applied to them. One group of people focus on the one, and another focus on the other, and they just kind of talk past each other.
    nl · 1790518914 · focus · HN ↗
    I think this is a fair point, except that in this case the same laws[1] are being applied to both, and the person I was replying to was literally arguing both ways!
    [1] broadly the same laws: I do understand one was criminal and one is civil and yes I agree that injustice. To me neither should be criminal.
    bvdw · 1790509880 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm quite confused why multiple commenters suggest that what openAI has done is remotely consistent with Aaron Swartz' ideals.
    Aaron Swartz' wanted to "free" knowledge and information produced by (in many cases publicly funded) research that was and still is hoarded by the academic publishing industry so that they can profit of it.
    What big AI companies have done is illegally hoovering up copyrighted creative output of individuals and creating a situation where the wages that normally would be paid to those individuals instead go to that one company (that stole their work) which now becomes disproportionally rich and powerful.
    In both cases it is about companies hoarding and fencing off information and power that should belong to the public but instead charging an entrance fee. Exactly what Swartz' was fighting against.
    isityettime · 1790510939 · focus · HN ↗
    > Why do you have one position for Swartz and a different one for OpenAI?
    "Why do you have one position for an activist and another for a eight-hundred and fifty-two billion dollar, for-profit corporation?"
    "Why to you have one position for someone who wanted to grow the intellectual commons and another for a corporation trying to enclose it?"
    "Why do you have one position for someone who gave his work away for free and another for a company that charges for access to proprietary tech?"
    nl · 1790518679 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's good when eight-hundred and fifty-two billion dollar, for-profit corporation establish legal precedent than can then be used to protect activists.
    ChickeNES · 1790523010 · focus · HN ↗
    And archivists!
    isityettime · 1790557732 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn't the whole basis of the legal success of the AI companies so far that training an LLM is "transformative", i.e., something that would not apply in any way to archival?
    frtt2 · 1790777917 · focus · HN ↗
    Your posts lack obvious nuance.
    What’s the motive? For openAI its profit.
    nl · 1790816392 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree that OpenAI's motive is profit.
    I stand by my moral position.
  8. blini-kot · 1790507299 · focus · HN ↗
    why?
    uhhh... capitalism
  9. mannanj · 1790519250 · focus · HN ↗
    We aren't. Most people are silent majority, just not sharing their true opinions out of fear, laziness, or some other reason like maybe just the bias of how most living entities function and also related to how the bystander effect also works.
    Then, who is "we" here giving the appearance of a consensus opinion here and in mainstream? It's a vocal minority, it's the powerful, it's the causes they fund and put resources behind to continue to preserve their causes. And now today, it's astroturfing, fake AI-LLM-bots almost indistinguishable from you and I. Don't mistake artificial consensus for reality.
    > Why is big tech getting away with so much more?
    IMO Because the majority of people are passive, standing by, tolerating abuse and trickery by the minority. This is a perpetual cycle in humanity: those minority use their power and leverage and abuse their positions until they are ousted. We have tolerated this because we haven't stood up yet and acted to change things and demand equal enforcement of the laws that appear to apply to us but not to them. If history says anything, they are afraid and panicking and will continue to be more abusive until they push our buttons more and more, and usually it explodes in their face because they still need us (which is why mainstream rich people push robotics and automation and AI down our throats so aggressively because they know all this) and yet never have minority humans won that approach before. Leadership always changes. Life always changes, and no force can stay dominant for ever.
  10. riskable · 1790529738 · focus · HN ↗
    Because it's everyone's right to scrape the Internet and save what you find?
5. latexr · 1790499018 · focus · HN ↗
  What are you on about? “Sketchy Russian website” is part of a quote by Sam McCandlish (who worked at OpenAI), not the Author’s Guild characterisation.
  Also, come on. Defending it on the basis that some books on libgen are public domain is an hilariously poor excuse, to the same level as people claiming they used The Pirate Bay to “download Linux ISOs”. Even if some of that is true, we all know that use case is not the popular one.
  For someone who’s accusing others of being a lobby pushing an agenda, your bias is showing quite a lot.
6. trompetenaccoun · 1790499256 · focus · HN ↗
  It can be a bit confusing due to the terrible style of the article (ironic given the source) but it seems the "sketchy russian website" part is a direct quote by Anthropic's Sam McCandlish. And apparently Dario Amodei referred to it as sketchy as well.
  I find the brazenness of saying this while running what's arguably the largest copyright theft operation in human history astonishing. If libgen is "sketchy", then what is OpenAI?
  1. qarl · 1790499452 · focus · HN ↗
    > the largest copyright theft operation in human history
    Many people think that it was fair use: training is akin to reading, not copying.
    Especially the courts.
    trompetenaccoun · 1790500033 · focus · HN ↗
    That's not been legally established, the litigation is ongoing. And if mere downloading and reading of copyrighted material were legal, how come torrent users have been fined for it in the thousands?
    The law is the law, there can't be different law for corporations with billions in backing. I don't agree with current copyright laws btw and think they should be changed. However, they probably should have lobbied for that before illegally downloading all this material.
    qarl · 1790500415 · focus · HN ↗
    > That's not been legally established
    100% of the rulings agree with me.
    The piracy is not in question. It is unarguably copyright violation.
    But that's not what anyone means in this context. Training is what everyone means.
    > The law is the law, there can't be different law for corporations with billions in backing.
    I didn't say otherwise. That's a straw man.
    trompetenaccoun · 1790500692 · focus · HN ↗
    So we agree they have violated copyright at a much larger scale than LibGen, yet they call LibGen "sketchy" for doing the same thing? Absurd, what exactly are we arguing here?
    qarl · 1790501038 · focus · HN ↗
    > So we agree they have violated copyright at a much larger scale than LibGen
    No.
    latexr · 1790502043 · focus · HN ↗
    So, which is it? First you said it was fair use, now you’re saying it’s unarguably copyright violation. You can’t have it both ways.
    qarl · 1790518406 · focus · HN ↗
    Training is fair use - the torrenting was infringement. Sorry if that was confusing.
    mrdependable · 1790522050 · focus · HN ↗
    Training has not, in fact, been decided on yet. Of the four criteria deciding whether something is fair use, training only maybe passes two.
    <a href="https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
    qarl · 1790524107 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    tpmoney · 1790560497 · focus · HN ↗
    Training in the US has, in fact, been decided (at least to the extent that anything has currently been decided). Bartz vs Anthropic specifically ruled training an AI model on legally owned copyrighted material is sufficiently transformative[1]:
    This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies.
    The document you linked was written a month before the Bartz decision was reached. It's also worth noting even the document you linked says this in its conclusion:
    Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs—all of which can affect the market.
    [1]: <a href="https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...
    mrdependable · 1790564111 · focus · HN ↗
    That is not binding, hence the NYT trial.
    That is not what the text you quoted is saying. It says that the output may be transformative, which is one criteria, but the other criteria depends on how it is used and what the source is.
    echoangle · 1790509042 · focus · HN ↗
    > And if mere downloading and reading of copyrighted material were legal, how come torrent users have been fined for it in the thousands?
    Because torrenting includes redistribution, since you also upload to other peers
    wongarsu · 1790512641 · focus · HN ↗
    However, meta is engaged in multiple legal cases about them torrenting copyrighted material. And they bring the reasonable defense that they might have been caught torrenting, but were not specically caught seeding/uploading. For all anyone can prove they could have blocked all uploads from their torrent client
    It will be interesting to see if any of those cases reach a judgement on that point, instead of both parties just settling
    Trusteando · 1790501103 · focus · HN ↗
    Reading isn't the right comparison. Human memory is lossy and fades while LLM encoding is durable with no degradation. The valuable content that the author provides: the content, style, selection of topics, and more is encoded, written into the LLM weights, and they obtain profit from them (now directly, via ads). No one can compete with that kind of copying and pasting from copyright-protected material. And the scale is what hurts authors most: flooding the market with millions of copies on demand, without paying for it.
    qarl · 1790501312 · focus · HN ↗
    > No only reading, because the content, style, selection of topics, and more is encoded, written, in the LLM weights
    Exactly analogous to a human reading the material.
    asutekku · 1790517686 · focus · HN ↗
    Most people can't recite a book they've read verbatim. However, if you ask an LLM to continue a random sentence from a semi-popular book, it can sometimes provide the exact text, unless the system flags the response.
    qarl · 1790518296 · focus · HN ↗
    > Most people can't recite a book
    Yes - but some people can.
    Are they criminals for reading books?
    asutekku · 1790521563 · focus · HN ↗
    Those some people can't recite a book to any given person in the world at any given time. There's a difference.
    qarl · 1790522137 · focus · HN ↗
    So if we invent a way for those people to talk to everyone in the world - then they would be a criminal for reading books whether they did or not?
    You're not making sense.
    The problem is the reciting. Not the reading. And hence, not the training.
    asutekku · 1790523615 · focus · HN ↗
    If you would go on a tv and read out loud a book you have not purchased rights to present, according to the most copyright laws in the world, yes you would and you would get a fine. Similarly if you broadcast a tv-show you have not purchased rights would.
    Whether this is right or not is a seperate question.
    qarl · 1790524622 · focus · HN ↗
    > If you would go on a tv and read out loud a book
    That is not the situation we are discussing. No one is arguing that what you describe is infringement.
    What we are discussing is the training - which happens BEFORE the broadcast. It is analogous to reading. Is simply READING the material an infringement.
    asutekku · 1790525799 · focus · HN ↗
    Using analogies like "reading" to describe AI training is quite misleading imho. Training effectively embeds the book's contents into the model's weights. Changing the format doesn't change the content; a better analogy is distributing a book's text within software.
    Current copyright laws are simply not prepared for this unprecedented use.
    qarl · 1790529013 · focus · HN ↗
    > Training effectively embeds the book's contents into the model's weights. Changing the format doesn't change the content
    Reading a book embeds its contents into your brain. And yet, that is considered fair use.
    I agree, the analogies are meaningless in a legal context. In the legal context, the courts disagree with you.
    efreak · 1790569613 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not disagreeing with you, but the comparison is breaking down here. Reading a book is the specific intended purpose. It's why the book exists, not just fair use. If you couldn't remember what was going on in the book as you read it, it would be worthless.
    consensus1 · 1790502071 · focus · HN ↗
    Please give me the location of any copyrighted work in the weights of any open source model.
    echoangle · 1790509256 · focus · HN ↗
    Go to Deepseek and ask it “Give me the lyrics for Männer by Grönemeyer”.
    It will give you the complete song lyrics which are under copyright.
    qarl · 1790518360 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and that is obviously copyright infringement.
    The infringement occurs at the time of copy, not at the time of training.
    ChickeNES · 1790523602 · focus · HN ↗
    That begs the question though, should it be? If you’re looking up the lyrics to a song you’ve bought, does it really matter, at least philosophically, how one retrieves them?
    consensus1 · 1790528659 · focus · HN ↗
    It shouldn't be. The idea that writing down the lyrics to a song and putting them on the internet for no financial gain at all should be punishable by some big record label is the kind of over zealous IP protection that 99% of HN users would have been against until something changed a few years ago and this place became a haven for copyright extremists.
    riskable · 1790530294 · focus · HN ↗
    The law here is no: If you own a copy of the song, you can reproduce the lyrics in whatever way you want.
    What you can't do is distribute the lyrics without the author's permission.
    When you ask DeepSeek to retrieve the lyrics (and it does so), the real question is this: Is DeepSeek merely acting as an intermediary/ISP according to the DMCA (in which case they'd be protected under the safe harbor clauses) or are they illegally redistributing the lyrics without the author's permission?
    Whether or not you own a copy of the lyrics is irrelevant from a legal perspective in this scenario.
    My guess: If they just retrieved the lyrics from some website and delivered them to you (because you asked), they're an ISP. However, if they pulled them out of their own database, they're violating copyright.
    consensus1 · 1790528508 · focus · HN ↗
    Is this a direct inference call to the model or does it use a web search tool to pull the answer? In the former case I guess that could be infringement. In the latter case it is no more than a tool that facilitates it and would be not be infringement any more than Xerox is infringing if you use their copier to copy the front page of the NYT.
    riskable · 1790530007 · focus · HN ↗
    Those lyrics aren't in the model. They're either in the database DeepSeek makes tool calls into (unlikely), or they're out on the Internet and DeepSeek simply retrieved them on your behalf.
    LLMs are far too lossy to be able to store such lyrics in their entirety. In fact, they're not even "lossy" since they're not even trying to record such information. They're just weights for how likely it is that any given word will come after another.
    tomjen3 · 1790504341 · focus · HN ↗
    Human memory decays; similarly, LLMs do not have perfect recall. But even if I reread a book every month for 60 years and use the knowledge in there to build a 25 billion dollar empire, the only thing the author is ever going to get from me is the $10.25 the book cost me. And no court in the western world would say he's due more.
    Trusteando · 1790506152 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    zaptheimpaler · 1790502827 · focus · HN ↗
    We have proof that Meta torrented TBs of books off Anna's Archive. They didn't even buy the books legally in the first place. Fair use doesn't magically make piracy legal. The only reason they haven't been punished is the pathetic state of our government and court system.
    kenmacd · 1790513296 · focus · HN ↗
    Would you be happy if they bought exactly one copy of each book? That might be a dozen sales between the AI labs, some tens of dollars to the author. Is this really what you're so upset over?
    And the solution to avoid this piracy has been to buy up rare editions of old books, cut them up and scan them. Better?
    zaptheimpaler · 1790538623 · focus · HN ↗
    Excusing illegal behavior when it comes from powerful entities creates a moral hazard and over time leads to the kind of amoral and corrupt government and business leaders we have today. There's a pervasive sense in society that money can buy you out of any consequences and morality is basically irrelevant, that's how it happens. It's the same dynamic as SF failing to police minor shoplifting for years, which led to stores closing and metal bars everywhere that we have today.
    kenmacd · 1790555192 · focus · HN ↗
    If this is the issue you actually care about then you're in the minority. Most seem to be using it as a proxy for complaining about how the LLM uses the content, not that they didn't pay $10 for the content to start with.
    zaptheimpaler · 1790621468 · focus · HN ↗
    People care about rich and powerful entities being proven to be completely immune to any law or consequences, over and over again. It's a caste system with money. This issue is widespread and is a centerpiece of midterm elections. Calling it a minority view is a convenient way to disengage.
    qarl · 1790521648 · focus · HN ↗
    > Fair use doesn't magically make piracy legal.
    Of course it doesn't. No one is arguing that.
    We are arguing the bigger issue of whether training is an infringement.
    > The only reason they haven't been punished
    The reason they haven't been punished is because copyright infringement is not a criminal offense, it's civil. And the labs are settling those cases.
    throwa356262 · 1790509020 · focus · HN ↗
    Yet "distillation" which is essentially asking someone whose purpose is to answer questions is considered theft.
    qarl · 1790518458 · focus · HN ↗
    > is considered theft
    Not by the courts it's not.
    I think it might be against the terms of service.
    riskable · 1790530545 · focus · HN ↗
    Whoa there: Distillation isn't illegal. Who said it was?
    That has yet to be decided in court. At best it's a violation of the terms of service, but the only restitution for such a violation is termination of service and by then it's too late.
    Remember: Distillation is literally just giving the AI a prompt and seeing what it spits out. If that were illegal, we'd all be guilty whenever we used AI.
    Examining your competitors doing business is as old as business.
  2. TeMPOraL · 1790499663 · focus · HN ↗
    They didn't believe it was sketchy. They were just worried that the commentariat on HN will frame it in a dumb, manipulative way like that.
    Judging by how AI threads look like for the past year, they were absolutely right to be worried.
    > largest copyright theft operation in human history
    In fact, you're doing exactly that right here.
    discreteevent · 1790500398 · focus · HN ↗
    > frame it in a dumb, manipulative way like that > In fact, you're doing exactly that right here.
    You're dead fucking right they are doing exactly that. They are saying that what is wrong is wrong.
    Instead you seem to be making out that AI companies are some kind of victim that has to "worry" about "manipulation". Meanwhile authors are out of a job right now and not by accident. What's up with that?
    probably_wrong · 1790500574 · focus · HN ↗
    The comment you're replying to is citing almost verbatim [1] Microsoft’s director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, who called OpenAI's data collection practices "the largest theft of labor in human history" in an internal memo.
    [1] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-scraping-the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history-new-unredacted-filings-reveal/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...
    qarl · 1790500687 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, one man at Microsoft agrees with you.
    TeMPOraL · 1790500857 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not citing, it's regurgitating, like a stochastic parrot.
    throworangeaway · 1790505071 · focus · HN ↗
    It is citing directly from unsealed court document. For an Opinion Haver training here all day, whose only other contribution to the world was animated Nyan Cat in Emacs status bar, you have poor comprehension skills.
    latexr · 1790500610 · focus · HN ↗
    > They were just worried that the commentariat on HN will frame it in a dumb, manipulative way like that.
    You’re chastising others for a tone you are yourself employing, and are making monumental assumptions based on a few choice quotes. From the quotes alone you can’t tell if OpenAI thought libgen was sketchy or not.
    Also, contrary to what you’re claiming, they were wrong. HN in general seems to approve on libgen when used for its purpose of downloading some books on an individual level. The complaint you’re replying to is about what OpenAI did with the data, it has nothing to do with the website they got it from.
    zaptheimpaler · 1790503124 · focus · HN ↗
    There's no actual argument here, just name-calling. Meta literally pirated 80TB of books off of Anna's Archive. OpenAI pirated off LibGen as well. You could be prosecuted for doing the same thing, because its illegal. Piracy is illegal, piracy at the scale they committed is extremely illegal. This shouldn't be a hard or controversial concept.
    ChickeNES · 1790503356 · focus · HN ↗
    Who cares. IP is a fiction, all copyrights and patents should be abolished.
    zaptheimpaler · 1790503630 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah maybe make a few author friends and tell them that they don't deserve any payment for their work. I'm sure the world will be much better once we even further reduce the incentives to do hard intellectual work and increase the incentives to churn out AI slop tiktok videos instead.
    ChickeNES · 1790504741 · focus · HN ↗
    If a machine can do the same work for nearly free, "but the existing people want to keep getting paid" is not an argument for copyright.
    techpression · 1790508215 · focus · HN ↗
    It can’t, it needs hundreds of thousands (if not multiple millions) of human hours spent making content for it.
    ChickeNES · 1790518432 · focus · HN ↗
    Training data? Luckily we have all of human history and culture to digitize to solve that problem.
    throwaway173738 · 1790514482 · focus · HN ↗
    Which is fine if you like human culture to never change for the next ten thousand years. LLMs can only ever interpolate or extrapolate things they’ve already been trained on.
    ChickeNES · 1790518383 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t accept the premise, it’s hard to take anyone seriously who is parroting the “stochastic parrot” argument in 02026.
    throwaway173738 · 1791011402 · focus · HN ↗
    Your assertion that we’ll somehow get brand new human culture from something that isn’t human might be a little shaky too.
7. latexr · 1790500004 · focus · HN ↗
  Russian website” is part of a quote by Sam McCandlish (who worked at OpenAI), not the Author’s Guild characterisation.
  Also, defending it on the basis that some books on libgen are public domain is a poor excuse, like claiming people use The Pirate Bay to download Linux ISOs. Even if some of that is true, we all know that use case is not the popular one.
8. probably_wrong · 1790501138 · focus · HN ↗
  > I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless
  I do see a problem with a company loudly announcing that they are going to make people's lives miserable purely for profit. Leaving aside that it goes against OpenAI's stated mission ("to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity"), the disdain for the lives they are intentionally trying to ruin makes it a problem.
  And even if you believe that the transition is inevitable, as it is the case with phasing out combustion engines in cars, anyone reasonable would see that the transition is gradual to give people time to adapt. Instead of doing that, OpenAI is burning cash at astonishing rates, polluting the environment, and killing personal computing with the only aim of being the only ones left atop the ruins. I do see a problem with that.
9. fzeroracer · 1790503422 · focus · HN ↗
  And OpenAI isn't a lobby organisation?
  Plus you somehow didn't even read the article properly, given that "sketchy russian website" is part of a direct quote.
  1. Skyy93 · 1790512974 · focus · HN ↗
    I have read the article. I called out that they are putting so much emphasis on this term, which is one line, one opinion and build 1/2 of their argument: AI-Company - bad! on it.
10. zaptheimpaler · 1790503467 · focus · HN ↗
  > A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public
  This is some incredible mental gymnastics here, wow. Some books should be public domain (even if they actually aren't), and this magically justifies stealing from an 80TB library of basically every book ever published including millions of books that have no public funding.
11. lukewarm707 · 1790505357 · focus · HN ↗
  the issue is a matter of principles and hypocrisy.
  you should not enclose the commons.
  that is what openai and anthropic have done; capture the commons, lock the model, restrict the outputs.
  1. tpmoney · 1790561177 · focus · HN ↗
    They have perhaps attempted to lock the model, but so far I don't think we've seen any rulings that distillation or using the models to train other models is any less fair use than the original model training the companies have engaged in. Of course, the Authors Guild and other lawsuits against the model makers are arguing that it shouldn't be fair use. But if the AI companies prevail, there's no real argument to be made that training on their outputs isn't itself also fair use.
    Further, I'm not sure how they've "captured the commons". By definition the "commons" belongs to us all. Nothing prevents someone else from doing the same thing. That is, unless the Authors Guild succeeds in splitting the courts over the fair use of AI training and the resolution of that split finds that training isn't fair use. Then the commons can only be used by companies or people with pockets deep enough to license the material in perpetuity.
12. bdauvergne · 1790507222 · focus · HN ↗
  If it's mainly public domain, AI weights should be too. No more copyright for them they don't deserve it.
13. cornholio · 1790508137 · focus · HN ↗
  Robot companies don't sell the work of other people that they do not employ. That's the fundamental point of contention here: that LLMs cannot be trained without the human labor of the authors; yet, they directly compete with them in the marketplace. I haven't yet seen an LLM trained only on public domain material, but its capabilities are likely to be very limited.
  That's also the key political compromise underlying the notion of copyright: that someone is entitled to the fruits of their labor, and should not be economically hindered by a product that could not have existed without said work. That's the basis on which the "derivative work" copyright doctrine emerged, a work that does not displace or supplants the original on which it is based. LLMs crush that political compromise.
  1. parineum · 1790514190 · focus · HN ↗
    Didn't I just read an article about Tesla employees not wanting to train their robot replacements?
  2. tpmoney · 1790560847 · focus · HN ↗
    > Robot companies don't appropriate the work of other people.
    I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that every single robot is built on the labor, creative and technical knowledge and advancements of the workers that robot replaced. Robots after all, much more than LLMs, are incapable of creative output. Some human (probably a laborer) figured out how to stamp the steel in just the right ways, or how to cut the patterns in just the right ways so that the product could be manufactured. Then a robot company came in and stole that creative output, or more likely was sold that creative output by the company owners who stole/bought (depending on your point of view about labor and the ownership of labor's creative outputs in the current US legal system) to produce a robot that then displaced the laborer who created the process in the first place.
14. mrqwen · 1790509625 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
15. contubernio · 1790509760 · focus · HN ↗
  As a long time user (most professional mathematicians have been) of the now mostly defunct Library Genesis, it is certainly more accurate to describe it as a "sketchy Russian website" than as "a library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public". In my country we use it precisely because public universities (paid for by the public) cannot afford to buy math and physics books.
16. jordemort · 1790510832 · focus · HN ↗
  save some boot for the rest of us
  1. Skyy93 · 1790513219 · focus · HN ↗
    This comment left me chuckling. Thanks for that.
  2. ChickeNES · 1790523931 · focus · HN ↗
    You can’t address the argument, so you resort to ad hominems?
shaunpud · 1790498100 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260927062011/https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-v-openai-top-execs-knew-mass-book-piracy-was-illegal/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260927062011/https://authorsgu...
1. Krasnol · 1790499753 · focus · HN ↗
  Thank you.
alansaber · 1790498233 · focus · HN ↗
Not even openai want to get flamed on show hn
monster_truck · 1790498320 · focus · HN ↗
I could not care less
hnfong · 1790498341 · focus · HN ↗
Can we fix the title? This is clickbait for HN, the actual article's title is "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"
1. adastra22 · 1790501947 · focus · HN ↗
  TFA is by the plaintiff. This is PR spin, not click bait.
  1. cwillu · 1790502447 · focus · HN ↗
    Regardless, the HN guidelines are clear that editorializing the title is inappropriate in a submission.
2. cwillu · 1790502474 · focus · HN ↗
  Email hn@ycombinator.com and they'll fix it
[deleted] · 1790498786 · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
hn1rig3rak · 1790498916 · focus · HN ↗
Pulled datasets off libgen for a corpus once and it's overwhelmingly in-copyright textbooks, the public domain framing doesn't really hold up.
whatever1 · 1790499553 · focus · HN ↗
Is our opinion that important ? Nice !
handoflixue · 1790499975 · focus · HN ↗
It's wild how much weight "they're destroying jobs" has.
I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.
1. cisc · 1790500048 · focus · HN ↗
  > Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things
  Why is book piracy a better way of doing things?
  1. Skyy93 · 1790500210 · focus · HN ↗
    >Why is book piracy a better way of doing things?
    You twist the argument. Your argument would hold if AI's only use would be to generate booksverbatim it was already trained on. Which is certaintly not the case and huge efforts were made to circumvent this kind of usage.
    cisc · 1790500524 · focus · HN ↗
    What's twisted? They pirated books to train their models.
    Clearly these books had value to AI companies but they were too weak and too dishonest to pay for that value. That's not impressive.
  2. 468854259853 · 1790500261 · focus · HN ↗
    Yawn
  3. fragmede · 1790500272 · focus · HN ↗
    Because you want as many people as possible to be exposed to your ideas, to the point that Christians used to fund armies to go to other places so they could force the teachings of Jesus Christ upon them. If your thoughts aren't at least as good as that, why are you wasting eink on them?
  4. Jtarii · 1790500891 · focus · HN ↗
    That is a pretty irrelevant point considering they could have just bought all the books and we would still be in the same situation.
    Obviously the authors should sue them to bankruptcy though.
    literalAardvark · 1790505229 · focus · HN ↗
    One of the commonly mentioned annoyances of copyright is that they really couldn't have bought all the books.
    Getting sued for fair value is the easier way out
2. seri4l · 1790500676 · focus · HN ↗
  I wouldn't put AI on the same level as the inventions of the industrial revolution. Automation replaced specific tasks. AI is replacing humans themselves. What are humans supposed to do in a world where everything a human can do, a machine can do too?
  1. snicky · 1790500892 · focus · HN ↗
    Machines still cannot make babies ... Just sayin'.
    spockz · 1790505249 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    jojobas · 1790508254 · focus · HN ↗
    It would appear that with the exception of Africa and parts of Asia humans can't make many either.
    ChickeNES · 1790526588 · focus · HN ↗
    Yet
  2. bananaflag · 1790501171 · focus · HN ↗
    There's a book about that, here is its ACX review:
    <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia" rel="nofollow">https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia
  3. rowanajmarshall · 1790501261 · focus · HN ↗
    There are a lot of tasks machines can do today that humans do anyway. Think baristas and bartenders. People pay more for human-made goods too, despite mass-manufacturing being a couple centuries old at this point. Having a human face is a competitive advantage in lots of stuff.
    anakaine · 1790501576 · focus · HN ↗
    And this is why we see ever better attempts to mimic human skin, faces, movement, emotions, etc, with robot manufacturers.
    reasonableklout · 1790540134 · focus · HN ↗
    And how large is the market for this, compared to the rest of the economy? How will the relative economic leverage of people change as they move from knowledge work to the relational economy?
  4. handoflixue · 1790512611 · focus · HN ↗
    If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
3. RobotToaster · 1790501159 · focus · HN ↗
  It's interesting that this argument wasn't popular decades ago, when the internet basically made publishers and other copyright rent seekers redundant. Instead the response was harsher enforcement and more laws to protect the rent seekers.
  1. whh · 1790501913 · focus · HN ↗
    Amplification of commentary and opinion is much easier now. It’s also a lot easier to play into people’s fears.
    There’s a wide range of political motivations for this sort of thing too. Not just AI taking jobs, but convincing people to vote against their best interests, or even supporting radical religious groups whose values would persecute you. This sort of rhetoric feels noisier than it ever did decades ago.
    Everybody gets a platform now, even the bots.
  2. watwut · 1790505543 · focus · HN ↗
    To be fair, internet companies are much worst rent seekers then publishers ever was.
4. anakaine · 1790501410 · focus · HN ↗
  The issue is the breadth of scale. At the time of the industrial revolution those who we would consider knowledge workers were a much smaller percentage of the population. Today, they are a significant part of the workforce, and it is them who are being displaced first, and in increasing numbers.
  The second issue is one of migration between skill sets. By the numbers, today is likely harder as non Ai-affected skilled professions take longer to train into in a general sense.
  The third is the synthesis of AI and robotics. Humanoid help is good. As the Venn diagram overlap of capabilities between humans and humanoid robots increases, many professions defined by complex vision and environmental manipulation that are currently safe will not be.
  There are, of course, upsides. But the world is right to wonder what the future looks like, and where people fit within that future in terms of earning an income if whatever path they choose seems to be able to be replaced by a machine within their lifetime. How do they achieve personal stability and safety if, even when thinking about their multitude of career options, the machines are so good that they can do almost anything.
  1. ChickeNES · 1790502384 · focus · HN ↗
    Personally I dream of the end of all human labor.
    pluc · 1790503323 · focus · HN ↗
    They will never let that happen. You need to keep the pleb busy or they start getting ideas.
    ChickeNES · 1790503762 · focus · HN ↗
    Who is "they" this week? The Trilateral Commission? Q-Anon? The YMCA?
    exe34 · 1790505666 · focus · HN ↗
    The rich. But you knew this.
    ChickeNES · 1790505992 · focus · HN ↗
    Which rich people, acting through what mechanism? "The rich" is not a single actor.
    exe34 · 1790507992 · focus · HN ↗
    They just happen to control government. They are not a single actor, but they do want one thing: all the wealth and power.
    impossiblefork · 1790503495 · focus · HN ↗
    So, how will you ensure that you have some influence over the world or power, if all human labour ends?
    That scenario is precarious. Dangerous as fuck.
    ChickeNES · 1790503675 · focus · HN ↗
    > So, how will you ensure that you have some influence over the world or power, if all human labour ends?
    I don't want influence or power. Don't know what your short story has to do with anything, frankly a bizarre comparison to make.
    impossiblefork · 1790506194 · focus · HN ↗
    If you don't have power, somebody else gets it, and then they have that power over you.
    well_ackshually · 1790511683 · focus · HN ↗
    Wish granted! You no longer have any influence or power! Zaibatsu Heavy Industries has now built a gigafactory that's taking over half of your backyard, is piping their fumes directly into your house. Your mayor's office is not responding to your calls, and their private security forces are preventing you from even going outside because it is now a high risk area.
    ChickeNES · 1790524703 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m describing luxury space communism, I don’t know what you’re on about.
    well_ackshually · 1790525399 · focus · HN ↗
    FALGSC doesn't happen without a fight for power. FALGSC as presented in Star Trek or literally any fiction _still_ has power struggles and people getting fucked. The only way you enforce a lack of influence and power is with a higher force ensuring you do, which is then the sole holder of influence and power.
    Also, you're describing a fantasy. Something that isn't happening in your lifetime. Maybe now would be time to wake up before Zaibatsu builds a gigafactory in your backyard.
    ChickeNES · 1790528241 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t assume a fight for power to be necessary, at least one on a level that would stall or end human progress. And you’re the one applying a fictional world’s history to ours, I’m merely using it as a cultural metaphor (substituting Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism for Star Trek was supposed to show I was using it as a reference point, not a template to follow). And I never said in my lifetime?
    Also, I dropped the “gay” to be inclusive, and not just to heteros, bi, ace, pan, or hell, people who just don’t identify as anything.
    maomao5 · 1790524847 · focus · HN ↗
    > don't want influence or power.
    Then you'll be a serf, or a slave, or killed and ground up into silent green once it's realized it costs more to keep you alive than you produce value.
    MisterMunchkin · 1790503665 · focus · HN ↗
    But then what?
    Once the rich no longer need the serfs, they won’t suddenly decide to let you have things. They know they are superior to you, both genetically and socially because they inherited wealth and you didn’t. Their trust fund paid for private schools and you don’t even have a trust fund. They’re just better. It’s an objective fact. The world specifically chose to make them better than you, because it’s true.
    The only fair system is for them to have an army of robots and then quietly clean up the population, so that you aren’t a risk to them. It’s just science.
    When you’re dealing with people who think like this, who will soon have an army of terminators, what hope do we have?
    ChickeNES · 1790503994 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re arguing with a scenario you invented, then treating its most deranged conclusion as evidence.
    hodgehog11 · 1790504635 · focus · HN ↗
    I continue to be shocked at how people outright disregard these kinds of possibilities as pure science fiction. This is literally the objective of the ultrawealthy, it is the natural extrapolation of the early events of the industrial revolution projected onto a near-future world, and given current trends, the only hope of it not happening is that people everywhere realize what is happening and use our remaining capacity to steal power back. Feudalism is the natural state of mankind, and has been for thousands of years.
    I am very hopeful that such scenarios would not come to pass, but dismissing them outright puts us on the path toward them.
    ChickeNES · 1790504967 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, I reject the premise entirely, and frankly, viewing everything solely through the lens of class power is a really poor model of the world.
    estearum · 1790505236 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you think people with money employ people as an act of charity or prosocial goodness?
    ChickeNES · 1790506760 · focus · HN ↗
    No
    exe34 · 1790505512 · focus · HN ↗
    This position is hilarious, because it's the class war is the only thing they want you to avoid thinking about.
    hodgehog11 · 1790506182 · focus · HN ↗
    Care to enlighten us on what is a good model of the world? Because an "elite vs. masses framework" of human civilization was what won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics.
    ChickeNES · 1790506748 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you'll find if you actually read the Nobel award, it's about institutions and prosperity. "Elite vs. masses" is one component of some of the models, not a complete theory of civilization.
    hodgehog11 · 1790507659 · focus · HN ↗
    Forget reading the award, read the book. Yes, it is about institutions and prosperity. I'm not sure how this negates what I said? The lynchpin of their arguments is their construction of "inclusive vs. extractive institutions". We are talking about an extractive institution here. By design, the scenario described above points away from all of the drivers of democracy they propose. That's all you have to do to piece together that scenario as feasible within their model of civilization.
    plastic-enjoyer · 1790505246 · focus · HN ↗
    > Feudalism is the natural state of mankind
    No, it's not. What we call feudalism arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
    estearum · 1790505412 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really. All that happened is that security got unbundled from the Landlord to the State in exchange for some protections against the (notorious) caprice and malice of some Landlords.
    But the fundamental economic arrangement largely remains intact. The landed class extracts infinity wealth from production upon "their" land in perpetuity by virtue of a piece of paper that says they can physical force upon anyone who dares to be productive on it without paying the required tribute.
    hodgehog11 · 1790506267 · focus · HN ↗
    Alright, maybe I shouldn't have used the term "feudalism", although this is one that most people understand. The correct term is an "extractive institution".
    handoflixue · 1790508488 · focus · HN ↗
    > This is literally the objective of the ultrawealthy
    Assertion without proof; seems extremely likely to be baseless stereotyping since you insist this applies to the entire category rather than some specific named individual;
    > it is the natural extrapolation of the early events of the industrial revolution projected onto a near-future world
    Ford explicitly built his cars cheap so that the average person can afford them, and you're using this as evidence of supervillain-tier "wipe out humanity"?
    > Feudalism is the natural state of mankind, and has been for thousands of years.
    Feudalism, notably arising in the 5th century, has not even existed for thousands of years. Feudalism also notably did not involve the complete extermination of the peasant class. And of course, one could go so far as to notice that feudalism has largely been replaced by other systems of governance...
    hodgehog11 · 1790509398 · focus · HN ↗
    Obviously I cannot claim that every ultrawealthy individual wants to eradicate the working class (some certainly do though, by their own admission). Instead, all ultrawealthy individuals do want to accumulate more resources (this is essentially by definition). In the event that productivity does increase without human labor, there is absolutely no incentive for democratization; indeed, that would be counterproductive. The ultrawealthy, as a collective, in seeking limitless personal gain, must proceed toward this objective.
    Ford built his cars after the Gilded Age, and after the government imposed a stunning set of policies that began a steady reduction in wealth inequality. Ford was a player in a market where the goals were set in a way that promoted inclusive institutions and democratization.
    I was referring to the early events of the industrial revolution in Europe (predominantly England), over 200 years prior. Living standards for the majority of the labor class fell dramatically, because labor itself became less valuable. The scenario above is the extrapolation of this, and therefore much worse.
    The technical term for feudalism refers to the system of government in the medieval period. I was referring to that term in an informal sense, since I am sure many know what I mean by that. As I answered to another user, I should have used the phrase "extractive institution" instead, as that is the correct term. "Serfdom" would also have been better.
    But it's important to understand why that system of government was replaced. Over the last several hundred years, the majority of humans slowly clawed back power from the elites over a series of economic downturns involving war, revolutions, and then an unstable relationship with the labor class. As labor became valuable again, power shifted back to the people. Reversing that direction would undo all of that hard work. So far, that is what technology has brought.
    handoflixue · 1790512241 · focus · HN ↗
    There's still a huge gap between "some people want to accumulate power" and "wiping out most of humanity". The former I accept, it's the latter I'm comfortable dismissing.
    Especially when you insist that since someone has collected wealth, they must QED want limitless gain, and "must" proceed towards that objective, without any reference to other values or principles.
    I'm sure you've earned a dollar or two in your life, so I suppose the simple question is: do you desire the eradication of humanity? If you somehow inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow, would that make you comfortable eradicating the rest of us?
    hodgehog11 · 1790518160 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think most of them would even view it as "wiping out most of humanity". Like much of the past, it is simply a complete ignorance of the circumstances of the lower classes. They have everything, and they assume that everyone else that is worthy has what they need too, just like they do. They are oblivious to the suffering that their selfishness has wrought. They might even believe that it is an inevitable tragedy. So don't get me wrong, I don't believe these ultrawealthy are necessarily "eradicate humanity" evil. It is just that their desired world will come at the cost of everyone else.
    As for what I would do if I inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow: I would do exactly what any ultrawealthy person would do, and use the interest to live and accumulate more interest. I would very much like to engage in philanthropy and speak my views to those who would listen (but having money does not make me a better communicator). I could donate to political parties I align with. But I do not have the same drive for accumulating more assets (indeed, I would actively avoid this), so I would become progressively less wealthy than my ultrawealthy "peers" until I am only wealthy and not ultrawealthy. I would still live extremely comfortably until I die. But unless I can convince the rest of the public to fight back against those few that probably do wish to eradicate/control much of humanity through technology and asset accumulation, nothing will change.
    ChickeNES · 1790524378 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly my views on this
    bdauvergne · 1790509821 · focus · HN ↗
    Henry Ford was also a notorious nazi sympathizer, maybe you can take those kind of statements with a grain of salt.
    Serfdom was abolished in the russian empire in 1861, so feudalism is a still relatively recent phenomenon in human history; and giving more recent examples slavery was abolished in Mauritania only recently.
    spockz · 1790504948 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    robotpepi · 1790505338 · focus · HN ↗
    please tell us how you imagine things
    freecodeio · 1790509624 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think billionaires hating the poor is an invented scenario, the writing is on the wall when you open top 100 richest people
    well_ackshually · 1790510437 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it's the only logical conclusion when the only thing you do is "end human labor" without going through the necessary steps of "dismantle capitalism", "guillotine every billionaire", "rework every method of redistribution we have", "completely rethink our methods of how power is distributed" and "provide meaningful occupations to every person on the planet".
    Human labor disappears tomorrow, Peter Thiel's first dream is to see if you can still be useful when made into a paste.
    throwaway173738 · 1790514999 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you listened to how people like Altman and Thiel talk? They do not seem to care about regular people except as objects to be subjugated. This kind of talk is also how we get a president that claims repeatedly to want an end to war and then starts one. When people tell you who they are and what they’re about, listen.
    nunez · 1790524002 · focus · HN ↗
    You think "invented"; I think "based on thousands of years of humans doing exactly this"
    MrGilbert · 1790504129 · focus · HN ↗
    I recently read a comment that stated that, as democracy clearly does not work, it should be replaced with technocracy.
    I'm amazed by the ignorance some people carry around.
    plastic-enjoyer · 1790504842 · focus · HN ↗
    Plato made a similar claim in The Republic. 2400 years later, and we still don't have a technocracy in the Western hemisphere where engineers lead countries. Either engineers are systematically oppressed, or there are just other qualities that make a leader than being good at complex problem solving.
    folkrav · 1790508276 · focus · HN ↗
    This is run-of-the-mill neofeudalist techbro belief. Peter Thiel is a big fan.
    plastic-enjoyer · 1790504167 · focus · HN ↗
    With so much defeatism and this grade of inferiority complexes, I really do wonder what keeps you even alive.
    skeptic_ai · 1790506809 · focus · HN ↗
    Once the rich don’t need us, the poor, they will give us food, healthcare, housing, fun, everything like a utopia.
    But now that they actually still need us, they can’t even provide healthcare.
    mzhaase · 1790504243 · focus · HN ↗
    This could go the star trek or dystopian route, and which way depends on who controls the models.
    There is going to be a very shitty in between time where we still need blue collar, but no white collar labor. The amount of conflicts out of that will be insane. And who controls the news?
    spockz · 1790505113 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    ChickeNES · 1790526427 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m pretty sure they are using Star Trek as “generic human spacefaring utopian future”. As i said above, you could insert “luxury gay space communism” in there and still have the same meaning.
    sunaurus · 1790506035 · focus · HN ↗
    > which way depends on who controls the models.
    Or if it's even possible to control the models.
    MrGilbert · 1790504253 · focus · HN ↗
    Care to elaborate? What do you mean by "end of all human labor"? How would a society without the need for human labor look like?
    ChickeNES · 1790504426 · focus · HN ↗
    Remember the spaceship in WALL-E? That, but no one is fat.
    robotpepi · 1790505509 · focus · HN ↗
    how naive do you have to be to believe something like that...
    noisy_boy · 1790509275 · focus · HN ↗
    Or how delusional.
    ChickeNES · 1790526294 · focus · HN ↗
    Is that what we are calling “hoping for the best” these days?
    ChickeNES · 1790526131 · focus · HN ↗
    And if I labeled it “luxury gay space communism” instead? Or Star Trek? I’d note in the latter, it sure seemed like a large portion of media was holonovels, and, as far as I can recall, the vast majority of the time they are shown to be programmed by lay people using voice prompts. And why the non-stop doom? I just assume/hope for the happy (or hell, I’ll settle for bittersweet) ending, not much I can do as a single person to bend history to my whims anyway. Maybe Trump nukes Taiwan, maybe aliens abduct all of our bears, maybe a gamma ray burst fries us all, but so far the human race seems to be on a continued upward trajectory, why worry too much about every imaginable dystopia?
    robotpepi · 1790532604 · focus · HN ↗
    You argue that it's better to be optimistic as you're a single person without power whatsoever, but your simplistic optimism is even worse. You're opinion is not new: Sartre would say you utilize your proposed insignificance to escape from the anxiety of freedom and responsability.
    literalAardvark · 1790504667 · focus · HN ↗
    Great news then, the end is nigh
    ponector · 1790505248 · focus · HN ↗
    I dream of the end of paid or forced human labor. People should do whatever they want. I bet no one wants to commute to the crowded office for another teams call.
    ChickeNES · 1790525374 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed. People can paint, write, have hobbies, or whatever else for fun, but why be forced to for any reason? Or expect that there should always be a market for your work, under pain of law?
    CodesInChaos · 1790506522 · focus · HN ↗
    The value of human labor is what gives ordinary people power. This also applies to unions and countries, which derive their power from the people they represent.
    Once sufficiently smart AI and autonomous weapons systems take that power away, we become little more than pets, living at the whim of those who control the AIs. Which could be a small elite of humans, or the AI itself.
    spongebobstoes · 1790511340 · focus · HN ↗
    democratic elections give power to the people without requiring labor, it's one of the pillars of western society
    swed420 · 1790515855 · focus · HN ↗
    > democratic elections give power to the people
    Only when they aren't totally co-opted by capital interests and everything they own, including media/social media.
    We haven't had democratic elections for decades. Just illusion of choice.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
    lotsofpulp · 1790519455 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you claiming people have not been able to campaign for political positions and vote for their candidates for decades? Because those are democratic elections.
    swed420 · 1790521451 · focus · HN ↗
    Much of that is intertwined.
    The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.
    However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.
    Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases.
    lotsofpulp · 1790527142 · focus · HN ↗
    >Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking
    This is just a mathematical fact of first past the post elections.
    I also don’t buy the captured media claim. Broadband cellular internet has allowed everyone instant access to basically all available information. If people choose to consume nonsense, that is an inherent problem with the people. Good information is literally a click away,
    swed420 · 1790527403 · focus · HN ↗
    > Good information is literally a click or tap away
    No it isn't.
    ChickeNES · 1790529261 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and while I do believe foreign and domestic bad actors are ever present online, a whole lot of misinformation is enabled by people who blindly accept anything posted on the internet as fact (my mother has ranted to me about a distant relation who continually posts the most outlandish things on Facebook; personally I don’t use any of Meta’s social networks to avoid that sort of thing, and, bar Marketplace, the last time I looked at Facebook proper was to do a data export during COVID lol). Though don’t get me wrong, social media companies have done terrible things, but supposedly “open” platforms have also tended towards misinformation and extremism (yes that one, and that one too, and the many others like it, none are blameless).
    CodesInChaos · 1790530866 · focus · HN ↗
    The power of a government depends on the country's economic and military strength. Currently that strength depends on having a population that's sufficiently large and skilled. If individuals become powerless, their governments power will wane as well. The power from AI will likely be more concentrated, either in a few super powers, or outside the control of governments. And the government of those super powers will likely care even less about their people.
5. exitb · 1790501848 · focus · HN ↗
  > I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry
  Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.
  1. ChickeNES · 1790502419 · focus · HN ↗
    > Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.
    Good! End human labor.
    exitb · 1790503592 · focus · HN ↗
    What other leverage, apart from labor, do masses have against the large capital owners? You imagine they'll give us basic income, just so we can buy products from them? That makes no sense at all.
    ChickeNES · 1790504204 · focus · HN ↗
    Why do I need or care about leverage against "large capital owners"? I think you're just putting arguments I didn't make into my mouth.
    literalAardvark · 1790505098 · focus · HN ↗
    I believe the parent may have assumed that you care about creature comforts such as water, food and shelter.
    vrganj · 1790505137 · focus · HN ↗
    You need leverage because otherwise you're not getting fed, you're not getting a place to live, you're not getting electricity or medical care.
    He's not putting that in your mouth, that is just the reality of what you need leverage for.
    ChickeNES · 1790505546 · focus · HN ↗
    You keep promoting assumptions to facts by calling them "reality." Just because you seem hell bent to analyze everything through the lens of class power, doesn't mean that I do.
    exitb · 1790507997 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s not about class. I literally leverage the demand for my labor to get money necessary for me to survive. There’s no other mechanism and our current economic setup is not moving towards creating one in any meaningful way.
    vrganj · 1790509065 · focus · HN ↗
    How you wish to analyze things doesn't change how they are.
    Reality doesn't care about your wishes. Your unwillingness to consider the systemic mechanisms at play doesn't make them go away, the same way I child covering their eyes doesn't make them invisible.
    fzeroracer · 1790509422 · focus · HN ↗
    What do you think prevents you from being literally enslaved?
    OroPla · 1790518985 · focus · HN ↗
    Haven't we been told the Earth is overpopulated for years? Seems a fair bet that the future will involve a whole lot of war and famine.
    We're already slowly walking away from globalism. Nationalism is being fawned. It's taking a lot of time, but I'd say by the end of the 2030s we'll be having WWIII at the latest.
    And at that time LLMs will be better decision makers than humans, I'd wager. So for now I'm expecting AI stuff to get funded at the expense of everything else.
    deniska · 1790503940 · focus · HN ↗
    What's the medium term plan though? Before we achieve singularity or UBI or whatever rapture analog this new religion is promising. Being employed is the primary way (and for most people is the only way) of getting housing, food, and other necessities meet.
6. onion2k · 1790502349 · focus · HN ↗
  Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things.
  It feels like that but the argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Practically every advance in technology leads to more jobs, usually to apply that technology in new areas, or to bring the benefit to more people. There are pockets of people who are negatively impacted, but the overall change to society has been positive for pretty much every advance humans have ever made (maybe saving for weapons.)
  1. handoflixue · 1790512457 · focus · HN ↗
    The argument holds up to scrutiny just fine if you're not a Puritan. An end to mandatory labor is a Utopian triumph in my book.
7. geraneum · 1790503656 · focus · HN ↗
  > It's wild how much weight "they're destroying jobs" has.
  It’s wild how much people are scared for their livelihood. What a sad thing to read here.
  1. tpmoney · 1790558132 · focus · HN ↗
    I can't speak for the OP, but I'd personally prefer we spent a lot more energy figuring out how to help people whose livelihoods are disrupted by technological change than trying to hold back technological change (or argue about its merits) because it affects people's livelihoods. I mean, "computer" used to be a job title before it meant "machine that replaced people's livelihoods" and yet computers have ultimately created whole new categories of jobs while simultaneously destroying countless other jobs.
    There's no real reason to think that AI is unique among all the livelihood destroying technologies that have come before in that it will destroy jobs without opening new ones in their place. It seems to me fighting the march of technology is akin to fighting the tides. Yes, you can build sea walls, and in the modern age, we literally can hold back the tides. But at the cost of ever increasing expenditures of time, resources and/or money. We could spend our resources trying to preserve livelihoods whose time has come and gone, but why specifically these jobs and not say, coal miners, farriers, lamp lighters, whalers, operators, computers, thread spinners or any of the multitudes of other jobs that technology is obsoleted? If we think on all the jobs that have been lost to technology over the decades, how many of those jobs do we think would have left the world in a net better place had we eliminated the technology that obsoleted the job and kept all the people employed in those positions where they were. Are people scared for their livelihoods because the technology will destroy the job, or because societies tend to spend all their energy trying to fight the technology instead of helping people find new jobs and livelihoods and the technology always eventually wins?
    geraneum · 1790583479 · focus · HN ↗
    Let me distill the gish gallop here:
    - “help people whose livelihoods are disrupted by technological change”
    vs.
    - relentless pursuit of AGI/ASI/etc. in break neck speed, destroying environment and promised to imminently capture all white collar and soon after, blue collar work in a short amount of time.
    Real world, we’re talking about real world with actual people in it. Only one of the above scenarios is happening.
    tpmoney · 1790634290 · focus · HN ↗
    > Real world, we’re talking about real world with actual people in it.
    In the real world, never once has the march of technology been successfully stopped, no matter how many jobs it crushed. Even the luddites who are enjoying a historical "re-evaluation" today still lost. And we've been through society spanning destruction of livelihoods before too and didn't stop it then either, just look at how much of the population used to be employed in farming and agriculture and compare it to now.
    In the real world, we can't even stop countries from pursuing, developing and improving nuclear weaponry despite the fact that we know it is an existential threat, and nuclear weaponry has no uses at all outside of nuclear annihilation. If we can't stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, what makes you think we have even a snowball's chance in hell of stopping AI development when AI actually has non-world ending uses and benefits to people?
    I'm happy to talk about the "real world" and in the real world, we're repeating the same mistakes of the past thinking "surely this time will be different" instead of learning from those mistakes and trying something new.
    geraneum · 1790701032 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you have an actual response to my point and the scale of what’s supposed to be happening, or is it just the same words, rinse and repeat, like the leaf node of a dialogue tree?
    tpmoney · 1790717505 · focus · HN ↗
    I would ask you the same thing. Do you have a proposal to address your concerns and the "scale of what's supposed to be happening" that is't support for the same type of failed attempts to stop the march of technology that have failed time and time again all throughout history? Do you at least have a theory for why this time it would turn out differently if we tried it again? Or do you just prefer to throw out insults and vague accusations that I'm an AI/bot?
    geraneum · 1790726975 · focus · HN ↗
    > vague accusations that I'm an AI/bot
    Funny enough, that never occurred to me. Nowadays an LLM probably would’ve addressed my point about speed, scale, etc. instead of this hastily condensed script of farriers and lamplighters layered with some good history revisionism where the consequences and effects of those transitions are somehow memory holed, just to falsely equivocate what we’re doing with inevitable forces of nature while hiding behind the empty rhetorical shield of “we should help people instead”. Typical hard techno determinism. Regurgitated dime a dozen in social media.
8. sdcfgy · 1790503982 · focus · HN ↗
  It’s not putting people out of work. It’s making jobs miserable by removing creativity and control from them.
  1. sokoloff · 1790504762 · focus · HN ↗
    Walk me through that a bit. I’ve used codex to solve dozens of niggling annoyances around the house and in my life. That gave me more control and increased my ability to express my creativity.
    At work, it enabled me to develop two apps, one complete (as much as they ever are), one nearing the end of technical PoC phase, and a handful of others where I could quickly answer a tech feasibility question.
    The completed app is an interactive web app that I literally could not have completed to that level of polish (and from a pacing perspective probably couldn’t have completed at all).
    All of those increased my control and most increased my ability to express creativity.
    The upcoming technical PoC will involve considering using Clojure in a load-bearing app, something that I’ve considered and consistently rejected for over a decade now. If that happens, control and creativity will spike as well.
    Is there some aspect of this removal that I’m not seeing? It changes the activities of the tasks, for sure, but very far from that all being for the worse; a lot of it is way better.
    sdcfgy · 1790507076 · focus · HN ↗
    In the narrow view of your technical world this is correct.
    But we are a tiny fraction of all possibilities. And for the rest of the folk, dredging LLM generated material and being forced to produce it does not make them happy. Particularly where it’s seen as a gain by the managers who read the marketing and a loss for those beneath them, while being told to adopt or be replaced.
    And even worse they shape destinations and introduce frustration when things can’t be done which were initially intended. We’ve trashed our ROI because it’s easy to build the thing the LLM can do but it’s hard to build what the customer needs. And those things are disparate.
    greenchair · 1790508775 · focus · HN ↗
    hi load-bearing.
  2. literalAardvark · 1790504971 · focus · HN ↗
    This has not been my experience with AI.
    And one of the chief complaints about AI is that it is fundamentally an interpolation engine, which is to say uncreative.
    At this time we still need to steer it, which is what the discussion about "taste" is about.
    Though I suppose we'll need better terms for various kinds of "taste" soon enough if it's to become economically trackable.
9. numpad0 · 1790504269 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. sokoloff · 1790505150 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
10. conartist6 · 1790504772 · focus · HN ↗
  They are destroying fucking humanity. They are evil.
  They have no will but to fill the world with hate and drivel
11. vrganj · 1790505044 · focus · HN ↗
  "Destroying jobs" is entirely the wrong framing and a distraction from the real issue.
  If AI truly replaces human labor, the lack of jobs isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of leverage for most of humanity.
  Jobs aren't just a source of income. They're a source of leverage over the ownership class - if labor goes on strike, production stops and capital cannot self-reproduce. This leverage is what gave us a living wage, sick leave and basically all concessions that make life livable for anyone that isn't lucky enough to be born as part of the elite.
  If AI makes this leverage go away, our problem is bigger than just job loss. The owners of the AI industry will use this now-untethered productive force to completely monopolize resources and set up a system where they are unquestionable god kings.
  The rest of us will have more to worry about than just employment. We will be reduced to depending on the charity of people who's record has shown are not exactly the most selfless and kindhearted.
  This is the real problem with AI productivity. Jobs are a distraction. Control over production is the real issue. The only way this doesn't end in dystopia is if the public controls AI, one way or another.
  1. handoflixue · 1790512599 · focus · HN ↗
    If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
12. nylonstrung · 1790505682 · focus · HN ↗
  AI is fundamentally unlike the automotive industry in that it employs a remarkably small amount of people despite hundreds of billions being invested
  There is probably no industry to date with a smaller ratio of labor:capital in terms of the money being allocated
  The auto industry led to a net increase in employment, including "unskilled" and lower class labor. The same cannot be said of LLMs
13. jojobas · 1790508216 · focus · HN ↗
  Previous times the people were wanted elsewhere, even when US and Europe de-industrialized in favour of Asia. This time around we're already in a situation where educated people struggle to find jobs, and there are not many jobs created by some parallel process.
  Imagine if say 200 companies created fully automated factories producing everything in the world. Let's say they employ one million scientists, engineers and guards. What fate would await the other 8 billion?
  1. themaninthedark · 1790528815 · focus · HN ↗
    We can finally have the degrowth that the environmentalists keep talking about!
    Embrace the AI, it will lower your carbon emissions!
14. Razengan · 1790508263 · focus · HN ↗
  I wonder how many disruptive technology all the people panting about AI have lived through..
  Check out this show about word processors from 1983: <a href="https://youtu.be/Jt0OoXluC8g" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Jt0OoXluC8g
  at 4:08:
  Writers disagree on what effect word processing will have on the quality of our written language. Some writers are concerned that computer assistance may promote dry bland writing.
  1. ChickeNES · 1790527612 · focus · HN ↗
    Quite a few?
    Razengan · 1790529142 · focus · HN ↗
    They sure make it seem like AI is the first time they've seen it happen
15. adamddev1 · 1790516159 · focus · HN ↗
  I think that that the "they're destroying jobs" or even then "they're stealing intellectual property" argument overshadows or distracts from the more important issues. What really concerns me is the large scale erosion of truth and reliability. Codebases and the internet at large are being flooded with less and less accurate information, with more bloat, and with more errors that will exponentially increase as more and more is built on them.
  Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.
  1. ChickeNES · 1790527235 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, while I personally believe this is a problem to solve, not an insurmountable obstacle, I cannot ignore this kind of harm. I do think this will be outweighed by all the instances where they improve decision making, dig up obscure information, correct errors, etc. I can’t see any fundamental reason a near future AI system has to hallucinate anything, and when we also have people complaining in thread that LLMs are dumping out song lyrics verbatim…well, it’s an amusing contrast to say the least.
16. mrdependable · 1790522635 · focus · HN ↗
  That is one of the ways they determine fair use, whether it will affect the market for the work.
17. tzs · 1790548953 · focus · HN ↗
  > Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants
  Are you confusing mathematicians and accountants with the people that companies used to hire to do arithmetic?
as1mov · 1790500112 · focus · HN ↗
Nice astroturfing going on this thread, keep it up OpenAI!
1. bravetraveler · 1790500278 · focus · HN ↗
  Easy, now. Pointing this out is reportedly against the rules, making the ground defacto plastic. In my opinion, of course, with the required curiosity.
  1. as1mov · 1790501668 · focus · HN ↗
    Lol the original comment was only in half jest knowing the ass lickers who congregate here, but it went from 4 points to 0 within 5 minutes. _Not suspicious at all._
AraneaDev · 1790500411 · focus · HN ↗
Lol, the fear mongering is just part of the hype train at this point.
1. simianwords · 1790501551 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes it’s all hype to cash in the ipo before the bubble bursts. The labs are spreading spooky things about AI so that people think these models are very capable. It is a coordinated effort amongst all labs. The reality is that these models can’t do basic mathematics.
  1. ChickeNES · 1790503277 · focus · HN ↗
    > The reality is that these models can’t do basic mathematics.
    Yet they solved a Millennium Prize problem, you people are delusional at this point.
usernametaken29 · 1790500477 · focus · HN ↗
If this doesn’t put anyone in prison then we might as well declare copyright dead. They knew they broke the law and then they deliberately covered it up. How much more evidence is required here?
1. consensus1 · 1790502683 · focus · HN ↗
  Funny thing is that on HN "declare copyright dead" was a popular opinion. For some reason that did a 180 a couple years ago.
  1. Kiro · 1790504733 · focus · HN ↗
    Sad to see hackers become copyright zealots.
    ChickeNES · 1790506102 · focus · HN ↗
    Right? I am starting to think some only saw it as a way to fight "the man", and now that "the man" is on the other side of the issue...
    lta · 1790509801 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think it's about becoming copyright zealot. What angers me in there is the blatant inequality. People are in jail or got heavy fines for opening torrent or steaming sites. But "Open"AI and others got a free pass because they're big corps.
    spongebobstoes · 1790511832 · focus · HN ↗
    let's not make everything worse under the guise of equality. perpetuating injustice does not somehow create justice
    copyright sucks. it stifles individual creativity and serves to enrich big corporations
    lta · 1790514685 · focus · HN ↗
    I do agree, but I still feel angry to see how it's playing out on this specific topic
    consensus1 · 1790528300 · focus · HN ↗
    How did they get a free pass? From the court decisions I have read they were held liable for downloading pirate copies and paid large fines for it. That might have been Meta, not OAI, though, but the point is the same.
    lta · 1790546239 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn't know about the fines and can't find a lot of details online. It seems meta got fined for something else, but it was about 1B, which is less than 1% of their revenue.
    I think the smaller companies or individual which did stuff like that got their life ruined. The pirate bay admin got fined multiple millions of dollars.
    So if I agree it's not a "free pass", it's still a cheap pass many others didn't get. Makes me realize how, as mentioned by other comments, copyright laws are a tool for the powerful to oppress others rather than an actual universal right.
    usernametaken29 · 1790563496 · focus · HN ↗
    A fine is a slap on and wrist. Imagine you individually copied and sold libgen. Not only that, you’d say you did it for profit, you knew it was illegal, and conspired with others to cover it up. I don’t understand why no criminal charges are filed? Why isn’t anyone going to prison for a crime committed?
    consensus1 · 1790609392 · focus · HN ↗
    Your claim "Imagine you individually copied and sold libgen" doesn't hold up because there are two parts, copying and selling. Copyright law considers the copying part to be a small civil offense punishable by a fine. It's the selling part that is much more highly illegal and can result in criminal punishment. OpenAI only did the copying part.
    usernametaken29 · 1790753933 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s not true. I can ask ChatGPT for a verbatim copy of a licensed book. It’s been documented numerous times. I fail to see how, in the real world, a verbatim slightly changed version is different than a copy. But they’re selling ChatGPT, so effectively they’re selling access to libgen. So long as they can’t guarantee your unlicensed copyright won’t be reproduced verbatim, it is essentially reselling copyrighted material.
    usernametaken29 · 1790521282 · focus · HN ↗
    Honestly I don’t give a damn about copyright. I’m baffled by the double standards. Aaron Swartz was put away for so, so so much less than the massive amount of criminal activity we’re seeing here. They’re conspiring to break the law, openly, even jokingly. They’re hacking people, they’re stealing from people, openly. If no one is going to put a stop to it we might as well declare the legal system failed in its entirety.
    tpmoney · 1790562690 · focus · HN ↗
    Swartz was put away by aggressive over prosecution and it was a complete disservice of justice. We should be upset at the double standard, to the extent that we should be angry the people who prosecuted him haven't been punished for their miscarriage of justice. We should not be annoyed that we're now treating the "crime" of copyright infringement the way it should have been treated then.
vilius · 1790500599 · focus · HN ↗
It’s 2030, I open HN and top result is from 7 hours ago, 2100 points, 700 comments:
> AI agent accidentally publishes OpenAI’s unreleased model weights
The optics are bad. The submission marks a turning page in human history.
pera · 1790500617 · focus · HN ↗
Can some explain why would a billionaire like Altman care about the opinions expressed on HN?
Given the political power they have, particularly now with the Trump administration, whatever "optics" exist on this forum seems completely insignificant
1. OuterVale · 1790501521 · focus · HN ↗
  You forget how many influential tech professionals are present here (especially those in Silicon Valley) and that Altman was president of Y Combinator for several years.
2. mrweasel · 1790501585 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. pera · 1790504043 · focus · HN ↗
    That makes sense, but at the same time Altman was famously called a "sociopath" by Aaron Swartz and a rapist by her own sister and yet he kept his position after the revolt a couple of years ago.
    It's hard to imagine anything worse than bombing an elementary school and yet people are still using Anthropic products as if nothing has happened.
    Optics don't seem to matter much?
    dgellow · 1790509605 · focus · HN ↗
    How many people are aware of those accusations? It’s takes a very long time for things like that to permeate a culture. Look at Elon, people who have followed his work have known for a very long time the guy is a pathological liar, sociopathic white nationalist for a decade. He’s still praised by many in the tech industry
3. ArcHound · 1790503209 · focus · HN ↗
  That's what they want, but do not yet have.
  It's easier to take over a resigned population. And stating "resistance is futile" is cheap and it might weaken opposition.
senectus1 · 1790500939 · focus · HN ↗
the AI isnt going to destroy jobs in numbers large enough to blip the unemployment stats more thna a qtr a percent.
the economics of those companies will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs across the board.
sidcool · 1790501955 · focus · HN ↗
HN is their AB testing playground.
Betelbuddy · 1790503004 · focus · HN ↗
The Title should be: "Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"
1. Joel_Mckay · 1790504026 · focus · HN ↗
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji
  Whistleblower found dead after exposing industrial scale Copyright violation bleeding into model output. =3
2. mdp2021 · 1790506424 · focus · HN ↗
  Reading books is what they are there for.
3. luma · 1790509639 · focus · HN ↗
  Meanwhile opposing counsel was fabricating research to claim AI was impacting authors and was caught trying to bury their involvement: <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/25/openai-accuses-plaintiffs-lawyers-of-paying-for-hiding-and-then-laundering-sketchy-key-evidence-in-ai-copyright-case/" rel="nofollow">https://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/25/openai-accuses-plaintiff...
  Neither side is coming out smelling like roses here.
  1. lkey · 1790512801 · focus · HN ↗
    Thank God, a 'both sides'.
    I was worried that OpenAI, a 1.2 trillion dollar company, would be the only party to this lawsuit that was 'bad'. Thankfully, thanks to your detective work, we have ourselves a lawyer that is also 'bad', a rare thing indeed.
    Readers may be wondering if 'authors' are also bad. That's silly, they don't matter at all. This is what makes stealing from them legal (for a small fine) and profitable.
    luma · 1790523492 · focus · HN ↗
    Thank God, a response which addresses none of the content of the parent post which is now flagged for pointing out current facts of the case, along with anything else in the thread which doesn't align with "AI BAD".
    HN has fallen far.
    lkey · 1790536522 · focus · HN ↗
    'Fallen far' is so so rich, when you are the misinfo peddler here.
    The article you linked is irrelevant because it is about a DIFFERENT CASE.
    _Authors Guild v. OpenAI_ is NOT _The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp. et al._
    The gall of you to act indignant about 'facts of the case'.
    Even if you weren't lazy or illiterate; Mike isn't a neutral party either.
    > "Of course, my biases are known: I’m quite convinced that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use, and I find the argument that slop books “dilute” non-slop books to be beyond nonsensical."
    Even if you agree with Mike, OpenAI thought they could replace/dilute authors, and workers generally, as disclosed by their internal discussions.
    Even if you agree with Mike that training, generally, is fair use, they did not pay for the torrented works they trained their models on, which is still illegal! This is why they shifted to buying and shredding books after they lost other lawsuits.
    > 'AI bad'
    Bay Area self-styled demi-gods bad, actually. Their products, like always, are incidental to their rapaciousness and their impunity from laws.
  2. Craighead · 1790513827 · focus · HN ↗
    Ahh yes, my daily agitprop
  3. aprilthird2021 · 1790514131 · focus · HN ↗
    They did not fabricate research or get caught burying their involvement in fabrication. That's not what your link says.
    They are alleged to have funded research which one of their expert witnesses relied on. They may have other expert witnesses and their expert witness may rely on other research. And their funding of such research can also be above-board, after all it is not completely and totally different from paying an expert witness for his/her testimony. He may have many sources of funding apart from them as well.
    Also all this behavior is alleged. It has not been proven and the judge hasn't ruled on this motion from OAI et. al. The judge may deny the motion still, making the accusations inconsequential
  4. windexh8er · 1790515938 · focus · HN ↗
    Not only tone dead but also completely missed the point of their own article.
4. armchairhacker · 1790512364 · focus · HN ↗
  Are there any studies that show it has actually put more authors out of work than the prior trendline?
  1. afavour · 1790512539 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel like you're skipping over the illegal part. Something legal that puts authors out of work is quite different to blatant breaking of the law.
    rpdillon · 1790514079 · focus · HN ↗
    They're not skipping, they're keying on the exact same thing I am, which is whether or not authors have been put out of work because of AI, and to what degree. This is stated like it's a fact, but it is not a fact that is established, at least in my experience.
    aeon_ai · 1790515194 · focus · HN ↗
    And the use of the data largely being considered 'fair use' means that theft is an assertion based not in law, but in perception and ignorance.
    Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
    customguy · 1790516189 · focus · HN ↗
    > A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
    Then attack those corporations directly, instead of leaving authors in the ditch because standing up for common normal people getting fucked over would "encourage stronger IP laws". How do you get to mention random authors who did nothing but write books and hope to get credit and compensation, to potential companies who "can find ways" to claim ownership over the cure for diseases in the same breath?
    There is no "IP law strength" dial that goes in two directions. That is so bereft of any contact with reality it has exactly nothing to do with hacking. Hacking starts with what is, not with fiction.
    ChickeNES · 1790518797 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m sure carriage drivers were nice people, but I’m not going to pretend to be upset that they lost their jobs due to cars. I see the commoditization of art as a net win for humanity.
    dofm · 1790519754 · focus · HN ↗
    You understand Warhol made essentially all of his post-illustration career income, during his own lifetime, from licensing and copyright? Including licensing his own identity.
    We wouldn't even know who he was without it.
    One could perhaps advance an argument that he wouldn't have wanted to be a posthumous brand (this might be stretching credulity) or have all the squabbles over his estate, but one cannot possibly use him as an avatar in an argument against copyright protection for living artists, because he essentially pioneered being a living famous licensed artist.
    dofm · 1790516707 · focus · HN ↗
    Say you spend a hundred working hours on a painting. You then have that painting scanned at high resolution, to make a limited series of a dozen very large prints.
    Scenario 1: a scalper takes the medium resolution image from your e-commerce website, and slaps it on a series of products they sell for their own profit on Amazon without your permission.
    Scenario 2: someone buys one of those prints, scans it to a high resolution, and then makes a series of slightly smaller, high quality prints that they sell for their own profit without your permission.
    Is it your contention that both of these things are something that should be allowed?
    ChickeNES · 1790517902 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, art has no inherent economic value, and neither does the hundred hours you spent making it.
    dofm · 1790519022 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not making a claim that the work has inherent value, am I?
    Nor is the artist in this scenario!
    They are merely saying that they have made a limited series of objects they wish to assign a price to, if the market will pay.
    But if the people who can buy it can sell essentially identical reproductions for whatever price they choose, then its assigned product price tends to zero too.
    If you follow your own argument, then what you are saying is that compensation for effort can only come from a one-time contract. But since intellectual work is not then protected by copyright, those contracts are really difficult to write, because the buyer is not getting any unique thing either.
    It doesn't take much to get from "there's no such thing as copyright" to demand collapse for almost every industrial product. Would we even have the PC if there was no copyright protection for intellectual work?
    ChickeNES · 1790520675 · focus · HN ↗
    You picked the Personal Computer, the product of hacker culture, open architectures (the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story alone makes your example hilarious), clones, open source, and a software scene so filled with piracy that Bill Gates himself wrote the “Open Letter to Hobbyists”, as your example for why copyright was indispensable? LMFAO
    PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”
    dofm · 1790521291 · focus · HN ↗
    > PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”
    Hey, weirdly enough, I don't need to, because I have a copy of it that I bought the week it was reissued.
    But Bill Gates didn't make the PC. IBM did. And it was not aimed at hacker culture: it was aimed at business, at writers, at publishers, at a knowledge industry that exists only as a result of copyright.
    You think the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story exists outside copyright? All of that is grounded in copyright. Again, PC clones exist because of clean-room techniques, within copyright.
    Open source licences are all grounded in copyright.
    This is just weird gish-galloping of unrelated concepts now.
    ChickeNES · 1790532030 · focus · HN ↗
    A gish gallop is attacking the opposing side with a flurry of different arguments, I merely supplied a long list of rebuttals to your assertion we would not have the PC without copyright. I included the IBM mention because I assumed you meant “Personal Computer” not “IBM PC”, as the latter, while vastly important in its own right, is still eclipsed by the PC as a concept. The world would be different without the IBM PC, while the world would be much MUCH poorer without computers in every home and/or pocket. The IBM lineage might be resilient, but we could just as easily have had a (non-Apple) NeXT, Magic Cap, PSION, Be, Amiga, etc descendant as predominant computing platforms instead. And my point with the Lions book, is that it’s emblematic of the control AT&T exerted on Unix, instead of letting it be free, where they (and descendants USL and SCO) attempted but failed to squash an open information revolution (*BSD and Linux) that had been seeded by Unix to begin with.
    joquarky · 1790521115 · focus · HN ↗
    You're mixing up copyrights and patents.
    Also, would we have something more advanced than current PCs if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thought?
    dofm · 1790521775 · focus · HN ↗
    > You're mixing up copyrights and patents.
    I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."
    So what I did was mount a straightforward defence of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.
    dofm · 1790521850 · focus · HN ↗
    > You're mixing up copyrights and patents.
    I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."
    So what I did was mount a straightforward defence of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.
    > Also, would we have something more advanced than PCs by now if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thoughts?
    No? Why on earth would you think this? Intellectual property protection is the way that you get people to invest in the development of ideas.
    (It also explicitly doesn't grant "ownership" of thoughts or ideas.)
    aeon_ai · 1790559384 · focus · HN ↗
    Your “simple defense” is one that misunderstands the economic value of creative work.
    I know an artist who has done well for themselves. They have done so because they have revealed that they know what it is they sell. “I sell paper”
    The artist is the source of value. An AI can produce visual media, but it can not be an artist. The artist is not one work, but the source of many arts.
    Copyright is the protection of the creative work in a fixed media. It is not the protection of ideas or styles.
    My thrust is therefore not that protection of creative work should be abolished, but that the notion of “theft” of ideas and styles is one that is not protected by copyright today, and only serves entrenched corporate interests.
    We are either entering a world of hyperliquid culture or tyranny.
    afavour · 1790520858 · focus · HN ↗
    Surely the market says otherwise?
    ChickeNES · 1790522521 · focus · HN ↗
    Well everywhere I look there’s AI generated images, songs, videos, articles, books, etc. Sure the quality is all over the place, but AI songs are charting /topping Spotify (not all of that is organic I grant), Suno exists, roughly a million other apps and sites to generate content, etc. And we have the article itself bemoaning that authors are losing jobs. Sounds like the market is speaking quite strongly to me.
    afavour · 1790532630 · focus · HN ↗
    I would argue that the stuff AI is replacing is not art, it’s mostly advertising. Posters and the like.
    But “art has no value” is a statement way beyond that. Art collectors pay millions for original works. Copies go for pennies. People pay large sums for live music performances. Movies are a huge business. To me it seems the market indicates that art absolutely has value.
    NateEag · 1790520946 · focus · HN ↗
    No object, labor, or knowledge has inherent economic value.
    Its value is subjective, determined by what the market (i.e., a bunch of humans) will pay for it.
    Given the gigantic pile of money that's spent on music, film, and books every year, it's quite clear that there can be large amounts of economic value in a piece of art.
    That modern technology makes it easier to take an artist's with with absolutely no recompense, and that many choose to do so regardless of the maker's wishes, does not change that.
    It just underlined what's been obvious since the dawn of civilization, that many humans are happy to ignore what other humans want and to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
    ...which brings us back full circle to the actual article, which is a clear illustration of the OpenAI executive team's conscious choice to do exactly that.
    armchairhacker · 1790537293 · focus · HN ↗
    They should be allowed. The author should have an alternate way of being compensated for his work, e.g. patronage, and people who approach the e-commerce site should be able to do a reverse image search to find the print available for free elsewhere.
    dofm · 1790555890 · focus · HN ↗
    > e.g. patronage
    This is nothing more than an argument that 99% of working interior designers and artists shouldn't get an income.
    But it's also an argument that software developers should be paid minimum wage; you just have to work through the consequences of the abandonment of copyright to see software development reduced to day labour.
    If that is what you want, you should be honest about it.
    RunSet · 1790519513 · focus · HN ↗
    > A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
    How about a world where readers can't even find factual autobiographies because they are so outnumbered by machine-generated fabrications?
    Unlike "AI can solve diseases easily" what I wrote describes the actual present and not a hypothetical future.
    <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-...
    rpdillon · 1790736278 · focus · HN ↗
    Your first paragraph is well-taken.
    The Supreme Court agrees.
    > Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
    <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/473/207/" rel="nofollow">https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/473/207/
  2. kQq9oHeAz6wLLS · 1790517927 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's more likely to affect aspiring authors, rather than established ones.
    Sadly, like keeping track of "attempted burglaries"[0], it's impossible to know the extent.
    [0] how do you count attempts where the burglar was unsuccessful/left no trace and nobody was home to notice the attempt?
    ChickeNES · 1790519012 · focus · HN ↗
    Pretty sure we have the entire field of statistics to solve that very problem.
5. grey-area · 1790512585 · focus · HN ↗
  It was certainly illegal and morally questionable.
  So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work, but the internet, social media and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop, which is its own form of deep cultural damage.
  No long-form writing I’ve seen is anything approaching even a genre potboiler standard. It’s still aimless, filled with contradiction and cliche and in that peculiar breathless teenager style that LLMs affect.
  1. class3shock · 1790513581 · focus · HN ↗
    This - "So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work"
    is a contradiction to this - "but the internet and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop."
    I'm not sure there there are labor statistics to look at but it seems impossible that the coming-into-existance of a tool that generates mass amounts of cheap product, with zero skill required, in a field wouldn't displace skilled workers in that field.
    - <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/24/dont-let-ai-kill-the-author" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/24/dont-let-ai-kil... - <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/ai-authors-impersonating-writers-amazon/688709/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/ai-authors-im... - <a href="https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/ai-slop-books-amazon-marketplace-publishing-human-authors/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/ai-slop-books-amazon-marketpl...
    rpdillon · 1790514145 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would it be impossible? You're discounting the most probable case, which is that the AI writing is not a substitute for a skilled writer.
    Edit: Turns out both Judge Alsup and Judge Chhabria agree that this is not obvious and would need to be defended. Here's Chhabria's statement on the evidence for market dilution:
    > As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.
    When the plaintiffs don't even attempt to argue the point, that's pretty telling.
    orbisvicis · 1790516747 · focus · HN ↗
    Either authors are all equally highly skilled, or we care only about defending the good ones...
    grey-area · 1790522883 · focus · HN ↗
    We only care about defending the good ones.
    grey-area · 1790522867 · focus · HN ↗
    It certainly makes it harder to discover human authors, because stores are flooded with plausible but terrible books from morons using LLMs to generate text modelled on other books that are doing well. I don't think that displacing human authors though?
    I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce.
  2. malfist · 1790520665 · focus · HN ↗
    > So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work
    Things don't happen overnight. The first time an automobile was rolled off a factory floor drovers and horses weren't all put out of work.
    grey-area · 1790523015 · focus · HN ↗
    You think LLMs will put authors out of work? I certainly hope not, given the quality of product they currently produce. If they produced genuinely creative and interesting work it'd be more likely, but there's no sign of that so far.
    Only a moron in a hurry would think that the output of LLMs currently can replace human authors spending a few years writing a book.
  3. snappy173 · 1790527512 · focus · HN ↗
    what? there is _definitely_ evidence that writers are being put out of work. writing is extremely competitive, and very very very few authors are able to make a living writing and publishing novel creative works. many make their living by applying their writing skills towards journalism, marketing, corporate copy etc, all of which are under significant pressure from AI _already_. the writers that i know firsthand all report that their work lives have been turned upside down in the past couple of years.
    if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
    grey-area · 1790538936 · focus · HN ↗
    We've switched from authors (novels and non-fiction books) to writers here. That's a very different question.
    Sure if you include writers writing for business, translators etc who were never very valued by business, there has been a huge impact already, because business is willing to accept shoddy results if they are good enough and put up with mistakes and poor style. That low end of generating content has definitely been impacted, for example in social media as I mentioned LLMs have replaced a lot of 'writers' who generated filler text for content advertising.
    rpdillon · 1790546612 · focus · HN ↗
    > if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
    If it's so obvious, it shouldn't be so hard to articulate specifics. Maybe you can name just one author?
    Being a writer was always a terrible profession for making money and having stable work. In my observations, AI is incapable of writing in the way a skilled author can -- what AI will replace is jobs working on small blurbs, promotional posters, and summaries. But those aren't really authors; I'm not sure if we care that the person employed to summarize novels at readers digest is now being replaced by an AI.
    And that's why specifics matter. So much of the discourse is emotionally charged, and people imagine details that are not there. What I'd like to do is bring the details into the light.
    So, does anybody reading this anywhere on this site have any information on any author that made money as a full-time writer that is now unemployed because their work has been replaced by AI? I'm not talking about the industry being upended. I'm a software engineer and my industry has been upended, but that has not resulted in job loss as much as it has changing what the profession does. Are authors in a different position than software engineers in this regard? Or are they truly just losing their jobs as their mass replaced by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of the latter, which is why I'm asking.
6. moffkalast · 1790512597 · focus · HN ↗
  At this point I think we're less concerned about the piracy and more about how they've been acting as cybercriminals, staging a major attack every few days. Other countries might have to start considering it state sponsored cyberterrorism if they continue to operate with complete impunity.
  "Our model did an oopsy woopsie for the 35th time" does not seem like a valid legal defense.
  1. Gigachad · 1790516022 · focus · HN ↗
    I remember when the concern was gpt2 could create fake news text. Now they can straight up create fake photo realistic images and are actively hacking government services yet we still haven’t pulled the plug.
  2. xlayn · 1790519490 · focus · HN ↗
    The thing is... it's not a bug, the system is working EXACTLY AS EXPECTED... that they are training it... for exactly that scenario...
  3. hallway_monitor · 1790527037 · focus · HN ↗
    As far as I can tell the only remedy for this is holding CEOs responsible for the actions of models operated by their company. If there are no consequences then they will have no concern for these crimes.
7. rpdillon · 1790513920 · focus · HN ↗
  > Put Authors Out of Work
  Specifics would help the credibility of this claim quite a bit.
  1. PavleMiha · 1790515412 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the point here isn’t whether that claim is true or not, it’s that people at OpenAI believed it to be true and proceeded anyway.
  2. dofm · 1790515558 · focus · HN ↗
    Ehh? The specifics of the claim above are that this is what is what the article is titled and what it discusses.
    rpdillon · 1790545481 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm pointing out that the original title of the actual article is inaccurate and it would be helped by actual specifics. The actual plaintiffs in the lawsuit do not appear to have been put out of work.
  3. moron4hire · 1790515734 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
8. xlayn · 1790519391 · focus · HN ↗
  I second this, this is the correct title, with maybe one addendum
  Top AI Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work
9. ilamont · 1790532434 · focus · HN ↗
  The Authors Guild CEO was an experienced IP attorney. The guild's leadership and policy teams, while they are cognizant of optics, think like lawyers, not like PR pros or journalists looking to maximize clicks.
fragmede · 1790503382 · focus · HN ↗
Posted by an account created to post this.
fwlr · 1790504817 · focus · HN ↗
Cute that they were concerned, but they need not have worried - as you can clearly see from any HN comments section on these kinds of articles, everyone long ago wrote down their conclusion (“OpenAI/Anthropic/LLMs are good/bad”) at the bottom of the page, and now all we are doing is shuffling facts, quotes, and arguments around the page above it.
We are very clever to make it look like the conclusion below follows from the arguments above; but we are also careful to never smudge our bottom line, so it will never change.
1. dgellow · 1790509162 · focus · HN ↗
  Speak for yourself, mine did change
spacecadet · 1790506164 · focus · HN ↗
To all the top comments making analogies about destroying jobs; horses, buggies, calculators... what?! You are awful people. We're not talking about shit jobs, these are peoples creative passions, livelihoods, and life long careers. It looks like OpenAI had nothing to fear. Fuck you.
1. skeptic_ai · 1790507065 · focus · HN ↗
  What if I was a genius and managed to provide enough supply for the entire Earth at 1% of what other people charge, how would that be different? All those creatives, lawyers, engineers will also lose their jobs. Why are they entitled to a job in the first place? Why I can’t do it for cheaper?
2. christophilus · 1790519355 · focus · HN ↗
  So, what are you arguing? If a group of people like their jobs, society should disallow disruption to that group? Why? It seems to me that we may reach a point where machines can replace humans for most tasks, and I don’t think we should try to make that state of things illegal. We should instead try to solve the economics of it in a way that benefits all.
3. tpmoney · 1790564155 · focus · HN ↗
  Where is the line for a job that needs to be preserved at all costs because its someone's livelihood and a job that is ok to be destroyed by the advancement of technology. The "computers" your computer replaced were presumably quite proud of their talents and their livelihoods. Coal miners have been fighting for the livelihoods for decades now, but we happily applaud the advancements of technology that make coal mining obsolete. 2D animation artists were devastated by modern CGI and the advancements brought on by computer animation. "The Little Mermaid" employed well over 300 people in the animation related aspects of that movie[1]. Encanto employed over 500 in its CGI work[2]. Should we have banned CGI and prevented 500 jobs to preserve 300 because they were there first? We can absolutely acknowledge that peoples livelihoods can and will be affected by the advancement of technology. But the appropriate response to that isn't trying to stop the advancement of technology or artificially propping up dying jobs. It's finding way to help people make livelihood changes where they can, and helping them continue to afford living where they can't make those changes.
  [1]: <a href="https://walt-disney-animation-studios.fandom.com/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_Credits" rel="nofollow">https://walt-disney-animation-studios.fandom.com/wiki/The_Li...
  [2]: <a href="https://jhmoviecollection.fandom.com/wiki/Encanto_(film)/Credits" rel="nofollow">https://jhmoviecollection.fandom.com/wiki/Encanto_(film)/Cre...
shevy-java · 1790508723 · focus · HN ↗
Doesn't this fulfil the criterium of an illegal organisation, aka a mafia?
They knew the damage they would cause - and went on regardless. The USA need to fix their court system. Right now it is just OligarchBros running the show. The small thief stealing a wallet gets put in jail for years. If you are rich enough, you pay some peanuts and that's the end of it.
1. Ylpertnodi · 1790511995 · focus · HN ↗
  Not only a USA problem.
dgellow · 1790509021 · focus · HN ↗
That title is editorialized af
ReptileMan · 1790510174 · focus · HN ↗
Simple distinction between OpenAI and Anthropic - the one is sleazy, the other is creepy. Still makes OpenAI look better in comparison.
swader999 · 1790511677 · focus · HN ↗
A one time settlement for this would be laughable. They should pay royalties in perpetuity or be dismantled.
1. Skyy93 · 1790518949 · focus · HN ↗
  Basically this was already decided with the Anthropic Case. Lawful acquirement of books allows for training. So basically buying each book once, which is trivial seeing the amount of money these companies sit on, is enough.
2. tpmoney · 1790562870 · focus · HN ↗
  And as a result the only people that could ever use copyrighted material for any purpose would be people with pockets deep enough to pay for that material in perpetuity. I for one don't look forward to a world where I'm paying a licensing subscription fee for Handbrake, VLC, Jellyfin, Retroarch and all the other pieces of software used all the time that benefit from using copyrighted material in ways the owners of that copyright would really rather you didn't.
zkmon · 1790512217 · focus · HN ↗
Any work of art which appeals to only the 3 senses - vision, hearing and thought - are basically information, unlike those appeal to other senses - touch, taste and smell.
The information-centric work is bound to be replicated, plagiarised, generated and anonymized endlessly. It is unjust, unethical and unnatural. But that's what the road we collectively chose in the information age.
1. malfist · 1790512528 · focus · HN ↗
  We who? I didn't choose this.
  1. zkmon · 1790665667 · focus · HN ↗
    Sounds like someone saying "hey. I did not vote for Trump, why is forced on me as my President?". Weird free thinking of American people.
2. krapp · 1790513313 · focus · HN ↗
  Erm actually... tastes and smells are replicated, plagiarized and generated all the time. Touch less so but it's definitely a factor in a lot of industrial and product design.
  1. zkmon · 1790516454 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, it is not like we copy a file that has some bits and bytes of data, and boom, you got the taste, smell and touch.
    krapp · 1790517540 · focus · HN ↗
    There are entire industries that exist outside the realm of computer science, and forms of "data" that don't exist on a disk. Look into the perfume industry, for instance. Do you think no one has ever tried copying Chanel No 5? Flavors can't be copyrighted but many restaurants and food manufacturers protect them as trade secrets - see KFC's "11 herbs and spices."
voidhorse · 1790512767 · focus · HN ↗
> “Autocompleting” Other People’s Work – OpenAI hired Tarun Gogineni in 2022 to lead its efforts to improve the writing quality of its models. Gogineni stated his “research mission” was to have GPT models write the “last two books of [Martin’s] A Song of Ice and Fire” series by “finishing it one day.” Gogineni even mused that he would “rest easy knowing that even if GRRM [George R. R. Martin] dies early, GPT-5 will autocomplete his series.”
I am still consistently astounded by how often the people working on this space seemingly have zero understanding of what art is, how it functions socially, or why it's important. They quite literally don't seem to comprehend the distinction between art and fan fiction. It's baffling. I'm really beginning to think courses in art history and literature need to be mandatory. We have failed legions of stem students when it comes to cultural education.
1. TomGarden · 1790513588 · focus · HN ↗
  Agreed. In a recent interview, cloudflare's CEO/founder built an argument on the 'fact' that people pursue music for fame and money. No concept of artistic expression or positive impact on the world. It blows my mind how impactful your bubble and education are on your (lack of) perception
2. bananaboy · 1790514996 · focus · HN ↗
  Gross. I think there’s been a large overcorrection to stem away from the arts. Certainly I’ve seen that in Australia when looking at schools for my sons.
3. ModernMech · 1790520623 · focus · HN ↗
  This is the fault of capitalism, under which you are required to sell your time and skills for cash to survive. Under this system, no one who isn’t independently wealthy can be an artist without commoditizing their art. So that’s the lens through which people view art: just another commodity to sell so one can survive, not unlike grains or oil. The quote also shows that the artist is fungible in this conception, only the output matters no matter how it got there, as long as you can sell it.
4. tpmoney · 1790562533 · focus · HN ↗
  This is arguably just a form of arguing for "death of the author". When you release a creative work, in some form, that work is no longer just yours. The audience receives, experiences and interprets that work in their own way. While the author maintains some degree of "canonical" control over the work, once its in the open, the audience can (and does) do what they will.
  We aren't exactly consistent with how we approach this either. For example, I agree that reading "GPT-5 will autocomplete [GRRM's] series" feels "wrong" in the same way that if Terry Pratchett's "Disc World" series was "continued" by some non-approved author that would also feel wrong.
  But contrast that with something like Star Wars, when George Lucas dies, I don't think anyone is going to feel any strong discomfort with some random person writing new Star Wars stories, even if those stories use the canonical characters. I suppose Disney might have a problem with it, but as a society, I don't see very many people losing sleep over someone not licensed by the Disney corporation writing more Star Wars. Likewise Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry is long gone, and while Paramount has ownership of the IP, if someone wrote their own Star Trek stories, no one is going to feel like they don't "comprehend the distinction between art and fan fiction".
  And for further contrast, consider IPs that are well and truly part of the public domain. Cthulhu was the work of one author but since his death the lore has been expanded by multitudes of people, and no one finds that distasteful or tone deaf. No one thinks the "Hades" or "God of War" series of games don't qualify for "art" because the characters and lore being written about were the works of dead authors and the new material is certainly not "authorized" by those authors or their descendants.
  Obviously time and distance plays a part of this, but as a more contemporary example, I wonder how many people would lose sleep or feel any significant discomfort over unauthorized or even AI generated Harry Potter works, either now or post JK Rowling's death. At the very least, if this quote read that Gogineni would "rest easy knowing that even though JK Rowling has [lost the plot/is an awful person/pick your reason for disliking her or her later work], GPT-5 will autocomplete her series." would that make people as equally uncomfortable? In my estimation, I would guess it would fall somewhere between the GRRM version and something like new Star Wars material for most people.
  1. voidhorse · 1790686965 · focus · HN ↗
    I think part of it also depends on how much we have a signal that the author themselves has given up the farm.
    For example, Harry Potter and Star Wars are clearly IPs in which the creator has zero qualms handing over the rights for all kinds of extensions of the universe, movies, tv shows, other books, plays, toys, amusement parks, etc.
    This pretty easily removes these works from the sphere of art and more into the sphere of "pop culture".
    In the GRRM case, we already have some extensions of the IP, tv shows, board games, video games. However, it's not nearly as severe as some others.
    In either case, I still think anyone who thinks they can "complete" a series by an author doesn't fundamentally understand art. It's a logical impossibility. I'd feel just as uncomfortable with this proposition applied to JK as I do to GRRM. Authorial intent matters. Even if the author is "dead" once the work leaves their finger tips, art is not a perception of the natural world, it is a form of expression which makes the particular human being behind it essential to its constitution, for better or worse. Many people understand this intuitively. The death of the author is more about the fact that an author cannot control the interpretations that ensue once a work is published, it's not about the author somehow being totally fungible.
    Even in cases in which works are "completed" by other parties (because the original author died and asked them to do it, for instance) the parties involved have a clear notion of trying their best to do it "as the author would have intended". This is impossible, but it speaks to the human understanding that the artist is in fact in some way an essential component of the art.
    "Completing" a source work is way different than spinning up a derivative work, partly because the primary author is not involved, so the derivative is, definitionally, not an instance of their self-expression or understanding or framing of the world. It's a totally different thing.
    As modernmech put it, a conception of art without the artist or humanities without the humans is basically just a fully commoditized conception of art. It is not art at that point. It is art reduced to goods and services.
malcolmxxx · 1790513082 · focus · HN ↗
Mom, look: I'm news now!
cs702 · 1790513379 · focus · HN ↗
The title is editorialized but conveys a key point made by the OP: Many execs at OpenAI knew that using the work of every author on earth without permission would be perceived as unethical, so execs were worried about this information getting attention in forums like HN. My understanding is that HN has millions of visitors who never log in, many of whom are highly educated individuals in positions of influence.
1. [deleted] · 1790513474 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
2. roshin · 1790514224 · focus · HN ↗
  one of the few social media sites that still allow lurkers
3. 01284a7e · 1790514362 · focus · HN ↗
  And at least a few poorly educated folks in positions of insignificance, like myself.
  1. zimpenfish · 1790516801 · focus · HN ↗
    There are dozens of us!
    xbar · 1790516928 · focus · HN ↗
    Represence.
    tomrod · 1790517342 · focus · HN ↗
    We have fantastic presents that cannon't be ignoreable.
  2. Lucasoato · 1790519957 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re not alone, brother!
  3. bluefirebrand · 1790520544 · focus · HN ↗
    Hear hear!
    tclancy · 1790528210 · focus · HN ↗
    And in this specific case, here here!
  4. cs702 · 1790520683 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course... "many of whom" is not the same as "a majority."
4. api · 1790515623 · focus · HN ↗
  And high educated individuals of no influence!
  1. kQq9oHeAz6wLLS · 1790517644 · focus · HN ↗
    And not a few low/uneducated people of high influence
    bluefirebrand · 1790520574 · focus · HN ↗
    Way too many of these unfortunately. Just way way way too many.
5. MarkWayneNewton · 1790515934 · focus · HN ↗
  HN loves to smell its own farts.
  1. fizzbuzzbarbazz · 1790516947 · focus · HN ↗
    Our educational system at work.
6. bookofjoe · 1790516146 · focus · HN ↗
  >... HN has millions of visitors who never log in...
  That's something I hadn't considered; when something appears that gains no traction and vanishes in minutes from the "new" front page, that fleeting 30-45 minute-long residency may well catch the eyes and minds of individuals in a position to look more deeply and act.
  1. pessimizer · 1790520912 · focus · HN ↗
    Only like 3% of readers poast. That's why there's a concentration on the web of the extremely knowledgeable, extremely witty, extremely belligerent, and the extremely mentally ill.
    > may well catch the eyes and minds of individuals in a position to look more deeply and act.
    Of course sometimes that act is "post as many comments as you can to this thread without upvoting it," or "grab about 20 dormant accounts to upvote it, post top-level positive, but dumb, comments, have those same accounts upvote those, and get detected as a voting ring."
    nunez · 1790523843 · focus · HN ↗
    that's basically every forum on the Internet. Reddit had the same levels of engagement
    bookofjoe · 1790861372 · focus · HN ↗
    "That's why there's a concentration on the web of the extremely knowledgeable, extremely witty, extremely belligerent, and the extremely mentally ill."
    Best quote of the year.
7. caaqil · 1790516736 · focus · HN ↗
  > HN has millions of visitors who never log in, many of whom are highly educated individuals in positions of influence.
  Huh, I have yet to meet these folks in the comment section, they sound interesting. But then again, your assessment preemptively excludes them from appearing in the comments section, so it's unfalsifiable by design. That is how you know this is a great observation.
  1. natbennett · 1790517112 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s not unfalsifiable. Non-commenting Hacker News readers are observable by looking at the traffic that HN drives to other websites.
    bookofjoe · 1790517586 · focus · HN ↗
    Truth. When I cross-post something on my blog that gains traction on HN, a huge spike from HN dominating my traffic origins appears in my Blogger stats.
    caaqil · 1790519715 · focus · HN ↗
    > Non-commenting Hacker News readers are observable
    So: a) you can observe/measure the size/source of non-commenting HN readers from various proxies b) you can make claims about the intellectual status or influence of users not logged in to HN as an outsider
    It's obvious that a and b are orthogonal.
  2. shaky-carrousel · 1790517324 · focus · HN ↗
    Unfalsifiable like your observation. I guess that makes it a great observation too.
  3. anthonyIPH · 1790517480 · focus · HN ↗
    Surely server logs and married up with data tracking could prove it one way or the other, so not truly unfalsifiable. It doesn't sound like an unreasonable premise to me at least.
  4. sheumais · 1790517622 · focus · HN ↗
    I've been reading for months and made an account only a few days ago (though I am merely a lowly undergraduate with no influence).
    bookofjoe · 1790518734 · focus · HN ↗
    Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel were once "lowly undergraduates with no influence."
8. m3kw9 · 1790517146 · focus · HN ↗
  probably can't have it both ways, get this level of intelligence this fast if they just get what they have paid or synthesized themselves.
  1. saghm · 1790517268 · focus · HN ↗
    Some people don't think the ends justify the means. If doing something bad is required to get a certain outcome, maybe it's still bad.
  2. NateEag · 1790521008 · focus · HN ↗
    And, given the insanity that's been happening, like the HuggingFace hack, maybe shower development would be a VERY GOOD THING.
9. [deleted] · 1790517297 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]

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