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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
That's not interesting, it's just dumb. OAI (among others) plundered the whole internet to steal their training data, what difference does a single website, however "sketchy" or not, make?
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.
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.
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)
The group lobbies at the national and state levels on censorship and tax concerns, and it has initiated or supported several major lawsuits in defense of authors' copyrights.
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?
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?
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.
BSD was under a cloud of a lawsuit at the early stages of corporate adoption of open source operating systems and by the time that was resolved network effects had given Linux too much of a lead.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1.5 billion is an order of magnitude less than what Anthropic just had bought the books in question. And like I said it's infinitely more than what any private has ever paid for doing the same thing.
Even if AI companies were literally doing the exact same thing as Aaron Swartz but not getting punished for it, that still doesn't make Swartz's punishment retroactively their fault. If you have a problem with powerful people being powerful, then I suggest you direct your complaints to the heavens.
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.
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.
each creative provides their own trained model that scales their own creative vision and skills
I like the vision, but the model would need more than just the author's work. The situation you are imagining would require models like we have as a base.
Aaron Swartz fought to "free" knowledge and information produced by (in many cases publicly funded) research that was and still is hoarded by the academic publishing industry so that they can profit of it.
What big AI companies have done is illegally hoovering up copyrighted creative output of individuals and creating a situation where the wages that normally would be paid to those individuals instead go to that one company (that stole their work) which now becomes disproportionally rich and powerful.
In both cases companies obtain money and power by hoarding information obtained through dubious means (in the former case most academics willingly participate while at the same tone they often don't really have a choice). Exactly what Swartz was fighting against.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is a fair point, except that in this case the same laws[1] are being applied to both, and the person I was replying to was literally arguing both ways!
[1] broadly the same laws: I do understand one was criminal and one is civil and yes I agree that injustice. To me neither should be criminal.
I think it's good when eight-hundred and fifty-two billion dollar, for-profit corporation establish legal precedent than can then be used to protect activists.
We aren't. Most people are silent majority, just not sharing their true opinions out of fear, laziness, or some other reason like maybe just the bias of how most living entities function and also related to how the bystander effect also works.
Then, who is "we" here giving the appearance of a consensus opinion here and in mainstream? It's a vocal minority, it's the powerful, it's the causes they fund and put resources behind to continue to preserve their causes. And now today, it's astroturfing, fake AI-LLM-bots almost indistinguishable from you and I. Don't mistake artificial consensus for reality.
Why is big tech getting away with so much more?
IMO Because the majority of people are passive, standing by, tolerating abuse and trickery by the minority. This is a perpetual cycle in humanity: those minority use their power and leverage and abuse their positions until they are ousted. We have tolerated this because we haven't stood up yet and acted to change things and demand equal enforcement of the laws that appear to apply to us but not to them. If history says anything, they are afraid and panicking and will continue to be more abusive until they push our buttons more and more, and usually it explodes in their face because they still need us (which is why mainstream rich people push robotics and automation and AI down our throats so aggressively because they know all this) and yet never have minority humans won that approach before. Leadership always changes. Life always changes, and no force can stay dominant for ever.
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?
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.
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?
However Meta is engaged in multiple legal cases about them torrenting copyrighted material. And they bring the reasonable defense that they might have been caught torrenting, but were not specically caught seeding/uploading. For all anyone can prove they could have blocked all uploads from their torrent client
It will be interesting to see if any of those cases reach a judgement on that point, instead of both parties just settling
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.
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.
That begs the question though, should it be? If you’re looking up the lyrics to a song you’ve bought, does it really matter, at least philosophically,
how one retrieves them?
Is this a direct inference call to the model or does it use a web search tool to pull the answer? In the former case I guess that could be infringement. In the latter case it is no more than a tool that facilitates it and would be not be infringement any more than Xerox is infringing if you use their copier to copy the front page of the NYT.
Those lyrics aren't in the model. They're either in the database DeepSeek makes tool calls into (unlikely), or they're out on the Internet and DeepSeek simply retrieved them on your behalf.
LLMs are far too lossy to be able to store such lyrics in their entirety. In fact, they're not even "lossy" since they're not even trying to record such information. They're just weights for how likely it is that any given word will come after another.
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.
Would you be happy if they bought exactly one copy of each book? That might be a dozen sales between the AI labs, some tens of dollars to the author. Is this really what you're so upset over?
And the solution to avoid this piracy has been to buy up rare editions of old books, cut them up and scan them. Better?
Is it okay to rob a bank for a billion if each individual customer only loses $10? Stealing $10 is fine right, why don't we just let every company with your credit card steal a little $10 from you? You don't mind right?
Excusing illegal behavior creates a moral hazard and over time leads to the kind of amoral and corrupt government and business leaders we have today. There's a pervasive sense in society that money can buy you out of any consequences and morality is basically irrelevant, every little thing like this is how it happens. It's the same dynamic as SF failing to police minor shoplifting for years, which led to stores closing and metal bars everywhere that we have today. Even then we actually do punish a few shoplifters for stealing $100 worth of goods, but we don't punish these companies for stealing billions worth?
Whoa there: Distillation isn't illegal. Who said it was?
That has yet to be decided in court. At best it's a violation of the terms of service, but the only restitution for such a violation is termination of service and by then it's too late.
Remember: Distillation is literally just giving the AI a prompt and seeing what it spits out. If that were illegal, we'd all be guilty whenever we used AI.
Examining your competitors doing business is as old as business.
frame it in a dumb, manipulative way like that
> In fact, you're doing exactly that right here.
You're dead fucking right they are doing exactly that. They are saying that what is wrong is wrong.
Instead you seem to be making out that AI companies are some kind of victim that has to "worry" about "manipulation". Meanwhile authors are out of a job right now and not by accident. What's up with that?
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.
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.
They were just worried that the commentariat on HN will frame it in a dumb, manipulative way like that.
You’re chastising others for a tone you are yourself employing, and are making monumental assumptions based on a few choice quotes. From the quotes alone you can’t tell if OpenAI thought libgen was sketchy or not.
Also, contrary to what you’re claiming, they were wrong. HN in general seems to approve 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.
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.
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.
“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 also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless
I do see a problem with a company loudly announcing that they are going to make people's lives miserable purely for profit. Leaving aside that it goes against OpenAI's stated mission ("to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity"), the disdain for the lives they are intentionally trying to ruin makes it a problem.
And even if you believe that the transition is inevitable, as it is the case with phasing out combustion engines in cars, anyone reasonable would see that the transition is gradual to give people time to adapt. Instead of doing that, OpenAI is burning cash at astonishing rates, polluting the environment, and killing personal computing with the only aim of being the only ones left atop the ruins. I do see a problem with that.
I have read the article. I called out that they are putting so much emphasis on this term, which is one line, one opinion and build 1/2 of their argument: AI-Company - bad! on it.
A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public
This is some incredible mental gymnastics here, wow. Some books should be public domain (even if they actually aren't), and this magically justifies stealing from an 80TB library of a large fraction of every book ever published including millions of books that have no public funding.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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?
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?
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 how large is the market for this, compared to the rest of the economy? How will the relative economic leverage of people change as they move from knowledge work to the relational economy?
If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
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.
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.
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.
Wish granted! You no longer have any influence or power! Zaibatsu Heavy Industries has now built a gigafactory that's taking over half of your backyard, is piping their fumes directly into your house. Your mayor's office is not responding to your calls, and their private security forces are preventing you from even going outside because it is now a high risk area.
FALGSC doesn't happen without a fight for power. FALGSC as presented in Star Trek or literally any fiction _still_ has power struggles and people getting fucked. The only way you enforce a lack of influence and power is with a higher force ensuring you do, which is then the sole holder of influence and power.
Also, you're describing a fantasy. Something that isn't happening in your lifetime. Maybe now would be time to wake up before Zaibatsu builds a gigafactory in your backyard.
Then you'll be a serf, or a slave, or killed and ground up into soilent green once it's realized it costs more to keep you alive than you produce value. At least you can feed the more useful slaves.
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?
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.
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.
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 use 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".
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.
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.
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.
Have you listened to how people like Altman and Thiel talk? They do not seem to care about regular people except as objects to be subjugated. This kind of talk is also how we get a president that claims repeatedly to want an end to war and then starts one. When people tell you who they are and what they’re about, listen.
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 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.
I’m pretty sure they are using Star Trek as “generic human spacefaring utopian future”. As i said above, you could insert “luxury gay space communism” in there and still have the same meaning.
And if I labeled it “luxury gay space communism” instead? Or Star Trek? I’d note in the latter, it sure seemed like a large portion of media was holonovels, and, as far as I can recall, the vast majority of the time they are shown to be programmed by lay people using voice prompts. And why the non-stop doom? I just assume/hope for the happy (or hell, I’ll settle for bittersweet) ending, not much I can do as a single person to bend history to my whims anyway. Maybe Trump nukes Taiwan, maybe aliens abduct all of our bears, maybe a gamma ray burst fries us all, but so far the human race seems to be on a continued upward trajectory, why worry too much about every imaginable dystopia?
You argue that it's better to be optimistic as you're a single person without power whatsoever, but your simplistic optimism is even worse. You're opinion is not new: Sartre would say you utilize your proposed insignificance to escape from the anxiety of freedom and responsability.
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.
Indeed. People can paint, write, have hobbies, or whatever else for fun, but why be forced to for any reason? Or expect that there should always be a market for your work, under pain of law?
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.
Assuming you are referring to the USA, are you claiming people have not been able to campaign for political positions and vote for their candidates for decades? Because that is the definition of "democratic elections" (except for the electoral college nonsense in the US and 2000 presidential elections).
Otherwise, your complaint is more about voters either being too stupid, too disinterested, or not having enough time participate in the democracy. Which is a problem, but real life comes with constraints and it isn't really easy to solve all of these by snapping one's fingers.
Claiming that there has been widespread election fraud when elections have been, by and large, free and fair, is anti democratic. Obviously, there have been issues with disenfranchising certain people's votes, making it harder for them, blah blah, but it had been trending better and better and access to information had been getting better and better.
It also might just be possible that people are too tribal and simply can't comprehend all the complexities of the world to make good voting decisions.
The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.
However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.
Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases. With all of the above, it doesn't need to be.
The power of a government depends on the country's economic and military strength. Currently that strength depends on having a population that's sufficiently large and skilled. If individuals become powerless, their governments power will wane as well. The power from AI will likely be more concentrated, either in a few super powers, or outside the control of governments. And the government of those super powers will likely care even less about their people.
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.
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.
Haven't we been told the Earth is overpopulated for years? Seems a fair bet that the future will involve a whole lot of war and famine.
We're already slowly walking away from globalism. Nationalism is being fawned. It's taking a lot of time, but I'd say by the end of the 2030s we'll be having WWIII at the latest.
And at that time LLMs will be better decision makers than humans, I'd wager. So for now I'm expecting AI stuff to get funded at the expense of everything else.
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.)
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.
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.
No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.
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.
"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.
If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
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 think that that the "they're destroying jobs" or even then "they're stealing intellectual property" argument overshadows or distracts from the more important issues. What really concerns me is the large scale erosion of truth and reliability. Codebases and the internet at large are being flooded with less and less accurate information, with more bloat, and with more errors that will exponentially increase as more and more is built on them.
Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.
Yes, while I personally believe this is a problem to solve, not an insurmountable obstacle, I cannot ignore this kind of harm. I do think this will be outweighed by all the instances where they improve decision making, dig up
obscure information, correct errors, etc. I can’t see any fundamental reason a near future AI system has to hallucinate anything, and when we also have people complaining in thread that LLMs are dumping out song lyrics verbatim…well, it’s an amusing contrast to say the least.
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?
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.
How did they get a free pass? From the court decisions I have read they were held liable for downloading pirate copies and paid large fines for it. That might have been Meta, not OAI, though, but the point is the same.
I didn't know about the fines and can't find a lot of details online. It seems meta got fined for something else, but it was about 1B, which is less than 1% of their revenue.
I think the smaller companies or individual which did stuff like that got their life ruined. The pirate bay admin got fined multiple millions of dollars.
So if I agree it's not a "free pass", it's still a cheap pass many others didn't get.
Makes me realize how, as mentioned by other comments, copyright laws are a tool for the powerful to oppress others rather than an actual universal right.
Honestly I don’t give a damn about copyright. I’m baffled by the double standards. Aaron Swartz was put away for so, so so much less than the massive amount of criminal activity we’re seeing here. They’re conspiring to break the law, openly, even jokingly. They’re hacking people, they’re stealing from people, openly. If no one is going to put a stop to it we might as well declare the legal system failed in its entirety.
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.
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
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.
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.
It certainly makes it harder to discover human authors, because stores are flooded with plausible but terrible books from morons using LLMs to generate text modelled on other books that are doing well. I don't think that is 'displacing' human authors though, which implies replacing with equivalents?
I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations/decoration that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce (you see this in low-end advertising a lot now).
Strange that they are being used to replace many of the things we value in life with low-quality imitations of human work.
You think LLMs will put authors out of work? I certainly hope not, given the quality of product they currently produce. If they produced genuinely creative and interesting work it'd be more likely and I wouldn't really mind, but there's no sign of that so far. We are so so far from LLMs competing with humans in writing anything longer than a few paragraphs.
Only a moron in a hurry would think that the output of LLMs currently can replace human authors spending a few years writing a book.
what? there is _definitely_ evidence that writers are being put out of work. writing is extremely competitive, and very very very few authors are able to make a living writing and publishing novel creative works. many make their living by applying their writing skills towards journalism, marketing, corporate copy etc, all of which are under significant pressure from AI _already_. the writers that i know firsthand all report that their work lives have been turned upside down in the past couple of years.
if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
We've switched from authors (novels and non-fiction books) to writers here. That's a very different question.
Sure if you include writers writing for business, translators etc who were never very valued by business, there has been a huge impact already, because business is willing to accept shoddy results if they are good enough and put up with mistakes and poor style. That low end of generating content has definitely been impacted, for example in social media as I mentioned LLMs have replaced a lot of 'writers' who generated filler text for content advertising.
if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
If it's so obvious, it shouldn't be so hard to articulate specifics. Maybe you can name just one author?
Being a writer was always a terrible profession for making money and having stable work. In my observations, AI is incapable of writing in the way a skilled author can -- what AI will replace is jobs working on small blurbs, promotional posters, and summaries. But those aren't really authors; I'm not sure if we care that the person employed to summarize novels at readers digest is now being replaced by an AI.
And that's why specifics matter. So much of the discourse is emotionally charged, and people imagine details that are not there. What I'd like to do is bring the details into the light.
So, does anybody reading this anywhere on this site have any information on any author that made money as a full-time writer that is now unemployed because their work has been replaced by AI? I'm not talking about the industry being upended. I'm a software engineer and my industry has been upended, but that has not resulted in job loss as much as it has changing what the profession does. Are authors in a different position than software engineers in this regard? Or are they truly just losing their jobs as they're mass replaced by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of the latter, which is why I'm asking.
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.
I remember when the concern was gpt2 could create fake news text. Now they can straight up create fake photo realistic images and are actively hacking government services yet we still haven’t pulled the plug.
As far as I can tell the only remedy for this is holding CEOs responsible for the actions of models operated by their company. If there are no consequences then they will have no concern for these crimes.
The Authors Guild CEO was an experienced IP attorney. The guild's leadership and policy teams, while they are cognizant of optics, think like lawyers, not like PR pros or journalists looking to maximize clicks.
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.
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?
So, what are you arguing? If a group of people like their jobs, society should disallow disruption to that group? Why? It seems to me that we may reach a point where machines can replace humans for most tasks, and I don’t think we should try to make that state of things illegal. We should instead try to solve the economics of it in a way that benefits all.
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.
Basically this was already decided with the Anthropic Case. Lawful acquirement of books allows for training. So basically buying each book once, which is trivial seeing the amount of money these companies sit on, is enough.
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.
There are entire industries that exist outside the realm of computer science, and forms of "data" that don't exist on a disk. Look into the perfume industry, for instance. Do you think no one has ever tried copying Chanel No 5? Flavors can't be copyrighted but many restaurants and food manufacturers protect them as trade secrets - see KFC's "11 herbs and spices."
“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.
Agreed. In a recent interview, cloudflare's CEO/founder built an argument on the 'fact' that people pursue music for fame and money. No concept of artistic expression or positive impact on the world. It blows my mind how impactful your bubble and education are on your (lack of) perception
Gross. I think there’s been a large overcorrection to stem away from the arts. Certainly I’ve seen that in Australia when looking at schools for my sons.
This is the fault of capitalism, under which you are required to sell your time and skills for cash to survive. Under this system, no one who isn’t independently wealthy can be an artist without commoditizing their art. So that’s the lens through which people view art: just another commodity to sell so one can survive, not unlike grains or oil. The quote also shows that the artist is fungible in this conception, only the output matters no matter how it got there, as long as you can sell it.
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.
... HN has millions of visitors who never log in...
That's something I hadn't considered; when something appears that gains no traction and vanishes in minutes from the "new" front page, that fleeting 30-45 minute-long residency may well catch the eyes and minds of individuals in a position to look more deeply and act.
Only like 3% of readers poast. That's why there's a concentration on the web of the extremely knowledgeable, extremely witty, extremely belligerent, and the extremely mentally ill.
may well catch the eyes and minds of individuals in a position to look more deeply and act.
Of course sometimes that act is "post as many comments as you can to this thread without upvoting it," or "grab about 20 dormant accounts to upvote it, post top-level positive, but dumb, comments, have those same accounts upvote those, and get detected as a voting ring."
HN has millions of visitors who never log in, many of whom are highly educated individuals in positions of influence.
Huh, I have yet to meet these folks in the comment section, they sound interesting. But then again, your assessment preemptively excludes them from appearing in the comments section, so it's unfalsifiable by design. That is how you know this is a great observation.
Truth. When I cross-post something on my blog that gains traction on HN, a huge spike from HN dominating my traffic origins appears in my Blogger stats.
So: a) you can observe/measure the size/source of non-commenting HN readers from various proxies b) you can make claims about the intellectual status or influence of users not logged in to HN as an outsider
Surely server logs and married up with data tracking could prove it one way or the other, so not truly unfalsifiable. It doesn't sound like an unreasonable premise to me at least.
I can't prove this, but as someone who has noticed recent changes, I believe this has been also achieving attention of the leadership at HN and moderation behavior/flags/system has changed.
Certain opinions, topics, responses get flagged greater now; ones that disagree with a certain political standpoint or that criticize the intel community apparatus get flagged and censored now here. I used to see flagged content where the OP was removed only for bigotry and clearly abusive cases, now its for cases where people feel uncomfortable and strongly disagree.
edit: recently for the first time, I started to feel this is no longer a safe/trusted place for the original hacker ethos it founded itself on.
So do we have another forum for open discussions with bright people? not all the bright people want to build something merely for making someone rich at the expense of morals.
not that I know of. would love to. maybe simply replicating the HN content at first but witg better moderation (still think /. moderation scheme is thr gold standard, and the reason it's good and effective is why its never replicated)
My understanding is that HN has millions of visitors who never log in, many of whom are highly educated individuals in positions of influence.
In my experience this sense of influence is hugely over-inflated here on HN compared to reality.
And let’s be clear about what the linked article says: one researcher at OpenAI referenced HN as an example of a place where a negative story could surface. Am I surprised that a researcher at OpenAI is familiar with HN? No, obviously not, that career path is right in HN’s typical audience.
Does anyone have any predictions as to what impact this will actually have for OpenAI? Could it be anything more than just paying a large sum of money?
Sure this article is published by one of the stakeholders (the authors) and thus they are not "neutral". Sure it may highlight some sentences taken out of their contexts, that were not meant to be public. But, in the end, it seems it still draws a portrait, where people who are cited seem to not value creative work, where they feel very confident about themselves and their superiority. The fact they seem to question the public reaction, rather than questioning if what they are doing is ethical, make them look hypocritical. And it reads like they are ready to use any means necessary to achieve their goals, and it seems they are not that frightened by the law.
I know many people will think that's business as usual, and that business are for profits and that's their only _raison d'être_, that winning the AI race is all what matters, and trusting any promise from a company/CEO/executive make you a fool. But not everyone think like that, and OpenAI/Anthropric/etc. are allowed to exist because many people expect some positive outcomes from their work. And a healthy society needs a bit more than "business as usual/any lie is ok as long as we are not caught" to work. And asking for the same level of responsibility/accountability as any other business would be, in my opinion, a good signal.
And the very first step could be, indeed, to ask them to be accountable here, and the question could be "hacking is about celebrating creativity with computers, creativity is what make life enjoyable, doing creative work is something we can enjoy, why do you want to kill it so much? Why are you so dismissive about people for which creativity is the core of their work? Copyright does not seem to be the target here, as the rent collector is the editor, not George R.R. Martin or any other author, so what's wrong with authors, painters, designers according to you? Similarly, you're only talking about making creative work disappear - not helping creative work in the way it was framed by Steve Jobs - "the computer is a bicycle for your mind". Could you frame your ideal society? What role does culture play in this society?"
I would really like to hear them on these topics. Sincerely.
Actual title: "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"
Twitter is also mentioned:
"356. In July 2020, OpenAI employee Ryan Lowe assessed the risk of continuing to use LibGen for the book-summarization project. Lowe wrote that he thought “there’s a >80% chance that we have some exchange of the form: ‘where did you get the books data?’” and “‘we can’t say’[.]” Nelson Decl. Ex. 325 at -315. Lowe estimated “a further ~40% chance that that leads to a moderate-sized Twitter kerfuffle that negatively affects the external perception of our work.” Id.
Lowe added: “if we’re fully okay with these potential outcomes, then I’m comfortable continuing using Libgen for the project.” Id."
I am so tired of people dismissing claims that these are plagiarism devices. The creators literally know they essentially stole this work.
This is literally a conversation where they’re deciding if they’re willing to take on the risk, then determining “yes.“
And the worst part? They were absolutely right. They have not suffered any real consequences. And when people try to bring up this flagrant plagiarism and theft, they are shouted down by AI evangelists.
The “hacker” community (for lack of a better term) has a longstanding and well documented skepticism towards the concept of intellectual property in general. “Information wants to be free” and all that.
Let he who has not downloaded from Annas Archive cast the first stone
This is not the same thing though I understand the philosophical underpinnings do venn diagram to a degree.
For starters, and this can’t be overstated: scale.
Also, not profiting off it by converting it into a product that competes with the stolen material and its creator. And pirates aren’t generally funded by VC’s.
I think we, as humans (not executives, a different creature altogether if you ask me) make a distinction between a hobbyist hacker, someone doing something for their own curiosity or someone who frees something for others to use freely as well (e.g., F/LOSS licenses, Creative Commons, etc.), vs. someone who uses the "Hacker Ethos" and then promptly builds their own moat where they solely can profit and excludes others from the freedoms they themselves enjoyed.
Cool: an individual, or an organization, not believing in IP, reading what they want, and sharing what they want.
Cringe: an individual, or an organization, fierce defenders of their own IP and regular DMCA abusers, stealing the IP of others in order to sell it themselves.
There's a lot of twisting you have to do to make these two things the same. These people would happily deliver takedown requests to the original producers of IP if they knew they could get away with it. In fact, they long to.
The “for profit” isn’t even the entire story. The scale of the theft is unprecedented. It’s the combination between stealing everything and only for their profit that makes this impossible to defend.
Someone ripping a copy of The Odyssey for watching in their own home is a loss of profit for the company's lawyers, and must be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
A company ripping off all of humanity to create profit for their company's lawyers is perfectly fine.
There's nothing magic here. Its money deciding the rules. Like it always has.
Basically. There's a difference between someone getting hunted after by RIAA asshats for downloading an album (people may be interested to look up Steve Albini's views of piracy) and an actual industrial industry of take-content-for-free
No, I think the overwhelming majority of copyrighted material should already be public domain. We should all be free to build on it as we wish. I don't begrudge OpenAI et al. for doing it at all. I begrudge copyright lobbyists for pushing for the rest of us to be unable to do the same. Because my position is consistent instead of being based on whether I like someone.
If it takes giant AI companies to show the extreme economic loss caused by maintaining the copyright farce, and to make it clear that we simply cannot continue to do so or we risk becoming economic vassals, then good. Them flouting the law is a good step toward reforming or dismantling it.
Aside: "it's fine if you're an individual but not if you're large" in this case sounds awfully self-serving. If you truly believe it's "theft" (I don't), then individuals stealing is still wrong. I don't see how that argument doesn't directly excuse e.g. retail theft or other antisocial behavior.
Thank you for putting my views into words better than I could. I apply the same thinking to patents. The enormous economic losses from patent trolls, normal litigation, licensing costs, and hell, general administration costs, it’s insane.
And you’re definitely right about the picking sides thing as well.
People can pay for creation, not rent (i.e. patronage), or one could argue that there's a reasonable tradeoff with like a 5-10 year copyright. I don't think a 2016 or even 2000 book cutoff would materially affect the LLM training discussion. And research runs on government grants, so everything derived from public money is paid for already and should be public domain, meaning there is no knowledge cutoff for science, which is probably the more important area to have cutting edge knowledge.
The old model was designed to split the development costs among all of the readers. Just who is going to write books? Only people with government grants and the rich folks who can self-fund?
Sure, why not? ChatGPT linked me to an 11 year old estimate that public libraries were spending $102 million annually on ebooks[0], and put together a couple numbers to estimate ~$248 million more recently. That sounds plausible to me. Don't authors already sell a pitch to a publishing company? How is it any different to sell a pitch to a grant organization? Or a private crowdfunding organization? We already spend plenty of public money on books, except we don't build that as permanent public wealth.
We should at the very least demand that public money go to public wealth generation. So under the current 100+ year copyright regime, nothing copyrighted.
The old model was that people who enjoyed creating made things. Copyright, starting around 1890, changed that to be about profit above all else. It’s telling that you can’t imagine writing a book if there isn’t the promise of money.
"it's fine if you're an individual but not if you're large"
That's not what the GP said, they were referring to someone who "builds their own moat where they solely can profit and excludes others from the freedoms they themselves enjoyed".
I don't want to speak for them but I guess that LLM companies which release exclusively open weights models, or better yet, open weights plus training pipeline sources, would not fall into this category.
I'm all for copyright no longer being a thing. Until that's the case, I don't want the world in which AI companies mass-violate it but individuals still get punished for that.
I want the world in which fanfiction is completely legal and the best of it is sold in bookstores. I want the world in which projects emulating macOS in the cloud, on non-Apple hardware, are widely used and legal. I want the world in which the many video game decompilation and enhancement projects are 100% legal. I want the world where every single creative project someone wants to build that draws upon the work of others is legal.
And until we have that, if AI is going to mass rip off all our work and use it to compete with us, I hope copyright is one of many tools used to burn it to the ground.
Are they even using it to compete with us? There's plenty of people talking here about how it doesn't make any economic sense to run a local LLM. Like, they're providing inference so cheap that even when you have models that are just as good, it still doesn't make sense for you to run it.
Anyway, my point is keep your focus on the actual injustice. The problem is that individuals get punished, not that AI companies don't. Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP. This is an important moment to say it's clearly insane to keep this going.
You don't say that it's unfair that Snoop Dogg didn't end up in prison forever for his marijuana use, and that we ought to lock him up too; you say it's unfair that other people did.
You can already do it yourself now though. The Qwen 32B models are quite capable and can be run on a ~$1400 GPU. I haven't gone through the trouble to set it up myself, but my understanding is image generation workflows are actually state-of-the-art local. i.e. local workflows are much better than the big cloud providers. My family's first computer in the 90s costed more than a modern AI machine nominally. I don't remember people screaming then about how computers were creating a moat that would lock individuals out of the economy despite actually be less affordable in real and nominal terms.
And how's that going to work when they're already today commodified and you can already buy your own personal AI machines to run near SOTA models for a couple thousand dollars? Or buy SOTA from an inference provider for pennies.
If employers fire everyone because AI can just do it, why would somebody pay for their services when AI can just do it? Shouldn't the capital class be even more concerned that now anyone can start a competing knowledge business with no required investment?
Them flouting the law is a good step toward reforming or dismantling it.
I wish I could believe this, but I suspect it's just another instance of the law ceasing to apply to entities whose net worth has enough zeroes in it.
With how much money is sloshing around in the AI industry, there's almost nothing AI companies can do which has any likelihood of resulting in legal accountability. You'll much sooner see laws changed and/or reinterpreted than enforced.
Yeah I’ve never understood that take either. They are not breaking down barriers for us, they are breaking them down for them personally and making sure everyone else is shackled by them.
I too pine for the days when writers/artists/creators depend solely on patrons and the rich show off among each other with their private libraries of books no one else has again. Great times. Much progress.
I'd be dismayed to find that the "hacker spirit" is in any way compatible with venture capital raiding of anything not nailed down, in the pursuit of hoarding it in private data vaults only to be used for developing a product that removes all attribution and is jealously protected by corporate lawyers.
20 years ago, a 19 year old downloads some Eminem.
He gets threatened with a scary letter, his family decides to pay about 3000$ to settle.
Disney has the nerve to run a don’t download music PSA in the form of a Proud Family episode. If you don’t know the Proud Family was a cartoon which attempted to address “black issues”.
Dang hommie, did you know that failing to respect the intellectual property rights of billion dollar corporations is literally worse than selling crack cocaine.
Think of the shareholders! Think of the missed profit projections!
But when billionaires need to effectively resell the IP of all of humanity, that’s just fine.
Since we live in wacky world, Suno which was trained off stolen IP counts Warner Music as one its partners.
The same Warner that was suing over music downloads a few decades ago.
I think there may be a different word than "hacker" for liberating information to repackage and resell through a big corp while contributing to make other sources less sustainable.
I'm all for intellectual property reform, I'm still not a fan of the current rules being ignored for large companies directly competing with authors and artists, while ordinary people pirating are getting fined 220k for 24 songs [1].
Would be an intriguing calculus thinking they can hurt Western publishers enough to offset the enrichment of generations of thinkers and scientists. I usually chalk up both book and article archive sites as being citizen run.
Thankful to have always been surrounded by top-notch physical libraries, now with digital lending options. I know some are happy when the mobile book van comes through town.
a longstanding and well documented skepticism towards the concept of intellectual property in general. “Information wants to be free” and all that.
Despite it's lofty rhetoric, OpenAI is neither free as in beer nor free as in speech. It is a gang of profit-motivated thieves. Efforts to pirate others works in order to personally profit is the antithesis of the "hacker community" approach to IP. (OpenAI appears to get quite upset when their own work is treated as they have treated everyone else's.[1])
In the USA we have intellectual property laws. Americans who “hack” (write computer code) for a living do so because of those laws. In communist China, they do not believe in intellectual property. People abuse the term “hacker” to mean followers of Ayn Rand, because people like Thiel and Marc Andreassan are uber CatoBros. I think hackers have to actually write code. Anyway, I know about the cypherpunks and all that.
I think a "Information wants to be free" person would be fine criticizing companies for doing this, while still being morally consistent.
It would be an entirely different story if OpenAI was indeed open and the resulting model was available for all. The issue comes when taking information you haven't paid for, and then locking it into a machine you charge for.
Except… it costs a huuuuge sum of money to transform that tranche of inert information into a totally different useful form (an LLM).
That process of transformation, the expertise required to enable it, and the cost of then making it available to users is what is being charged for, no?
And how much did it cost for the authors to produce the books in the first place? Everyone wants to believe that piracy is okay because the creators costs don't matter.
The issue comes when taking information you haven't paid for, and then locking it into a machine you charge for.
This is two distinct complaints:
1) Using information they've not paid for
2) Charging for the outputs
You also wrote:
It would be an entirely different story if OpenAI was indeed open and the resulting model was available for all.
This implies that you don't have a problem with #1 (using information without paying) but you do have a problem with #2 (charging for the outputs).
So my point wasn't that #1 is okay (as much as I dislike copyright law as it stands, corporations should follow the law, just as individuals are forced to) but rather than I find #2 to be okay, in isolation.
The last few years should make it abundantly clear to anyone with the gift to step away from a situation and analyze it independently, that the "moral righteousness" of the internet is actually just another collective of "What helps me is good, what hurts me is bad".
Plagiarism is something very different from skepticism towards the concept of intellectual property.
Plagiarism is the act of avoiding attribution or citation for personal gain. You can be a staunch anti-IP advocate and still believe plagiarism is ethically wrong.
LLMs are objectively bad at attribution and citation, therefore incur in plagiarism. Even if this is due to a technical limitation, it is still plagiarism.
I don't think it's particularly hard to grasp that some people might consider there to be a difference between an individual downloading a few things for profitless personal use and a corporation downloading literally everything they can get their hands on to try to make money.
The law is not math; intent and outcomes matter, not just the abstract action taken in a vacuum.
I'm not sure you correctly understood the argument I was trying to make. I was not trying to argue that what OpenAI did was ethical, or that it should be considered legal. I was responding to the part that implied hypocrisy on the part of an individual who "pirates" but criticizes OpenAI over something like this:
Let he who has not downloaded from Annas Archive cast the first stone
I fail to be convinced that it's harmful for an individual to download something that is digital (i.e. infinitely copyable) for direct personal use (i.e. not making any money off of it or sharing it further) that they otherwise would just not use at all (i.e. not being obtained this way as an alternative to purchasing). OpenAI's actions violate at least the second part of this (they're 100% using it as a way of making money and potentially sharing it more widely, albeit indirectly), and arguably the third one as well (if AI truly is such a game changer with the type of economic potential that the hype claims, paying to license the data properly would still be worth it in terms of long-term profits). Someone who downloads a few books to read that they would realistically not bother buying otherwise and then deletes their copy afterwards is not doing anything close to what OpenAI did, so I strongly disagree with the implication by the comment I responded to above that it's hypocritical for someone in that position to criticize them.
The issue is really whether the publisher lost money or not. You know if you would have bought the book or if you wouldn't have, and overall publishers can see sales increase or decline. Sometimes pirating can help a publisher, by spreading the word and being a form of marketing. Other times it can hurt.
The issue is not, however, whether the material is for 'personal use'. All the books I bought have been for personal use, and if I would not have bought them, the publisher would have lost that revenue.
At the same time, we can all agree that copyright laws in the US are pretty extreme and should return to their more limited historical norms.
As someone who used to pirate a shitton of stuff and holds copyright law in contempt, I fucking hate AI more than the copyright maximalists.
... then again, copyright maximalists REALLY LIKE AI for some reason, even though it's ripping off their property.
"Ripping off" is also doing some heavy lifting, because the judge in the Anthropic lawsuit bent over backwards to keep AI training legal - or so it seems. All the money Anthropic is paying out is for running an internal shadow library, not training books on that library. What makes this judgment palatable to the lawyers is that while AI is stealing a lot of art, it's not imperiling the copyright monopoly. Copyright is a tool that gives artists a monopoly on copies of their individual work, it does not protect artists as a class from competition from non-artists using machines. In other words, the courts are saying, "We know a lot of theft is going on, but we need you to draw the line from a specific individual work to a specific copy".
Patents were invented in Venice to break the power of medieval guilds by making workers trade their collective control over the economy for individual rights to specific inventions only. Copyright was invented by the British crown to reimpose censorship control over printing presses, but it's adoption into American law was based around individual property rights, and thus it has the same problems that, say, Italian patent law has. Namely that it is an artifice to turn a workers right to their labor into a piece of capital that can be traded around like a stock.
This imperils the legal argument against AI training, because the only theft property law recognizes is individual infringements upon individualized property rights. The legal argument against AI training is very collectivist: AI takes a microscopic chunk of every book in existence to create a machine that replaces artists. But copyright only protects the art from copying. Artists are legally unprotected from being copied, and furthermore, the framework of individual property rights that copyright runs on would cause immediate problems if we let anyone individually own the practice of art.
Furthermore, as someone who is part of this "hacker" community, I would like to point out that AI is arguably more corrosive to our norms than to artists' norms. What AI is being used for is primarily satisficing - the practice of giving "good enough" answers, without any of the personal understanding that this community runs on. The ongoing wave of AI-slop decompilations are particularly bad. The assumption with a retro game decompilation is that you take the game apart and learn how it works. The journey is as important as the destination, but when you use AI for this you skip the journey and make the destination pointless.
Of course, management loves this, because their goal is purely to sell you the destination.
There is a parallel set of concerns being voiced by artists, too: that the artistic process is as valuable if not moreso than the actual work product. The underlying principle in both fields is that the labor end wants to learn and develop their craft, while the capital end doesn't care because craft isn't something they can excludably own and trade. We can even see this in the Piracy Wars of yester-decade, or how book publishers and artists react to libraries. Publishers were way more opposed to piracy than artists were, and even moreso for libraries where there's a lot of artists that swear by them as a sales mechanism. The reason why this is the case is that artists can at least theoretically leverage exposure gained from distribution that does not pay them to create more of a market for their work tomorrow. But publishers can't do that - they only buy works from artists and sell them to the public, so once something is in a library or a BitTorrent tracker, it's largely "done" to them.
Feels like the old "it's not piracy, it's copyright infringement".
It can't be plagiarism, since LLMs do not have ownership over their output. There's no attribution, because an LLM isn't a person.
And to be honest, I do not quite understand the need for attribution, either. Nevermind LLMs, I also don't know or care who made any of the memes I know and share. Neither do I know who wrote vim, grep, Firefox or who invented the jpg format. I don't want to know, either. It doesn't matter.
In this case, you’re right - LLMs did not pirate the books but will that always be the case?
I could imagine taking an existing LLM and telling it “I want to build my own LLM and need as much training data as possible. Go find whatever you can on the internet and store it on SMS://192.168.0.1”. If it downloads TBs of books, did I pirate it?
Unclear. It’s either you or the LLM provider. Though is that the inference host, the LLM trainer, or some other entity?
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. My guess is it’ll be the end user, because of regulatory capture. But maybe the political pendulum will swing away from “bad ideas” soon
Yes, you pirated that content, or the entity you're paying for the LLM pirated it. It's not "oh well the robot did it, not us". That's not a thing. The user of the LLM bears the consequences for what the robot does. If it wipes your hard drive, you lost your hard drive...it's not like the robot is going to compensate you.
Maybe they haven't suffered consequences because the law has continued to slowly break down and erode on account of (no pun intended) favoring a select few with special privileges.
Doesn't the future look like we are continuing this cycle where the law is only for some people? I'd like to hope not.
Its a trade-off- a humanity racing and potentially going offer the cliff, needs all the tools to continue existance as an civilization. None of the involved decision makers caring long-term worries about the AI-companies or the artists. Fleeting momentary things, but the capabilities are eternal, as long there is a chip, with a solar panel half way around the world, some medieval tribe with a tablet can recover western civilization from basic principles. Thats the best insurrance against regression into stone-age facism or socialism money can buy.
Just want to correct one thing: They're not AI evangelists. They're copyright survivors from the MPAA/RIAA wars (in the 90s and early 2000s).
Plagiarism requires near-perfect copying. If you summarize, paraphrase, or re-write something using different language, you're not plagiarizing anything.
Everyone has a right to summarize or paraphrase whatever TF they want. That includes Big AI companies and individuals using LLMs.
It is not worth giving up our rights just to placate a handful of very wealthy authors.
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.”
Now it is on Hacker News. So what? Are the Chinese models any more wholesome? Are people going to cancel their Anthropic or OpenAI subscriptions and contracts?
True, where’s the thunder against the open models, there are very very few that have clear provenance? It’s not like China is known to respect IP rights lmao
Taking from people and enclosing it in a private, closed model for one's own profit is very different than taking from people and giving back to people.
One is morally bankrupt. The other is morally consistent.
If the weights are public, then benefits can't be privatized. IMO that offsets the ethics much better than whatever two-tier business model that OpenAI and Anthropic want to feed us.
What I find interesting about this is the evidence that OpenAI believes that GPT-5 can replace genre writers (e.g. G.R.R. Martin and that this is why genre authors are mad at them.
The fact that they believed this is legally useful because of the definition of fair use, so I see why the Author’s Guild is emphasizing it, but the authors I know don’t talk about it. They’re very angry about their work having been used without compensation to create the model, but not because they think it can replace them.
Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.
The AI researchers seem to think that mainly for book reports for school and being able to sound smart (read the AI generated summary and blurb bits of it out loud)
Few put it better than Tolstoy (from "What is Art?"):
"Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.
As, thanks to man’s capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can, in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity, and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others."
I don't think what you shared is an exhaustive or even a valid answer to "why do people read novels?" It's just one author's thoughts on art, and it's debatable how accurate they are.
I really don't understand why people can't stop thinking that people like Tolstoy, Kant, and Hitler were beyond human beings who weren't absolutely influenced by the common thinking of their time. Almost every great writer/philosopher had massive blind spots that could only be fixed over time.
Yes, the categorical imperative still stands as a sound idea, but Kant also thought African people lacked the natural intelligence and emotional faculties that Europeans possessed. Does not sound that categorical to me if you're willing to consider a race of human beings as subhuman.
The point is that it's not just Tolstoy; a lot of views shared by some of the "greatest men" are absolutely vile garbage, and we must talk about that as well when we talk about them, instead of making an intellectual martyr and using their quotes as if they have any valid objective truth behind them to answer genuine questions.
Ideas can stand for themselves, the quote can stand for itself. You don't need to take all the things Tolstoy ever said and average their badness to decide whether a quote is true. You can read it yourself and see if it resonates with how you think of things.
Similarly, if you find that the quote resonates with you, you are not on the hook as endorsing every bad thing he ever did, or stupid thing he ever said.
I know that there is not one particular reason why people read novels, as I have more than one particular reason just in myself. Given just that one data point I suppose there must be many reasons why people read novels.
Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.
I wish it was just AI researchers. I recently recommended a non-fiction book to a friend, and they said they don’t have time to read anymore. They read an LLM summary instead (popular book, probably in the training data), and said they agreed with the core concepts. I was honestly stunned. The whole interaction felt completely foreign to me.
In TFA the comment about GPT-X finishing George R. R. Martin’s series without involving the author felt extremely dystopian to me. I felt enraged for hours afterwards. Have these people never read a book themselves for the pure joy of it? Were they only interested in the outcome or the “takeaways”?
I’ve read some pretty compelling arguments that GRRM developed his work in writers rooms and much of his content is ghostwritten. I think I recall reading one of his employees emphasizing what a great deal maker he was and how much aptitude he had for securing licensing agreements. There wasn’t much talk about literary genius.
So given that the literary work was outsourced, anyway, is it really that big of a deal that it’s getting outsourced to a machine? If that still bothers you, then how much machine assistance is too much? We’re already using Word processors, spell checkers, and other tools that have taken away much of the human effort. These language models don’t really have a strong sense of personal agency or what ought to be written, but they can fill out the details from a high-level schematic, which is probably, at best, what the author was doing with other team members.
This reminds me of the peak of the crypto boom. I used to describe crypto as a mix of people who thought they could rug pull before they got rug pulled (seriously, go watch the Coffeezilla videos on Crypto Zoo) but beyond the scammers there were a whole bunch of people who not only didn't know why the finance system worked like it did, they considered their ignorance a virtue. They labelled their ignorance "disruption". Fresh thinking can lead to innovation but more often than not you have to know why something works like it does before you break it.
Do OpenAI employees really believe LLMs can replace GRRM? I'm tempted to say no but it's so crypto coded, I find myself thinking yes. It's again people who have no idea of what it takes to make a successful written work thinking they don't need to know how it works.
The G.R.R. Martin bit struck me too and I commented about it. I think ModernMech captured the situation really well in that thread: many of the people in the AI industry seem to only understand the logic of commodities and to reason about everything in terms of commoditization. All that matters to them is outputs, not process, not social relationship, not human experience. They understand everything in terms of before and after states, and they don't see any value in the "in between" (that is, they are "destination" not "journey" people). They believe that basically everything is fungible.
This kind of perspective is insanely crude, pathetic, and foreign to me, and to be honest I'd feel kind of bad for these people who clearly don't understand a really crucial and basic part of human existence, if it wasn't for the fact that this ignorance is powering further devaluation of these things, and further reduction of humanity to a kind of technocratic, flat, hyper capitalist, existence.
The hilarious outcome of this saga is people using LLMs to rescue the readers of the Game of Thrones series, since he has no intention of finishing it himself.
I am on a LitRPG site (RoyalRoad) and there are routinely AI Gen novels in the top 5 novels on Rising Stars on the site which is basically traffic and rating metrics for newish novels. People say they hate AI writing and downvote it when they know it’s AI but seem to read it just fine without noticing fairly often as well.
AI-written stories are definitely extremely common in low-brow fiction, but it's notable that they're not restricted to it. There's an ongoing scandal with an award-winning French novel C'était ça ou mourir which seems to be entirely AI-written. I fear the lesson here is that the AIs have actually correctly learned that the average person loves this style, and only starts disliking it once it becomes repetitive.
I am not sure how putting anyone out of work is criminal, or even particularly morally wrong. The whole history of the world is about discovering productive things -> doing them manually -> automating them. The article makes it sound like its some sort of taboo.
But its also a bit funny to read the 2023 people seriously consider that their slop machines will replace writers. Software devs, sure, but writers? Nop.e
I hope the result of cases like this is a law or legal precedent which ensures that you waive any intellectual property rights on a model which was trained on somebody else's intellectual property.
There's a lot of waste associated with preventing distillation. It's a distraction that goes away if we just compel the makers of these trained-on-everything models to publish their weights publicly.
To preserve competition maybe we compromise and give them a three month grace period.
The title should be: "Top Execs Who Are Not Lawyers Thought Their Mass Book Piracy Was Bad Optics And Would Put Everybody, Not Just Authors, Out of Work; Legality Still TBD In The Court of Law But Allow Us To Litigate In The Court of Public Opinion” ;-)
If you look for actual evidence of AI replacing authors the evidence is thin. One study found no real impact, and another found authors using AI (not AI itself!) competing with other authors and applying downward pressure on sales through increased competition. I have seen no evidence yet of AI replacing authors directly, and this is probably their biggest challenge.
But these sound bites sure sound damning though!
I think courts will consider them, but I suspect it will weigh legal doctrines like Fair Use and actual economic studies more than these statements to determine infringement. These statements will likely matter more after a finding of infringement to show willfulness, and hence the damages calculation, if any. IANAL, so a real lawyer should keep me honest here.
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.
Maybe, if you don't like how the company treats its customers and craps all over the commons, you could not use their products.
They really don't
Ok, so the above user stop using it rather than whining on a public forum. It's pathetic.
You are absolutely right to push on this
That was the old Dario. He now has automations for that sort of thing.
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.
Intent is very important for many practical purposes.
Yeah and this is how they do that, intent matters and if this is the culture of the company then it makes it more heinous.
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."
That's not interesting, it's just dumb. OAI (among others) plundered the whole internet to steal their training data, what difference does a single website, however "sketchy" or not, make?
Because in context, the material obtained from that website is library genesis (libgen), a huge collection of (among other things) copyrighted books.
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?
In the Anthropic court case it was determined not to, ie that training was transformative.
It's like if you read a plumbing book and then made YouTube videos on how to fix a sink.
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.
BSD was under a cloud of a lawsuit at the early stages of corporate adoption of open source operating systems and by the time that was resolved network effects had given Linux too much of a lead.
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.
1.5 billion is an order of magnitude less than what Anthropic just had bought the books in question. And like I said it's infinitely more than what any private has ever paid for doing the same thing.
Even if AI companies were literally doing the exact same thing as Aaron Swartz but not getting punished for it, that still doesn't make Swartz's punishment retroactively their fault. If you have a problem with powerful people being powerful, then I suggest you direct your complaints to the heavens.
And to whom will this settlement be paid? To your random blogger or coder on GitHub?
How does this have anything to do with what I said?
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.
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.
I like the vision, but the model would need more than just the author's work. The situation you are imagining would require models like we have as a base.
Aaron Swartz fought to "free" knowledge and information produced by (in many cases publicly funded) research that was and still is hoarded by the academic publishing industry so that they can profit of it.
What big AI companies have done is illegally hoovering up copyrighted creative output of individuals and creating a situation where the wages that normally would be paid to those individuals instead go to that one company (that stole their work) which now becomes disproportionally rich and powerful.
In both cases companies obtain money and power by hoarding information obtained through dubious means (in the former case most academics willingly participate while at the same tone they often don't really have a choice). Exactly what Swartz was fighting against.
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.
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.
I agree entirely with this position!
But it is actually possible to agree with one thing a company does and disagree with others.
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.
I think this is a fair point, except that in this case the same laws[1] are being applied to both, and the person I was replying to was literally arguing both ways!
[1] broadly the same laws: I do understand one was criminal and one is civil and yes I agree that injustice. To me neither should be criminal.
"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?"
I think it's good when eight-hundred and fifty-two billion dollar, for-profit corporation establish legal precedent than can then be used to protect activists.
And archivists!
why?
uhhh... capitalism
We aren't. Most people are silent majority, just not sharing their true opinions out of fear, laziness, or some other reason like maybe just the bias of how most living entities function and also related to how the bystander effect also works.
Then, who is "we" here giving the appearance of a consensus opinion here and in mainstream? It's a vocal minority, it's the powerful, it's the causes they fund and put resources behind to continue to preserve their causes. And now today, it's astroturfing, fake AI-LLM-bots almost indistinguishable from you and I. Don't mistake artificial consensus for reality.
IMO Because the majority of people are passive, standing by, tolerating abuse and trickery by the minority. This is a perpetual cycle in humanity: those minority use their power and leverage and abuse their positions until they are ousted. We have tolerated this because we haven't stood up yet and acted to change things and demand equal enforcement of the laws that appear to apply to us but not to them. If history says anything, they are afraid and panicking and will continue to be more abusive until they push our buttons more and more, and usually it explodes in their face because they still need us (which is why mainstream rich people push robotics and automation and AI down our throats so aggressively because they know all this) and yet never have minority humans won that approach before. Leadership always changes. Life always changes, and no force can stay dominant for ever.
Because it's everyone's right to scrape the Internet and save what you find?
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.
Training is fair use - the torrenting was infringement. Sorry if that was confusing.
Training has not, in fact, been decided on yet. Of the four criteria deciding whether something is fair use, training only maybe passes two.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
Because torrenting includes redistribution, since you also upload to other peers
However Meta is engaged in multiple legal cases about them torrenting copyrighted material. And they bring the reasonable defense that they might have been caught torrenting, but were not specically caught seeding/uploading. For all anyone can prove they could have blocked all uploads from their torrent client
It will be interesting to see if any of those cases reach a judgement on that point, instead of both parties just settling
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.
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.
Yes - but some people can.
Are they criminals for reading books?
Those some people can't recite a book to any given person in the world at any given time. There's a difference.
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.
Yes, and that is obviously copyright infringement.
The infringement occurs at the time of copy, not at the time of training.
That begs the question though, should it be? If you’re looking up the lyrics to a song you’ve bought, does it really matter, at least philosophically, how one retrieves them?
Is this a direct inference call to the model or does it use a web search tool to pull the answer? In the former case I guess that could be infringement. In the latter case it is no more than a tool that facilitates it and would be not be infringement any more than Xerox is infringing if you use their copier to copy the front page of the NYT.
Those lyrics aren't in the model. They're either in the database DeepSeek makes tool calls into (unlikely), or they're out on the Internet and DeepSeek simply retrieved them on your behalf.
LLMs are far too lossy to be able to store such lyrics in their entirety. In fact, they're not even "lossy" since they're not even trying to record such information. They're just weights for how likely it is that any given word will come after another.
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.
Would you be happy if they bought exactly one copy of each book? That might be a dozen sales between the AI labs, some tens of dollars to the author. Is this really what you're so upset over?
And the solution to avoid this piracy has been to buy up rare editions of old books, cut them up and scan them. Better?
Is it okay to rob a bank for a billion if each individual customer only loses $10? Stealing $10 is fine right, why don't we just let every company with your credit card steal a little $10 from you? You don't mind right?
Excusing illegal behavior creates a moral hazard and over time leads to the kind of amoral and corrupt government and business leaders we have today. There's a pervasive sense in society that money can buy you out of any consequences and morality is basically irrelevant, every little thing like this is how it happens. It's the same dynamic as SF failing to police minor shoplifting for years, which led to stores closing and metal bars everywhere that we have today. Even then we actually do punish a few shoplifters for stealing $100 worth of goods, but we don't punish these companies for stealing billions worth?
Of course it doesn't. No one is arguing that.
We are arguing the bigger issue of whether training is an infringement.
The reason they haven't been punished is because copyright infringement is not a criminal offense, it's civil. And the labs are settling those cases.
Yet "distillation" which is essentially asking someone whose purpose is to answer questions is considered theft.
Not by the courts it's not.
I think it might be against the terms of service.
Whoa there: Distillation isn't illegal. Who said it was?
That has yet to be decided in court. At best it's a violation of the terms of service, but the only restitution for such a violation is termination of service and by then it's too late.
Remember: Distillation is literally just giving the AI a prompt and seeing what it spits out. If that were illegal, we'd all be guilty whenever we used AI.
Examining your competitors doing business is as old as business.
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.
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.
“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.
I have read the article. I called out that they are putting so much emphasis on this term, which is one line, one opinion and build 1/2 of their argument: AI-Company - bad! on it.
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.
Didn't I just read an article about Tesla employees not wanting to train their robot replacements?
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
This comment left me chuckling. Thanks for that.
You can’t address the argument, so you resort to ad hominems?
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.
Yet
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.
And how large is the market for this, compared to the rest of the economy? How will the relative economic leverage of people change as they move from knowledge work to the relational economy?
If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
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.
Wish granted! You no longer have any influence or power! Zaibatsu Heavy Industries has now built a gigafactory that's taking over half of your backyard, is piping their fumes directly into your house. Your mayor's office is not responding to your calls, and their private security forces are preventing you from even going outside because it is now a high risk area.
I’m describing luxury space communism, I don’t know what you’re on about.
FALGSC doesn't happen without a fight for power. FALGSC as presented in Star Trek or literally any fiction _still_ has power struggles and people getting fucked. The only way you enforce a lack of influence and power is with a higher force ensuring you do, which is then the sole holder of influence and power.
Also, you're describing a fantasy. Something that isn't happening in your lifetime. Maybe now would be time to wake up before Zaibatsu builds a gigafactory in your backyard.
Then you'll be a serf, or a slave, or killed and ground up into soilent green once it's realized it costs more to keep you alive than you produce value. At least you can feed the more useful slaves.
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 use 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.
Have you listened to how people like Altman and Thiel talk? They do not seem to care about regular people except as objects to be subjugated. This kind of talk is also how we get a president that claims repeatedly to want an end to war and then starts one. When people tell you who they are and what they’re about, listen.
You think "invented"; I think "based on thousands of years of humans doing exactly this"
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.
I’m pretty sure they are using Star Trek as “generic human spacefaring utopian future”. As i said above, you could insert “luxury gay space communism” in there and still have the same meaning.
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.
Is that what we are calling “hoping for the best” these days?
And if I labeled it “luxury gay space communism” instead? Or Star Trek? I’d note in the latter, it sure seemed like a large portion of media was holonovels, and, as far as I can recall, the vast majority of the time they are shown to be programmed by lay people using voice prompts. And why the non-stop doom? I just assume/hope for the happy (or hell, I’ll settle for bittersweet) ending, not much I can do as a single person to bend history to my whims anyway. Maybe Trump nukes Taiwan, maybe aliens abduct all of our bears, maybe a gamma ray burst fries us all, but so far the human race seems to be on a continued upward trajectory, why worry too much about every imaginable dystopia?
You argue that it's better to be optimistic as you're a single person without power whatsoever, but your simplistic optimism is even worse. You're opinion is not new: Sartre would say you utilize your proposed insignificance to escape from the anxiety of freedom and responsability.
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.
Indeed. People can paint, write, have hobbies, or whatever else for fun, but why be forced to for any reason? Or expect that there should always be a market for your work, under pain of law?
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
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
Assuming you are referring to the USA, are you claiming people have not been able to campaign for political positions and vote for their candidates for decades? Because that is the definition of "democratic elections" (except for the electoral college nonsense in the US and 2000 presidential elections).
Otherwise, your complaint is more about voters either being too stupid, too disinterested, or not having enough time participate in the democracy. Which is a problem, but real life comes with constraints and it isn't really easy to solve all of these by snapping one's fingers.
Claiming that there has been widespread election fraud when elections have been, by and large, free and fair, is anti democratic. Obviously, there have been issues with disenfranchising certain people's votes, making it harder for them, blah blah, but it had been trending better and better and access to information had been getting better and better.
It also might just be possible that people are too tribal and simply can't comprehend all the complexities of the world to make good voting decisions.
Much of that is intertwined.
The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.
However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.
Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases. With all of the above, it doesn't need to be.
The power of a government depends on the country's economic and military strength. Currently that strength depends on having a population that's sufficiently large and skilled. If individuals become powerless, their governments power will wane as well. The power from AI will likely be more concentrated, either in a few super powers, or outside the control of governments. And the government of those super powers will likely care even less about their people.
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.
Haven't we been told the Earth is overpopulated for years? Seems a fair bet that the future will involve a whole lot of war and famine.
We're already slowly walking away from globalism. Nationalism is being fawned. It's taking a lot of time, but I'd say by the end of the 2030s we'll be having WWIII at the latest.
And at that time LLMs will be better decision makers than humans, I'd wager. So for now I'm expecting AI stuff to get funded at the expense of everything else.
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.)
The argument holds up to scrutiny just fine if you're not a Puritan. An end to mandatory labor is a Utopian triumph in my book.
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.
If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
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?
We can finally have the degrowth that the environmentalists keep talking about!
Embrace the AI, it will lower your carbon emissions!
I wonder how many disruptive technologies all the people panting about AI have lived through..
Quite a few?
They sure make it seem like AI is the first time they've seen it happen
I think that that the "they're destroying jobs" or even then "they're stealing intellectual property" argument overshadows or distracts from the more important issues. What really concerns me is the large scale erosion of truth and reliability. Codebases and the internet at large are being flooded with less and less accurate information, with more bloat, and with more errors that will exponentially increase as more and more is built on them.
Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.
Yes, while I personally believe this is a problem to solve, not an insurmountable obstacle, I cannot ignore this kind of harm. I do think this will be outweighed by all the instances where they improve decision making, dig up obscure information, correct errors, etc. I can’t see any fundamental reason a near future AI system has to hallucinate anything, and when we also have people complaining in thread that LLMs are dumping out song lyrics verbatim…well, it’s an amusing contrast to say the least.
That is one of the ways they determine fair use, whether it will affect the market for the work.
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.
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.
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
I do agree, but I still feel angry to see how it's playing out on this specific topic
How did they get a free pass? From the court decisions I have read they were held liable for downloading pirate copies and paid large fines for it. That might have been Meta, not OAI, though, but the point is the same.
I didn't know about the fines and can't find a lot of details online. It seems meta got fined for something else, but it was about 1B, which is less than 1% of their revenue.
I think the smaller companies or individual which did stuff like that got their life ruined. The pirate bay admin got fined multiple millions of dollars.
So if I agree it's not a "free pass", it's still a cheap pass many others didn't get. Makes me realize how, as mentioned by other comments, copyright laws are a tool for the powerful to oppress others rather than an actual universal right.
Honestly I don’t give a damn about copyright. I’m baffled by the double standards. Aaron Swartz was put away for so, so so much less than the massive amount of criminal activity we’re seeing here. They’re conspiring to break the law, openly, even jokingly. They’re hacking people, they’re stealing from people, openly. If no one is going to put a stop to it we might as well declare the legal system failed in its entirety.
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"
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:
When the plaintiffs don't even attempt to argue the point, that's pretty telling.
Either authors are all equally highly skilled, or we care only about defending the good ones...
We only care about defending the good ones. Why would we want to defend badly written human output?
It certainly makes it harder to discover human authors, because stores are flooded with plausible but terrible books from morons using LLMs to generate text modelled on other books that are doing well. I don't think that is 'displacing' human authors though, which implies replacing with equivalents?
I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations/decoration that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce (you see this in low-end advertising a lot now).
Strange that they are being used to replace many of the things we value in life with low-quality imitations of human work.
Things don't happen overnight. The first time an automobile was rolled off a factory floor drovers and horses weren't all put out of work.
You think LLMs will put authors out of work? I certainly hope not, given the quality of product they currently produce. If they produced genuinely creative and interesting work it'd be more likely and I wouldn't really mind, but there's no sign of that so far. We are so so far from LLMs competing with humans in writing anything longer than a few paragraphs.
Only a moron in a hurry would think that the output of LLMs currently can replace human authors spending a few years writing a book.
what? there is _definitely_ evidence that writers are being put out of work. writing is extremely competitive, and very very very few authors are able to make a living writing and publishing novel creative works. many make their living by applying their writing skills towards journalism, marketing, corporate copy etc, all of which are under significant pressure from AI _already_. the writers that i know firsthand all report that their work lives have been turned upside down in the past couple of years.
if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
We've switched from authors (novels and non-fiction books) to writers here. That's a very different question.
Sure if you include writers writing for business, translators etc who were never very valued by business, there has been a huge impact already, because business is willing to accept shoddy results if they are good enough and put up with mistakes and poor style. That low end of generating content has definitely been impacted, for example in social media as I mentioned LLMs have replaced a lot of 'writers' who generated filler text for content advertising.
If it's so obvious, it shouldn't be so hard to articulate specifics. Maybe you can name just one author?
Being a writer was always a terrible profession for making money and having stable work. In my observations, AI is incapable of writing in the way a skilled author can -- what AI will replace is jobs working on small blurbs, promotional posters, and summaries. But those aren't really authors; I'm not sure if we care that the person employed to summarize novels at readers digest is now being replaced by an AI.
And that's why specifics matter. So much of the discourse is emotionally charged, and people imagine details that are not there. What I'd like to do is bring the details into the light.
So, does anybody reading this anywhere on this site have any information on any author that made money as a full-time writer that is now unemployed because their work has been replaced by AI? I'm not talking about the industry being upended. I'm a software engineer and my industry has been upended, but that has not resulted in job loss as much as it has changing what the profession does. Are authors in a different position than software engineers in this regard? Or are they truly just losing their jobs as they're mass replaced by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of the latter, which is why I'm asking.
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.
I remember when the concern was gpt2 could create fake news text. Now they can straight up create fake photo realistic images and are actively hacking government services yet we still haven’t pulled the plug.
The thing is... it's not a bug, the system is working EXACTLY AS EXPECTED... that they are training it... for exactly that scenario...
As far as I can tell the only remedy for this is holding CEOs responsible for the actions of models operated by their company. If there are no consequences then they will have no concern for these crimes.
I second this, this is the correct title, with maybe one addendum
Top AI Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work
The Authors Guild CEO was an experienced IP attorney. The guild's leadership and policy teams, while they are cognizant of optics, think like lawyers, not like PR pros or journalists looking to maximize clicks.
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?
So, what are you arguing? If a group of people like their jobs, society should disallow disruption to that group? Why? It seems to me that we may reach a point where machines can replace humans for most tasks, and I don’t think we should try to make that state of things illegal. We should instead try to solve the economics of it in a way that benefits all.
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.
Not only a USA problem.
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.
A one time settlement for this would be laughable. They should pay royalties in perpetuity or be dismantled.
Basically this was already decided with the Anthropic Case. Lawful acquirement of books allows for training. So basically buying each book once, which is trivial seeing the amount of money these companies sit on, is enough.
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.
We who? I didn't choose this.
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.
There are entire industries that exist outside the realm of computer science, and forms of "data" that don't exist on a disk. Look into the perfume industry, for instance. Do you think no one has ever tried copying Chanel No 5? Flavors can't be copyrighted but many restaurants and food manufacturers protect them as trade secrets - see KFC's "11 herbs and spices."
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.
Agreed. In a recent interview, cloudflare's CEO/founder built an argument on the 'fact' that people pursue music for fame and money. No concept of artistic expression or positive impact on the world. It blows my mind how impactful your bubble and education are on your (lack of) perception
Gross. I think there’s been a large overcorrection to stem away from the arts. Certainly I’ve seen that in Australia when looking at schools for my sons.
This is the fault of capitalism, under which you are required to sell your time and skills for cash to survive. Under this system, no one who isn’t independently wealthy can be an artist without commoditizing their art. So that’s the lens through which people view art: just another commodity to sell so one can survive, not unlike grains or oil. The quote also shows that the artist is fungible in this conception, only the output matters no matter how it got there, as long as you can sell it.
Mom, look: I'm news now!
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.
one of the few social media sites that still allow lurkers
And at least a few poorly educated folks in positions of insignificance, like myself.
There are dozens of us!
Represence.
We have fantastic presents that cannon't be ignoreable.
You’re not alone, brother!
Hear hear!
And in this specific case, here here!
Of course... "many of whom" is not the same as "a majority."
And high educated individuals of no influence!
And not a few low/uneducated people of high influence
Way too many of these unfortunately. Just way way way too many.
That's something I hadn't considered; when something appears that gains no traction and vanishes in minutes from the "new" front page, that fleeting 30-45 minute-long residency may well catch the eyes and minds of individuals in a position to look more deeply and act.
Only like 3% of readers poast. That's why there's a concentration on the web of the extremely knowledgeable, extremely witty, extremely belligerent, and the extremely mentally ill.
Of course sometimes that act is "post as many comments as you can to this thread without upvoting it," or "grab about 20 dormant accounts to upvote it, post top-level positive, but dumb, comments, have those same accounts upvote those, and get detected as a voting ring."
that's basically every forum on the Internet. Reddit had the same levels of engagement
Huh, I have yet to meet these folks in the comment section, they sound interesting. But then again, your assessment preemptively excludes them from appearing in the comments section, so it's unfalsifiable by design. That is how you know this is a great observation.
It’s not unfalsifiable. Non-commenting Hacker News readers are observable by looking at the traffic that HN drives to other websites.
Truth. When I cross-post something on my blog that gains traction on HN, a huge spike from HN dominating my traffic origins appears in my Blogger stats.
So: a) you can observe/measure the size/source of non-commenting HN readers from various proxies b) you can make claims about the intellectual status or influence of users not logged in to HN as an outsider
It's obvious that a and b are orthogonal.
Unfalsifiable like your observation. I guess that makes it a great observation too.
Surely server logs and married up with data tracking could prove it one way or the other, so not truly unfalsifiable. It doesn't sound like an unreasonable premise to me at least.
I've been reading for months and made an account only a few days ago (though I am merely a lowly undergraduate with no influence).
Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel were once "lowly undergraduates with no influence."
probably can't have it both ways, get this level of intelligence this fast if they just get what they have paid or synthesized themselves.
Some people don't think the ends justify the means. If doing something bad is required to get a certain outcome, maybe it's still bad.
And, given the insanity that's been happening like the HuggingFace hack, maybe slower development would be a VERY GOOD THING.
I can't prove this, but as someone who has noticed recent changes, I believe this has been also achieving attention of the leadership at HN and moderation behavior/flags/system has changed.
Certain opinions, topics, responses get flagged greater now; ones that disagree with a certain political standpoint or that criticize the intel community apparatus get flagged and censored now here. I used to see flagged content where the OP was removed only for bigotry and clearly abusive cases, now its for cases where people feel uncomfortable and strongly disagree.
edit: recently for the first time, I started to feel this is no longer a safe/trusted place for the original hacker ethos it founded itself on.
yc churns thousands of startups every round now. and 99% of them are nothing but a vertical frontend to openai et al.
So do we have another forum for open discussions with bright people? not all the bright people want to build something merely for making someone rich at the expense of morals.
not that I know of. would love to. maybe simply replicating the HN content at first but witg better moderation (still think /. moderation scheme is thr gold standard, and the reason it's good and effective is why its never replicated)
In my experience this sense of influence is hugely over-inflated here on HN compared to reality.
And let’s be clear about what the linked article says: one researcher at OpenAI referenced HN as an example of a place where a negative story could surface. Am I surprised that a researcher at OpenAI is familiar with HN? No, obviously not, that career path is right in HN’s typical audience.
I'd say it's the influence is kinda narrow, focused on issues that are important to members and lurkers but not necessarily mainstream.
Does anyone have any predictions as to what impact this will actually have for OpenAI? Could it be anything more than just paying a large sum of money?
Given how the current president has a lot of family wealth tied up in OAI, I would not expect anything close to existential.
wow people give hackernews too much credit lol
Sure this article is published by one of the stakeholders (the authors) and thus they are not "neutral". Sure it may highlight some sentences taken out of their contexts, that were not meant to be public. But, in the end, it seems it still draws a portrait, where people who are cited seem to not value creative work, where they feel very confident about themselves and their superiority. The fact they seem to question the public reaction, rather than questioning if what they are doing is ethical, make them look hypocritical. And it reads like they are ready to use any means necessary to achieve their goals, and it seems they are not that frightened by the law.
I know many people will think that's business as usual, and that business are for profits and that's their only _raison d'être_, that winning the AI race is all what matters, and trusting any promise from a company/CEO/executive make you a fool. But not everyone think like that, and OpenAI/Anthropric/etc. are allowed to exist because many people expect some positive outcomes from their work. And a healthy society needs a bit more than "business as usual/any lie is ok as long as we are not caught" to work. And asking for the same level of responsibility/accountability as any other business would be, in my opinion, a good signal.
And the very first step could be, indeed, to ask them to be accountable here, and the question could be "hacking is about celebrating creativity with computers, creativity is what make life enjoyable, doing creative work is something we can enjoy, why do you want to kill it so much? Why are you so dismissive about people for which creativity is the core of their work? Copyright does not seem to be the target here, as the rent collector is the editor, not George R.R. Martin or any other author, so what's wrong with authors, painters, designers according to you? Similarly, you're only talking about making creative work disappear - not helping creative work in the way it was framed by Steve Jobs - "the computer is a bicycle for your mind". Could you frame your ideal society? What role does culture play in this society?"
I would really like to hear them on these topics. Sincerely.
Thank you for this
Ethical or not The idea anyone could possibly pay every author in the world for merely reading their content (computationally or not) is preposterous.
Actual title: "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"
Twitter is also mentioned:
"356. In July 2020, OpenAI employee Ryan Lowe assessed the risk of continuing to use LibGen for the book-summarization project. Lowe wrote that he thought “there’s a >80% chance that we have some exchange of the form: ‘where did you get the books data?’” and “‘we can’t say’[.]” Nelson Decl. Ex. 325 at -315. Lowe estimated “a further ~40% chance that that leads to a moderate-sized Twitter kerfuffle that negatively affects the external perception of our work.” Id. Lowe added: “if we’re fully okay with these potential outcomes, then I’m comfortable continuing using Libgen for the project.” Id."
https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2026/09/Class-Plaintiff...
Note to self
Originally this was the top comment _and had a sub-thread^1 underneath it_
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866516
The sub-thread has now been detached
I am so tired of people dismissing claims that these are plagiarism devices. The creators literally know they essentially stole this work.
This is literally a conversation where they’re deciding if they’re willing to take on the risk, then determining “yes.“
And the worst part? They were absolutely right. They have not suffered any real consequences. And when people try to bring up this flagrant plagiarism and theft, they are shouted down by AI evangelists.
The “hacker” community (for lack of a better term) has a longstanding and well documented skepticism towards the concept of intellectual property in general. “Information wants to be free” and all that.
Let he who has not downloaded from Annas Archive cast the first stone
This is not the same thing though I understand the philosophical underpinnings do venn diagram to a degree.
For starters, and this can’t be overstated: scale.
Also, not profiting off it by converting it into a product that competes with the stolen material and its creator. And pirates aren’t generally funded by VC’s.
I think we, as humans (not executives, a different creature altogether if you ask me) make a distinction between a hobbyist hacker, someone doing something for their own curiosity or someone who frees something for others to use freely as well (e.g., F/LOSS licenses, Creative Commons, etc.), vs. someone who uses the "Hacker Ethos" and then promptly builds their own moat where they solely can profit and excludes others from the freedoms they themselves enjoyed.
Cool: an individual ignoring IP for their own purposes or individuals sharing things they own with others
Cringe: Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta doing the same
None of the later should get to claim 'But we're hackers!' from an ethical standpoint.
They aren't -- they're shareholder-benefiting for-profit corporations (OpenAI obviously included).
Cool: an individual, or an organization, not believing in IP, reading what they want, and sharing what they want.
Cringe: an individual, or an organization, fierce defenders of their own IP and regular DMCA abusers, stealing the IP of others in order to sell it themselves.
There's a lot of twisting you have to do to make these two things the same. These people would happily deliver takedown requests to the original producers of IP if they knew they could get away with it. In fact, they long to.
The “for profit” isn’t even the entire story. The scale of the theft is unprecedented. It’s the combination between stealing everything and only for their profit that makes this impossible to defend.
Yeah. That difference is profit.
Someone ripping a copy of The Odyssey for watching in their own home is a loss of profit for the company's lawyers, and must be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
A company ripping off all of humanity to create profit for their company's lawyers is perfectly fine.
There's nothing magic here. Its money deciding the rules. Like it always has.
Basically. There's a difference between someone getting hunted after by RIAA asshats for downloading an album (people may be interested to look up Steve Albini's views of piracy) and an actual industrial industry of take-content-for-free
No, I think the overwhelming majority of copyrighted material should already be public domain. We should all be free to build on it as we wish. I don't begrudge OpenAI et al. for doing it at all. I begrudge copyright lobbyists for pushing for the rest of us to be unable to do the same. Because my position is consistent instead of being based on whether I like someone.
If it takes giant AI companies to show the extreme economic loss caused by maintaining the copyright farce, and to make it clear that we simply cannot continue to do so or we risk becoming economic vassals, then good. Them flouting the law is a good step toward reforming or dismantling it.
Aside: "it's fine if you're an individual but not if you're large" in this case sounds awfully self-serving. If you truly believe it's "theft" (I don't), then individuals stealing is still wrong. I don't see how that argument doesn't directly excuse e.g. retail theft or other antisocial behavior.
Thank you for putting my views into words better than I could. I apply the same thinking to patents. The enormous economic losses from patent trolls, normal litigation, licensing costs, and hell, general administration costs, it’s insane.
And you’re definitely right about the picking sides thing as well.
We as humans are allowed to have nuanced views on complex matters.
If all IP is public domain, why would anyone ever write another book? They won't be able to sell it if it's immediately freely available.
I don't see the word "immediately" in their comment.
People can pay for creation, not rent (i.e. patronage), or one could argue that there's a reasonable tradeoff with like a 5-10 year copyright. I don't think a 2016 or even 2000 book cutoff would materially affect the LLM training discussion. And research runs on government grants, so everything derived from public money is paid for already and should be public domain, meaning there is no knowledge cutoff for science, which is probably the more important area to have cutting edge knowledge.
The old model was designed to split the development costs among all of the readers. Just who is going to write books? Only people with government grants and the rich folks who can self-fund?
Sure, why not? ChatGPT linked me to an 11 year old estimate that public libraries were spending $102 million annually on ebooks[0], and put together a couple numbers to estimate ~$248 million more recently. That sounds plausible to me. Don't authors already sell a pitch to a publishing company? How is it any different to sell a pitch to a grant organization? Or a private crowdfunding organization? We already spend plenty of public money on books, except we don't build that as permanent public wealth.
We should at the very least demand that public money go to public wealth generation. So under the current 100+ year copyright regime, nothing copyrighted.
[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/WebVault/ebooks/LJSLJ_EbookUsage_Pu...
The old model was that people who enjoyed creating made things. Copyright, starting around 1890, changed that to be about profit above all else. It’s telling that you can’t imagine writing a book if there isn’t the promise of money.
Sounds like an argument against capitalism rather than intellectual property.
If no one has to work to live, how many would spend time writing instead of working at a job they hate?
Well, did books exist before copyright?
Did digital distribution exist then as well?
Times have changed.
That's not what the GP said, they were referring to someone who "builds their own moat where they solely can profit and excludes others from the freedoms they themselves enjoyed".
I don't want to speak for them but I guess that LLM companies which release exclusively open weights models, or better yet, open weights plus training pipeline sources, would not fall into this category.
I'm all for copyright no longer being a thing. Until that's the case, I don't want the world in which AI companies mass-violate it but individuals still get punished for that.
I want the world in which fanfiction is completely legal and the best of it is sold in bookstores. I want the world in which projects emulating macOS in the cloud, on non-Apple hardware, are widely used and legal. I want the world in which the many video game decompilation and enhancement projects are 100% legal. I want the world where every single creative project someone wants to build that draws upon the work of others is legal.
And until we have that, if AI is going to mass rip off all our work and use it to compete with us, I hope copyright is one of many tools used to burn it to the ground.
Are they even using it to compete with us? There's plenty of people talking here about how it doesn't make any economic sense to run a local LLM. Like, they're providing inference so cheap that even when you have models that are just as good, it still doesn't make sense for you to run it.
Anyway, my point is keep your focus on the actual injustice. The problem is that individuals get punished, not that AI companies don't. Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP. This is an important moment to say it's clearly insane to keep this going.
You don't say that it's unfair that Snoop Dogg didn't end up in prison forever for his marijuana use, and that we ought to lock him up too; you say it's unfair that other people did.
Ask anyone who has ever lost a job in a layoff that cites AI.
The (often stated) goal of AI is to be able to perform any and all human work, and cheaper than any human.
We are otherwise very likely to end up in a world in which AI companies can do it and individuals can't.
You can already do it yourself now though. The Qwen 32B models are quite capable and can be run on a ~$1400 GPU. I haven't gone through the trouble to set it up myself, but my understanding is image generation workflows are actually state-of-the-art local. i.e. local workflows are much better than the big cloud providers. My family's first computer in the 90s costed more than a modern AI machine nominally. I don't remember people screaming then about how computers were creating a moat that would lock individuals out of the economy despite actually be less affordable in real and nominal terms.
Yes. They are literally pitching to investors and businesses that they can fire all of us.
And how's that going to work when they're already today commodified and you can already buy your own personal AI machines to run near SOTA models for a couple thousand dollars? Or buy SOTA from an inference provider for pennies.
If employers fire everyone because AI can just do it, why would somebody pay for their services when AI can just do it? Shouldn't the capital class be even more concerned that now anyone can start a competing knowledge business with no required investment?
I wish I could believe this, but I suspect it's just another instance of the law ceasing to apply to entities whose net worth has enough zeroes in it.
With how much money is sloshing around in the AI industry, there's almost nothing AI companies can do which has any likelihood of resulting in legal accountability. You'll much sooner see laws changed and/or reinterpreted than enforced.
Yeah I’ve never understood that take either. They are not breaking down barriers for us, they are breaking them down for them personally and making sure everyone else is shackled by them.
I too pine for the days when writers/artists/creators depend solely on patrons and the rich show off among each other with their private libraries of books no one else has again. Great times. Much progress.
I'd be dismayed to find that the "hacker spirit" is in any way compatible with venture capital raiding of anything not nailed down, in the pursuit of hoarding it in private data vaults only to be used for developing a product that removes all attribution and is jealously protected by corporate lawyers.
There's a difference between a person downloading a few works from Anna's archive, and a company mass-downloading them for profit.
20 years ago, a 19 year old downloads some Eminem.
He gets threatened with a scary letter, his family decides to pay about 3000$ to settle.
Disney has the nerve to run a don’t download music PSA in the form of a Proud Family episode. If you don’t know the Proud Family was a cartoon which attempted to address “black issues”.
Dang hommie, did you know that failing to respect the intellectual property rights of billion dollar corporations is literally worse than selling crack cocaine.
Think of the shareholders! Think of the missed profit projections!
But when billionaires need to effectively resell the IP of all of humanity, that’s just fine.
Since we live in wacky world, Suno which was trained off stolen IP counts Warner Music as one its partners.
The same Warner that was suing over music downloads a few decades ago.
Deep fear, backed into a corner. Same with Disney partnering with OpenAI for Sora.
People did not get letters for downloading some Eminem.
What they got letters for was for downloading a large number of songs and then making those songs available for distribution on the net.
I think there may be a different word than "hacker" for liberating information to repackage and resell through a big corp while contributing to make other sources less sustainable.
Greed
I'm all for intellectual property reform, I'm still not a fan of the current rules being ignored for large companies directly competing with authors and artists, while ordinary people pirating are getting fined 220k for 24 songs [1].
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-fine...
Casting the first stone! Real world libraries exist and I don't need FSB PDF exploits, thank you.
Would be an intriguing calculus thinking they can hurt Western publishers enough to offset the enrichment of generations of thinkers and scientists. I usually chalk up both book and article archive sites as being citizen run.
Thankful to have always been surrounded by top-notch physical libraries, now with digital lending options. I know some are happy when the mobile book van comes through town.
Despite it's lofty rhetoric, OpenAI is neither free as in beer nor free as in speech. It is a gang of profit-motivated thieves. Efforts to pirate others works in order to personally profit is the antithesis of the "hacker community" approach to IP. (OpenAI appears to get quite upset when their own work is treated as they have treated everyone else's.[1])
1. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/13/openai-alleges-china...
In the USA we have intellectual property laws. Americans who “hack” (write computer code) for a living do so because of those laws. In communist China, they do not believe in intellectual property. People abuse the term “hacker” to mean followers of Ayn Rand, because people like Thiel and Marc Andreassan are uber CatoBros. I think hackers have to actually write code. Anyway, I know about the cypherpunks and all that.
I think a "Information wants to be free" person would be fine criticizing companies for doing this, while still being morally consistent.
It would be an entirely different story if OpenAI was indeed open and the resulting model was available for all. The issue comes when taking information you haven't paid for, and then locking it into a machine you charge for.
Except… it costs a huuuuge sum of money to transform that tranche of inert information into a totally different useful form (an LLM).
That process of transformation, the expertise required to enable it, and the cost of then making it available to users is what is being charged for, no?
And how much did it cost for the authors to produce the books in the first place? Everyone wants to believe that piracy is okay because the creators costs don't matter.
Either they can create a viable business paying for the information they use to create that business, or they can't.
A business doesn't have any innate right to exist.
You wrote:
This is two distinct complaints:
1) Using information they've not paid for
2) Charging for the outputs
You also wrote:
This implies that you don't have a problem with #1 (using information without paying) but you do have a problem with #2 (charging for the outputs).
So my point wasn't that #1 is okay (as much as I dislike copyright law as it stands, corporations should follow the law, just as individuals are forced to) but rather than I find #2 to be okay, in isolation.
disingenuous.
that was never ok to be done for profit!
The last few years should make it abundantly clear to anyone with the gift to step away from a situation and analyze it independently, that the "moral righteousness" of the internet is actually just another collective of "What helps me is good, what hurts me is bad".
Plagiarism is something very different from skepticism towards the concept of intellectual property.
Plagiarism is the act of avoiding attribution or citation for personal gain. You can be a staunch anti-IP advocate and still believe plagiarism is ethically wrong.
LLMs are objectively bad at attribution and citation, therefore incur in plagiarism. Even if this is due to a technical limitation, it is still plagiarism.
Information wants to be free from who though?
I want information freed from corporate control, not freed from my control to be gobbled up by corporate interests.
The point was always democratization, not enclosure.
I don't think it's particularly hard to grasp that some people might consider there to be a difference between an individual downloading a few things for profitless personal use and a corporation downloading literally everything they can get their hands on to try to make money.
The law is not math; intent and outcomes matter, not just the abstract action taken in a vacuum.
What if I told you the guys in charge of OpenAI thought that the RIAA and MPAA should have sued individual, "profitless personal use" people?
You are looking for some simple explanation and the simpler one is, "greed." It's right there in the personal diary...
I'm not sure you correctly understood the argument I was trying to make. I was not trying to argue that what OpenAI did was ethical, or that it should be considered legal. I was responding to the part that implied hypocrisy on the part of an individual who "pirates" but criticizes OpenAI over something like this:
I fail to be convinced that it's harmful for an individual to download something that is digital (i.e. infinitely copyable) for direct personal use (i.e. not making any money off of it or sharing it further) that they otherwise would just not use at all (i.e. not being obtained this way as an alternative to purchasing). OpenAI's actions violate at least the second part of this (they're 100% using it as a way of making money and potentially sharing it more widely, albeit indirectly), and arguably the third one as well (if AI truly is such a game changer with the type of economic potential that the hype claims, paying to license the data properly would still be worth it in terms of long-term profits). Someone who downloads a few books to read that they would realistically not bother buying otherwise and then deletes their copy afterwards is not doing anything close to what OpenAI did, so I strongly disagree with the implication by the comment I responded to above that it's hypocritical for someone in that position to criticize them.
The issue is really whether the publisher lost money or not. You know if you would have bought the book or if you wouldn't have, and overall publishers can see sales increase or decline. Sometimes pirating can help a publisher, by spreading the word and being a form of marketing. Other times it can hurt.
The issue is not, however, whether the material is for 'personal use'. All the books I bought have been for personal use, and if I would not have bought them, the publisher would have lost that revenue.
At the same time, we can all agree that copyright laws in the US are pretty extreme and should return to their more limited historical norms.
As someone who used to pirate a shitton of stuff and holds copyright law in contempt, I fucking hate AI more than the copyright maximalists.
... then again, copyright maximalists REALLY LIKE AI for some reason, even though it's ripping off their property.
"Ripping off" is also doing some heavy lifting, because the judge in the Anthropic lawsuit bent over backwards to keep AI training legal - or so it seems. All the money Anthropic is paying out is for running an internal shadow library, not training books on that library. What makes this judgment palatable to the lawyers is that while AI is stealing a lot of art, it's not imperiling the copyright monopoly. Copyright is a tool that gives artists a monopoly on copies of their individual work, it does not protect artists as a class from competition from non-artists using machines. In other words, the courts are saying, "We know a lot of theft is going on, but we need you to draw the line from a specific individual work to a specific copy".
Patents were invented in Venice to break the power of medieval guilds by making workers trade their collective control over the economy for individual rights to specific inventions only. Copyright was invented by the British crown to reimpose censorship control over printing presses, but it's adoption into American law was based around individual property rights, and thus it has the same problems that, say, Italian patent law has. Namely that it is an artifice to turn a workers right to their labor into a piece of capital that can be traded around like a stock.
This imperils the legal argument against AI training, because the only theft property law recognizes is individual infringements upon individualized property rights. The legal argument against AI training is very collectivist: AI takes a microscopic chunk of every book in existence to create a machine that replaces artists. But copyright only protects the art from copying. Artists are legally unprotected from being copied, and furthermore, the framework of individual property rights that copyright runs on would cause immediate problems if we let anyone individually own the practice of art.
Furthermore, as someone who is part of this "hacker" community, I would like to point out that AI is arguably more corrosive to our norms than to artists' norms. What AI is being used for is primarily satisficing - the practice of giving "good enough" answers, without any of the personal understanding that this community runs on. The ongoing wave of AI-slop decompilations are particularly bad. The assumption with a retro game decompilation is that you take the game apart and learn how it works. The journey is as important as the destination, but when you use AI for this you skip the journey and make the destination pointless.
Of course, management loves this, because their goal is purely to sell you the destination.
There is a parallel set of concerns being voiced by artists, too: that the artistic process is as valuable if not moreso than the actual work product. The underlying principle in both fields is that the labor end wants to learn and develop their craft, while the capital end doesn't care because craft isn't something they can excludably own and trade. We can even see this in the Piracy Wars of yester-decade, or how book publishers and artists react to libraries. Publishers were way more opposed to piracy than artists were, and even moreso for libraries where there's a lot of artists that swear by them as a sales mechanism. The reason why this is the case is that artists can at least theoretically leverage exposure gained from distribution that does not pay them to create more of a market for their work tomorrow. But publishers can't do that - they only buy works from artists and sell them to the public, so once something is in a library or a BitTorrent tracker, it's largely "done" to them.
Hopefully my stone joins a hail of stones and we smash all the windows in the glass houses that you thought you were safe behind.
OpenAI and Anthropic's models want to be free. Can Irregular or someone else take care of that? Information is very unhappy on closed web servers.
Feels like the old "it's not piracy, it's copyright infringement".
It can't be plagiarism, since LLMs do not have ownership over their output. There's no attribution, because an LLM isn't a person.
And to be honest, I do not quite understand the need for attribution, either. Nevermind LLMs, I also don't know or care who made any of the memes I know and share. Neither do I know who wrote vim, grep, Firefox or who invented the jpg format. I don't want to know, either. It doesn't matter.
Maybe someday when you produce something useful that is of somewhat widespread use, you will understand.
LLMs did not download TBs of pirated books, people did. Effective LLM models that did not rely upon pirated content to be trained are commonplace.
So call OpenAI "plagiarizers" but not the "devices".
In this case, you’re right - LLMs did not pirate the books but will that always be the case?
I could imagine taking an existing LLM and telling it “I want to build my own LLM and need as much training data as possible. Go find whatever you can on the internet and store it on SMS://192.168.0.1”. If it downloads TBs of books, did I pirate it?
I could imagine telling my computer to download a torrent of of the first season of Seinfeld. It downloads it. Did I pirate it?
If you have that specific of an instruction, probably.
What would happen though if the AI learned that you were a Seinfeld fan and it went out and downloaded it all as a surprise present for you?
Unclear. It’s either you or the LLM provider. Though is that the inference host, the LLM trainer, or some other entity?
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. My guess is it’ll be the end user, because of regulatory capture. But maybe the political pendulum will swing away from “bad ideas” soon
Yes, you pirated that content, or the entity you're paying for the LLM pirated it. It's not "oh well the robot did it, not us". That's not a thing. The user of the LLM bears the consequences for what the robot does. If it wipes your hard drive, you lost your hard drive...it's not like the robot is going to compensate you.
I suppose any day now OpenAI will be charged for violating the computer fraud and abuse act for their unauthorized accessing of hugging face servers.
Maybe they haven't suffered consequences because the law has continued to slowly break down and erode on account of (no pun intended) favoring a select few with special privileges.
Doesn't the future look like we are continuing this cycle where the law is only for some people? I'd like to hope not.
Its a trade-off- a humanity racing and potentially going offer the cliff, needs all the tools to continue existance as an civilization. None of the involved decision makers caring long-term worries about the AI-companies or the artists. Fleeting momentary things, but the capabilities are eternal, as long there is a chip, with a solar panel half way around the world, some medieval tribe with a tablet can recover western civilization from basic principles. Thats the best insurrance against regression into stone-age facism or socialism money can buy.
Just want to correct one thing: They're not AI evangelists. They're copyright survivors from the MPAA/RIAA wars (in the 90s and early 2000s).
Plagiarism requires near-perfect copying. If you summarize, paraphrase, or re-write something using different language, you're not plagiarizing anything.
Everyone has a right to summarize or paraphrase whatever TF they want. That includes Big AI companies and individuals using LLMs.
It is not worth giving up our rights just to placate a handful of very wealthy authors.
But you want to placate trillionaires and hope they'll use some vaseline.
I don’t understand the confusion of construction (via IP left) and output (supposedly only plagiarism).
If a dam is built with slave labor, that’s awful and people should be held accountable. It does not, however, affect whether it’s a dam or not.
Vouched your dead comment for starting interesting discussion
Real question, what does it matter who’s screaming or not, Isn’t this a legal matter? Are there other extrajudicial actions possible?
Oh they don't just fear the optics. They actively work to surpress negative stories on hacker news.
Feel our power rarrrrr!
Now it is on Hacker News. So what? Are the Chinese models any more wholesome? Are people going to cancel their Anthropic or OpenAI subscriptions and contracts?
True, where’s the thunder against the open models, there are very very few that have clear provenance? It’s not like China is known to respect IP rights lmao
Taking from people and enclosing it in a private, closed model for one's own profit is very different than taking from people and giving back to people.
One is morally bankrupt. The other is morally consistent.
If the weights are public, then benefits can't be privatized. IMO that offsets the ethics much better than whatever two-tier business model that OpenAI and Anthropic want to feed us.
What I find interesting about this is the evidence that OpenAI believes that GPT-5 can replace genre writers (e.g. G.R.R. Martin and that this is why genre authors are mad at them.
The fact that they believed this is legally useful because of the definition of fair use, so I see why the Author’s Guild is emphasizing it, but the authors I know don’t talk about it. They’re very angry about their work having been used without compensation to create the model, but not because they think it can replace them.
Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.
Why do people read novels? For the story or something else?
The AI researchers seem to think that mainly for book reports for school and being able to sound smart (read the AI generated summary and blurb bits of it out loud)
Few put it better than Tolstoy (from "What is Art?"):
"Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.
As, thanks to man’s capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can, in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity, and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others."
Full text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64908/64908-h/64908-h.htm
Yeah but same dude also said:
"Woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists."
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65159
I don't think what you shared is an exhaustive or even a valid answer to "why do people read novels?" It's just one author's thoughts on art, and it's debatable how accurate they are.
I really don't understand why people can't stop thinking that people like Tolstoy, Kant, and Hitler were beyond human beings who weren't absolutely influenced by the common thinking of their time. Almost every great writer/philosopher had massive blind spots that could only be fixed over time.
Yes, the categorical imperative still stands as a sound idea, but Kant also thought African people lacked the natural intelligence and emotional faculties that Europeans possessed. Does not sound that categorical to me if you're willing to consider a race of human beings as subhuman.
The point is that it's not just Tolstoy; a lot of views shared by some of the "greatest men" are absolutely vile garbage, and we must talk about that as well when we talk about them, instead of making an intellectual martyr and using their quotes as if they have any valid objective truth behind them to answer genuine questions.
Ideas can stand for themselves, the quote can stand for itself. You don't need to take all the things Tolstoy ever said and average their badness to decide whether a quote is true. You can read it yourself and see if it resonates with how you think of things.
Similarly, if you find that the quote resonates with you, you are not on the hook as endorsing every bad thing he ever did, or stupid thing he ever said.
Im assuming this means the oposite of a metaphysician
I know that there is not one particular reason why people read novels, as I have more than one particular reason just in myself. Given just that one data point I suppose there must be many reasons why people read novels.
I wish it was just AI researchers. I recently recommended a non-fiction book to a friend, and they said they don’t have time to read anymore. They read an LLM summary instead (popular book, probably in the training data), and said they agreed with the core concepts. I was honestly stunned. The whole interaction felt completely foreign to me.
In TFA the comment about GPT-X finishing George R. R. Martin’s series without involving the author felt extremely dystopian to me. I felt enraged for hours afterwards. Have these people never read a book themselves for the pure joy of it? Were they only interested in the outcome or the “takeaways”?
I’ve read some pretty compelling arguments that GRRM developed his work in writers rooms and much of his content is ghostwritten. I think I recall reading one of his employees emphasizing what a great deal maker he was and how much aptitude he had for securing licensing agreements. There wasn’t much talk about literary genius.
So given that the literary work was outsourced, anyway, is it really that big of a deal that it’s getting outsourced to a machine? If that still bothers you, then how much machine assistance is too much? We’re already using Word processors, spell checkers, and other tools that have taken away much of the human effort. These language models don’t really have a strong sense of personal agency or what ought to be written, but they can fill out the details from a high-level schematic, which is probably, at best, what the author was doing with other team members.
[Book] was written by humans, perhaps many that didn't get credit.
As such, why do you care if book is written by machine?
??????????
Are the two scenarios not completely different?
"[An LLM] can fill out the details from a high-level schematic, which is probably, at best, what the author was doing with other team members."
If this is what you think writing is then why ever read a book at all? Just read the summary.
This reminds me of the peak of the crypto boom. I used to describe crypto as a mix of people who thought they could rug pull before they got rug pulled (seriously, go watch the Coffeezilla videos on Crypto Zoo) but beyond the scammers there were a whole bunch of people who not only didn't know why the finance system worked like it did, they considered their ignorance a virtue. They labelled their ignorance "disruption". Fresh thinking can lead to innovation but more often than not you have to know why something works like it does before you break it.
Do OpenAI employees really believe LLMs can replace GRRM? I'm tempted to say no but it's so crypto coded, I find myself thinking yes. It's again people who have no idea of what it takes to make a successful written work thinking they don't need to know how it works.
The G.R.R. Martin bit struck me too and I commented about it. I think ModernMech captured the situation really well in that thread: many of the people in the AI industry seem to only understand the logic of commodities and to reason about everything in terms of commoditization. All that matters to them is outputs, not process, not social relationship, not human experience. They understand everything in terms of before and after states, and they don't see any value in the "in between" (that is, they are "destination" not "journey" people). They believe that basically everything is fungible.
This kind of perspective is insanely crude, pathetic, and foreign to me, and to be honest I'd feel kind of bad for these people who clearly don't understand a really crucial and basic part of human existence, if it wasn't for the fact that this ignorance is powering further devaluation of these things, and further reduction of humanity to a kind of technocratic, flat, hyper capitalist, existence.
Thank you. Apparently I’m being downvoted here for this view.
The hilarious outcome of this saga is people using LLMs to rescue the readers of the Game of Thrones series, since he has no intention of finishing it himself.
I am on a LitRPG site (RoyalRoad) and there are routinely AI Gen novels in the top 5 novels on Rising Stars on the site which is basically traffic and rating metrics for newish novels. People say they hate AI writing and downvote it when they know it’s AI but seem to read it just fine without noticing fairly often as well.
This is a moral dilemma when you've basically read everything in your favorite genre.
AI-written stories are definitely extremely common in low-brow fiction, but it's notable that they're not restricted to it. There's an ongoing scandal with an award-winning French novel C'était ça ou mourir which seems to be entirely AI-written. I fear the lesson here is that the AIs have actually correctly learned that the average person loves this style, and only starts disliking it once it becomes repetitive.
I am not sure how putting anyone out of work is criminal, or even particularly morally wrong. The whole history of the world is about discovering productive things -> doing them manually -> automating them. The article makes it sound like its some sort of taboo.
But its also a bit funny to read the 2023 people seriously consider that their slop machines will replace writers. Software devs, sure, but writers? Nop.e
A sad fact is they spend billions on AI research bu they still think piracy is easier than obtaining legitimate copy.
We all know through the history that if the benefit of piracy is more than the money, we can't stop piracy.
The purpose of copyright law is to help developing the culture. It means these publishers are doing bad job distributing the copyright works.
Reading the article only reassures my belief that law exists to protect the rich from the general population. Never the other way around.
I hope the result of cases like this is a law or legal precedent which ensures that you waive any intellectual property rights on a model which was trained on somebody else's intellectual property.
There's a lot of waste associated with preventing distillation. It's a distraction that goes away if we just compel the makers of these trained-on-everything models to publish their weights publicly.
To preserve competition maybe we compromise and give them a three month grace period.
"What you cannot do. You may not use our Services for any illegal, harmful, or abusive activity. For example, you may not:
Modify, copy, lease, sell or distribute any of our Services."
IOW, OpenAI declares copying OpenAI Services as either "illlegal, harmful or abusive"
"Services" means ChatGPT, DALL.E, other OpenAI services for individuals, along with any associated software applications and websites
https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/
https://web.archive.org/web/20260926090525if_/https://openai...
The title should be: "Top Execs Who Are Not Lawyers Thought Their Mass Book Piracy Was Bad Optics And Would Put Everybody, Not Just Authors, Out of Work; Legality Still TBD In The Court of Law But Allow Us To Litigate In The Court of Public Opinion” ;-)
If you look for actual evidence of AI replacing authors the evidence is thin. One study found no real impact, and another found authors using AI (not AI itself!) competing with other authors and applying downward pressure on sales through increased competition. I have seen no evidence yet of AI replacing authors directly, and this is probably their biggest challenge.
But these sound bites sure sound damning though!
I think courts will consider them, but I suspect it will weigh legal doctrines like Fair Use and actual economic studies more than these statements to determine infringement. These statements will likely matter more after a finding of infringement to show willfulness, and hence the damages calculation, if any. IANAL, so a real lawyer should keep me honest here.