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.”'

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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)

Do you have any evidence of them being a lobby organisation

Have you looked at their name?

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.

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?

the current system hurts us all

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.

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

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.

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 (https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/137501417/Friendship-ended).

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Imagine OpenAI, Anthropic &co having to compete by hiring [thousands] of their own talent to help training their commercial models.

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. Imagine 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.

Aaron was sued for distributing and not for pirating. They are different offences

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)

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.

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 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?"

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

largest copyright theft operation in human history

In fact, you're doing exactly that right here.

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...

It's not citing, it's regurgitating, like a stochastic parrot.

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.

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.

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.

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.

save some boot for the rest of us

https://web.archive.org/web/20260927062011/https://authorsgu...

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Feudalism is the natural state of mankind

No, it's not. What we call feudalism arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

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...

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

democratic elections give power to the people without requiring labor, it's one of the pillars of western society

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 in a race to the bottom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

Are there any studies that show it has actually put more authors out of work than the prior trendline?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Warhol FTW

Say you spend a hundred working hours on an ephemeral painting (that is, it won't last, it will fade, disintegrate in nature, can't be moved, etc.). 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 and the original artist has no recourse?

Because it seems like your more specific concerns about e.g. disease cures could be addressed by targeted legislation creating new exemptions from intellectual property without destroying the means of protecting income from creative work.

(Scenario 1 has happened to an artist I know, luckily with a piece of non-ephemeral work)

Yes, art has no inherent economic value, and neither does the hundred hours you spent making it.

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?

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.

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.

- https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/24/dont-let-ai-kil... - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/ai-authors-im... - https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/ai-slop-books-amazon-marketpl...

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.

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.

Put Authors Out of Work

Specifics would help the credibility of this claim quite a bit.

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.

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.

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.

A one time settlement for this would be laughable. They should pay royalties in perpetuity or be dismantled.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

And at least a few poorly educated folks in positions of insignificance, like myself.

There are dozens of us!

Represence.

And high educated individuals of no influence!

HN loves to smell its own farts.