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.
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 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.
They're not skipping, they're keying on the exact same thing I am, which is whether or not authors have been put out of work because of AI, and to what degree. This is stated like it's a fact, but it is not a fact that is established, at least in my experience.
And the use of the data largely being considered 'fair use' means that theft is an assertion based not in law, but in perception and ignorance.
Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
Say you spend a hundred working hours on an ephemeral painting (that is, it won't last, it will fade, disintegrate in nature, can't be moved, etc.). You then have that painting scanned at high resolution, to make a limited series of a dozen very large prints.
Scenario 1: a scalper takes the medium resolution image from your e-commerce website, and slaps it on a series of products they sell for their own profit on Amazon without your permission.
Scenario 2: someone buys one of those prints, scans it to a high resolution, and then makes a series of slightly smaller, high quality prints that they sell for their own profit without your permission.
Is it your contention that both of these things are something that should be allowed and the original artist has no recourse?
Because it seems like your more specific concerns about e.g. disease cures could be addressed by targeted legislation creating new exemptions from intellectual property without destroying the means of protecting income from creative work.
(Scenario 1 has happened to an artist I know, luckily with a piece of non-ephemeral work)
I am not making a claim that the work has inherent value, am I?
Nor is the artist in this scenario!
They are merely saying that they have made a limited series of objects they wish to assign a price to, if the market will pay.
But if the people who can buy it can sell essentially identical reproductions for whatever price they choose, then its assigned product price tends to zero too.
If you follow your own argument, then what you are saying is that compensation for effort can only come from a one-time contract. But since intellectual work is not then protected by copyright, those contracts are really difficult to write, because the buyer is not getting any unique thing either.
It doesn't take much to get from "there's no such thing as copyright" to demand collapse for almost every industrial product. Would we even have the PC if there was no copyright protection for intellectual work?
I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."
So what I did was mount a straightforward, easy defence of the simplest form of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.
> Also, would we have something more advanced than PCs by now if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thoughts?
No? Why on earth would you think this? Intellectual property protection is the way that you get people to invest in the development of ideas. Almost no groundbreaking ideas in the industrial revolution or later would have happened if their subsequent monetisation was not protected.
It also explicitly doesn't grant "ownership" of thoughts or ideas.
One can make all sorts of arguments that software patents are bad (mostly I think they are), that copyright durations are too long or grant undue protection (I think it's possible that the total protection window is now too long) and that copyright extension law was bogus (most of it was).
But the legal construct of intellectual property is why we have the progress we have already. Will it need changing going forward? If it survives at all, yes.
But if intellectual property does not survive then the alternative is corporate thuggishness of an unimaginable kind.
Your “simple defense” is one that misunderstands the economic value of creative work.
I know an artist who has done well for themselves. They have done so because they have revealed that they know what it is they sell. “I sell paper”
The artist is the source of value. An AI can produce visual media, but it can not be an artist. The artist is not one work, but the source of many arts.
Copyright is the protection of the creative work in a fixed media. It is not the protection of ideas or styles.
My thrust is therefore not that protection of creative work should be abolished, but that the notion of “theft” of ideas and styles is one that is not protected by copyright today, and only serves entrenched corporate interests.
We are either entering a world of hyperliquid culture or tyranny.
You picked the Personal Computer, the product of hacker culture, open architectures (the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story alone makes your example hilarious), clones, open source, and a software scene so filled with piracy that Bill Gates himself wrote the “Open Letter to Hobbyists”, as your example for why copyright was indispensable? LMFAO
PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”
> PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”
Hey, weirdly enough, I don't need to, because I have a copy of it that I bought the week it was reissued, during his lifetime, from which AFAIK he made money, as the author?
I know that story and I don't think you really understand, actually, that the Lions book folklore is not actually a story of abusing or invalidating Lions' copyright.
But Bill Gates didn't make the PC. IBM did. And it was not aimed at hacker culture: it was aimed at business, at writers, at publishers, at a knowledge industry that exists only as a result of copyright.
You think the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story exists outside copyright? All of that is grounded in copyright. Again, PC clones exist because of clean-room techniques, within copyright. Not in ignorance or contravention of it.
Open source licences are all grounded in copyright.
This is just weird gish-galloping of unrelated concepts now.
A gish gallop is attacking the opposing side with a flurry of different arguments, I merely supplied a long list of rebuttals to your assertion we would not have the PC without copyright. I included the IBM mention because I assumed you meant “Personal Computer” not “IBM PC”, as the latter, while vastly important in its own right, is still eclipsed by the PC as a concept. The world would be different without the IBM PC, while the world would be much MUCH poorer without computers in every home and/or pocket. The IBM lineage might be resilient, but we could just as easily have had a (non-Apple) NeXT, Magic Cap, PSION, Be, Amiga, etc descendant as predominant computing platforms instead. And my point with the Lions book, is that it’s emblematic of the control AT&T exerted on Unix, instead of letting it be free, where they (and descendants USL and SCO) attempted but failed to squash an open information revolution (*BSD and Linux) that had been seeded by Unix to begin with.
No object, labor, or knowledge has inherent economic value.
Its value is subjective, determined by what the market (i.e., a bunch of humans) will pay for it.
Given the gigantic pile of money that's spent on music, film, and books every year, it's quite clear that there can be large amounts of economic value in a piece of art.
That modern technology makes it easier to take an artist's with with absolutely no recompense, and that many choose to do so regardless of the maker's wishes, does not change that.
It just underlined what's been obvious since the dawn of civilization, that many humans are happy to ignore what other humans want and to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
...which brings us back full circle to the actual article, which is a clear illustration of the OpenAI executive team's conscious choice to do exactly that.
Well everywhere I look there’s AI generated images, songs, videos, articles, books, etc. Sure the quality is all over the place, but AI songs are charting /topping Spotify (not all of that is organic I grant), Suno exists, roughly a million other apps and sites to generate content, etc. And we have the article itself bemoaning that authors are losing jobs. Sounds like the market is speaking quite strongly to me.
I would argue that the stuff AI is replacing is not art, it’s mostly advertising. Posters and the like.
But “art has no economic value” is a statement way beyond that. Art collectors pay millions for original works. Copies go for pennies. People pay large sums for live music performances. Broadway and the West End continue to make a lot of money. To me it seems the market indicates that art absolutely has value.
They should be allowed. The author should have an alternate way of being compensated for his work, e.g. patronage, and people who approach the e-commerce site should be able to do a reverse image search to find the print available for free elsewhere.
This is nothing more than an argument that 99% of working interior designers and artists shouldn't get an income.
But it's also an argument that software developers should be paid minimum wage; you just have to work through the consequences of the abandonment of copyright to see software development reduced to day labour.
If that is what you want, you should be honest about it.
Your first paragraph is well-taken. Even if it were infringement, infringement is not theft, as HN likes so often to assert.
The Supreme Court agrees.
> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
> A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
Then attack those corporations directly, instead of leaving authors in the ditch because standing up for common normal people getting fucked over would "encourage stronger IP laws". How do you get to mention random authors who did nothing but write books and hope to get credit and compensation, to potential companies who "can find ways" to claim ownership over the cure for diseases in the same breath?
There is no "IP law strength" dial that goes in two directions. That is so bereft of any contact with reality it has exactly nothing to do with hacking. Hacking starts with what is, not with fiction.
I’m sure carriage drivers were nice people, but I’m not going to pretend to be upset that they lost their jobs due to cars. I see the commoditization of art as a net win for humanity. Warhol FTW
You understand Warhol made essentially all of his post-illustration career income, during his own lifetime, from licensing and copyright? Including licensing his own identity.
We wouldn't even know who he was without it.
One could perhaps advance an argument that he wouldn't have wanted to be a posthumous brand (this might be stretching credulity) or have all the squabbles over his estate, but one cannot possibly use him as an avatar in an argument against copyright protection for living artists, because he essentially pioneered being a living famous licensed artist.
> A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
How about a world where readers can't even find factual autobiographies because they are so outnumbered by machine-generated hallucinations?
Unlike "AI can solve diseases easily" what I wrote describes the actual present and not a hypothetical future.
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.
Ehh? The specifics of the claim above are that this is what is what the article is titled and what it discusses. Don’t sealion people who are only pointing out an inaccurate title.
I'm pointing out that the original title of the actual article is inaccurate and it would be helped by actual specifics. The actual plaintiffs in the lawsuit do not appear to have been put out of work.
I was worried that OpenAI, a 1.2 trillion dollar company, would be the only party to this lawsuit that was 'bad'.
Thankfully, thanks to your detective work, we have ourselves a lawyer that is also 'bad', a rare thing indeed.
Readers may be wondering if 'authors' are also bad. That's silly, they don't matter at all. This is what makes stealing from them legal (for a small fine) and profitable.
Thank God, a response which addresses none of the content of the parent post which is now flagged for pointing out current facts of the case, along with anything else in the thread which doesn't align with "AI BAD".
'Fallen far' is so so rich, when you are the misinfo peddler here.
The article you linked is irrelevant because it is about a DIFFERENT CASE.
_Authors Guild v. OpenAI_
is NOT
_The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp. et al._
The gall of you to act indignant about 'facts of the case'.
Even if you weren't lazy or illiterate; Mike isn't a neutral party either.
> "Of course, my biases are known: I’m quite convinced that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use, and I find the argument that slop books “dilute” non-slop books to be beyond nonsensical."
Even if you agree with Mike, OpenAI thought they could replace/dilute authors, and workers generally, as disclosed by their internal discussions.
Even if you agree with Mike that training, generally, is fair use, they did not pay for the torrented works they trained their models on, which is still illegal! This is why they shifted to buying and shredding books after they lost other lawsuits.
> 'AI bad'
Bay Area self-styled demi-gods bad, actually. Their products, like always, are incidental to their rapaciousness and their impunity from laws.
They did not fabricate research or get caught burying their involvement in fabrication. That's not what your link says.
They are alleged to have funded research which one of their expert witnesses relied on. They may have other expert witnesses and their expert witness may rely on other research. And their funding of such research can also be above-board, after all it is not completely and totally different from paying an expert witness for his/her testimony. He may have many sources of funding apart from them as well.
Also all this behavior is alleged. It has not been proven and the judge hasn't ruled on this motion from OAI et. al. The judge may deny the motion still, making the accusations inconsequential
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.
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.
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.
