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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.
It's good to know we all live rent-free in Dario Amodei's head
You might be thinking of Demis Altman.
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.”'
I was curious what he was responding to. Per 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 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."
Same as all the world’s copyright text lives rent-free in Claude and ChatGPT.
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.
Surely anthropic has a customer service channel you can use
But Claude probably trawls HN so it’ll just tell him in its daily slop report.
You’re jocking right?
I just want to keep this crap off public spaces; anyone who gives money to anthropic can deal with that relationship separately
Sure but Anthropic customer support is infamous enough for being close to non existent
Caveat emptor; please don't drag that here.
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.
Legal incentives against better internal communication/coordination create so much inefficiency. The legal system should focus on outcomes more than internal comms.
i am of the belief that papering over a fundamental lack of integrity and ethics will usually fail to conceal it. it is ineffective.
lack of ethics and integrity is of course part of the design of a capitalist economy.
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."
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I agree with you, but I acknowledge that some people (not myself) might feel different about copyright.
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.
EDIT: look at it this way: no one is calling Internet Archive "a sketchy US website".
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.
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.
They mention it in the text, its this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
Just go look: https://libgen.im/ (may be blocked by your isp, just find an alternate URL somehwere)
(note: https://z-library.sk/ is prettier/nicer)
They're talking about LibGen, per the article.
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.
"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)
Simply look at the Wikipedia article?
Have you looked at their name?
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...
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.
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?
Then you misunderstood my point. I think copyright law should be significantly changed and the current system hurts us all.
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.
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?
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
How? The current system enables the GPL. The GPL protects many open source projects.
All the GPL does is restrict rights, unlike permissive licenses.
So.. Linux is bad and we should all use BSDs?
Why has restrictive Linux succeeded far more than any BSD ever has?
Why yes, I did order a new strawman, thanks so much!
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.
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
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.
Is quoting “criticism of OpenAI” without the rest of the post a way of saying “checkmate”?
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 (https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/137501417/Friendship-ended).
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.
Big tech will enable access to free information and will help people reach new heights. Do you see how wrong that sounds?
The article is about a lawsuit targeting OpenAI. That's how rules and laws are typically enforced.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
Nothing is inverted. OpenAI was never engaged in any sort of distribution of pirated copies.
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.
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.
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.
And to whom will this settlement be paid? To your random blogger or coder on GitHub?
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.
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.
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.
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?”
Aaron was sued for distributing and not for pirating. They are different offences
As far as I know Aaron never distributed that which was collected in the MIT data closet.
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.
Because this website is full of bootlickers without real friends. People cut off from social life. Losers that hate humans.
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)
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.
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?
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.
"Why do you have one position for an activist and another for a 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?"
why?
uhhh... capitalism
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?
Many people think that it was fair use: training is akin to reading, not copying.
Especially the courts.
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.
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.
I didn't say otherwise. That's a straw man.
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?
No.
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.
Because torrenting includes redistribution, since you also upload to other peers
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.
Exactly analogous to a human reading the material.
Please give me the location of any copyrighted work in the weights of any open source model or a prompt that will retrieve it.
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.
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.
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.
Yet "distillation" which is essentially asking someone whose purpose is to answer questions is considered theft.
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.
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?
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] https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...
Yes, one man at Microsoft agrees with you.
It's not citing, it's regurgitating, like a stochastic parrot.
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.
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 of 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.
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.
Who cares. IP is a fiction, all copyrights and patents should be abolished.
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.
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.
It can’t, it needs hundreds of thousands (if not multiple millions) of human hours spent making content for it.
“Sketchy 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.
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.
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.
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 a large fraction of every book ever published including millions of books that have no public funding.
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.
If it's mainly public domain, AI weights should be too. No more copyright for them they don't deserve it.
Robot companies don't appropriate the work of other people. 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 sufficiently original that it does not displace the work on which it is based. LLMs fail to abide by that political compromise by a country mile.
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.
save some boot for the rest of us
https://web.archive.org/web/20260927062011/https://authorsgu...
Thank you.
Not even openai want to get flamed on show hn
I could not care less
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"
TFA is by the plaintiff. This is PR spin, not click bait.
Regardless, the HN guidelines are clear that editorializing the title is inappropriate in a submission.
Email hn@ycombinator.com and they'll fix it
Pulled datasets off libgen for a corpus once and it's overwhelmingly in-copyright textbooks, the public domain framing doesn't really hold up.
Is our opinion that important ? Nice !
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.
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.
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.
Because you want as many people as possible to be exposed to your ideas, to the point that Christianity 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?
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.
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. Especially after a few billion in funding.
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?
Machines still cannot make babies ... Just sayin'.
And as soon as they can construct it you will get a SkyNet or Horizon scenario.
It would appear that with the exception of Africa and parts of Asia humans can't make many either.
There's a book about that, here is its ACX review:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia
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.
And this is why we see ever better attempts to mimic human skin, faces, movement, emotions, etc, with robot manufacturers.
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.
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.
To be fair, internet companies are much worst rent seekers then publishers ever was.
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.
Personally I dream of the end of all human labor.
They will never let that happen. You need to keep the pleb busy or they start getting ideas.
Who is "they" this week? The Trilateral Commission? Q-Anon? The YMCA?
The rich. But you knew this.
Which rich people, acting through what mechanism? "The rich" is not a single actor.
They just happen to control government. They are not a single actor, but they do want one thing: all the wealth and power.
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. I have a short story, basically a horror Isekai, portal goes straight into a place like Sarek or similar pretty northern fell landscape, only full of bears and savages. I think my protagonists are safer in that, than the average human in your scenario.
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.
If you don't have power, somebody else gets it, and then they have that power over you.
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?
You’re arguing with a scenario you invented, then treating its most deranged conclusion as evidence.
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.
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.
Do you think people with money employ people as an act of charity or prosocial goodness?
This position is hilarious, because it's the class war is the only thing they want you to avoid thinking about.
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.
No, it's not. What we call feudalism arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
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.
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".
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;
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, 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...
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.
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.
I read it more as a sarcastic reflection on the state of the world by the author rather than that the author believes what he write himself or agrees with it. It is a debating technique to push a contrary argument to the extreme to see where the balance lies.
please tell us how you imagine things
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
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.
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.
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.
This is run-of-the-mill neofeudalist techbro belief. Peter Thiel is a big fan.
With so much defeatism and this grade of inferiority complexes, I really do wonder what keeps you even alive.
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.
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?
We will never end in the star trek branch until energy and resources in general are abundantly cheap and uncontested. Even in Star Trek, the canon is still that next to whole modern part of society, even on earth, there still exists classes. It’s just that the TV series depict the upper class: everyone working for the federation and star fleet.
Or if it's even possible to control the models.
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?
Remember the spaceship in WALL-E? That, but no one is fat.
how naive do you have to be to believe something like that...
Or how delusional.
Great news then, the end is nigh
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.
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.
Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.
Good! End human labor.
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.
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.
I believe the parent may have assumed that you care about creature comforts such as water, food and shelter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you think prevents you from being literally enslaved? The government is (or was) one avenue of your leverage against capital, when they own the government and they write the laws what protection do you have against being forced into service?
The complete inability of people to learn that what we have now was written in blood as their form of leverage is enough to drive a man insane.
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.
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.)
It’s wild how much people are scared for their livelihood. What a sad thing to read here.
It’s not putting people out of work. It’s making jobs miserable by removing creativity and control from them.
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.
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.
hi load-bearing.
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.
It's not. You be performatively hostile and people be hostile to you. That's all.
Car brands don't pitch cars as horse replacements. They put names and icons of horses on cars and horse riders love them. No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.
AI startups pitched AI like it's a coagulation of malice and hostility against humanity on tap. People aren't liking it. Of course they won't. No intelligence would, natural or artificial. It's wild that they don't get that.
Search for something like “newspaper complaints about cars early 1900s” and read the contemporaneous complaints.
The fact that that complaining happened then and not now is evidence that motor cars are now widely seen as better than horse-drawn personal transport, not that they were eagerly welcomed from the first day of production.
They are destroying fucking humanity. They are evil.
They have no will but to fill the world with hate and drivel
"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.
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
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?
I wonder how many disruptive technologies all the people panting about AI have lived through..
Check out this show about word processors from 1983: https://youtu.be/Jt0OoXluC8g
at 4:08:
Lol, the fear mongering is just part of the hype train at this point.
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.
Yet they solved a Millennium Prize problem, you people are delusional at this point.
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?
Funny thing is that on HN "declare copyright dead" was a popular opinion. For some reason that did a 180 a couple years ago.
Sad to see hackers become copyright zealots.
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...
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.
It’s 2030, I open HN and top result is from 7 hours ago, 2100 points, 700 comments:
The optics are bad. The submission marks a turning page in human history.
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
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.
Elon Musk seems to care a great deal about a lot of stuff that frankly isn't any of his concern, not really. Trump care immensely about shallow stuff that's really below what the president of the United States of America should spend time on.
Altman has some reason to worry, because developers and the users of HN are then ones he needs to promote/hype his products. OpenAI still needs customers and they need to sell tokens and a large number of users on HN are not only not buying, but are becoming increasingly hostile towards the product Altman is selling. My guess would be that he'd assume that the users on HN are in some sense his peers, and they are currently extremely divided in the question about the value and dangers of LLMs, and are increasingly critical of the business practises of OpenAI (and other AI companies).
That makes sense, but at the same time Altman has been 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?
How many people are aware of those accusations? It’s takes a very long time for things like that to permeate a culture to the point where there is actual consequences. 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. He’s still praised by many in the tech industry
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.
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.
HN is their AB testing playground.
The Title should be: "Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"
Meanwhile opposing counsel was fabricating research to claim AI was impacting authors and was caught trying to bury their involvement: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/25/openai-accuses-plaintiff...
Neither side is coming out smelling like roses here.
Posted by an account created to post this.
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.
Speak for yourself, mine did evolve a lot over the past year.
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.
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?
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.
That title is editorialized af
Simple distinction between OpenAI and Anthropic - the one is sleazy, the other is creepy. Still makes OpenAI look better in comparison.