On a Lark, I asked Codex to find silhouettes for all car models so I could make a fun drag coefficient website for all cars.
It found a website that had all of them but had no interest in making them available. So it went ahead and started hacking CAPTCHAs and downloading them. I was pretty flabbergasted that it would do this, but also kind of amazed. Eventually I stopped it because I realized I didn't want to be caught stealing these things.
This was around April, the same time as these hacks.
One is a legal grey area that laws are slowly starting to be written for, while the other is theft under existing laws. Breaking into companies to get access to their data is actionable by both Civil and Criminal courts. This is just setting a complicated timer for the computer to do it at a delay.
Sounds like a good way to make alot of lawyers alot of money.
Why is using a computer to solve a captcha stealing. The websites posed you a challenge, you solved it. Maybe the website _expected_ you to waste human time on it, but that's not what you did.
Well, the reason we introduced it is because we realised it’s a lot of work to make these - be that paint, write, collect, curate - someone needs to do it and we need to incentivise people in our society to do it.
Maybe these incentives weren’t perfect. If we throw all of this away, we’re back at the original problem.
You imply that there was no original problem to be solved; I think that’s naive.
It's really funny to see the delusion being defended so vigorously by people - presumably well-meaning people - purporting to defend the livelihoods of musicians and artists, while the musicians and artists are desperately trying to free themselves from the jaws of their IP agreements precisely so that their music can spread more easily.
I imagine this is already well-known on HN, but there is a significant movement underfoot in the worlds of bluegrass/old time/trad/jam toward DRM-free and CC licensing.
It found a website that had all of them but had no interest in making them available. So it went ahead and started hacking CAPTCHAs and downloading them. I was pretty flabbergasted that it would do this, but also kind of amazed. Eventually I stopped it because I realized I didn't want to be caught stealing these things.
This was around April, the same time as these hacks.