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cs702 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
01284a7e 40 minutes ago [-]
And at least a few poorly educated folks in positions of insignificance, like myself.
bookofjoe 10 minutes ago [-]
>... 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.
roshin 42 minutes ago [-]
one of the few social media sites that still allow lurkers
54 minutes ago [-]
api 19 minutes ago [-]
And high educated individuals of no influence!
MarkWayneNewton 13 minutes ago [-]
HN loves to smell its own farts.
1vuio0pswjnm7 17 minutes ago [-]
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 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."
Forgeties79 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
sincerely 5 minutes ago [-]
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
Betelbuddy 4 hours ago [-]
The Title should be: "Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"
rpdillon 47 minutes ago [-]
> Put Authors Out of Work
Specifics would help the credibility of this claim quite a bit.
PavleMiha 22 minutes ago [-]
I think the point here isn’t whether that claim is true or not, it’s that people at OpenAI believed it to be true and proceeded anyway.
moron4hire 17 minutes ago [-]
That is the actual title of the article. The one currently on the HN post is editorialized.
dofm 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
armchairhacker 1 hours ago [-]
Are there any studies that show it has actually put more authors out of work than the prior trendline?
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
I feel like you're skipping over the illegal part. Something legal that puts authors out of work is quite different to blatant breaking of the law.
rpdillon 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
aeon_ai 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
dofm 31 seconds ago [-]
Say you spend a hundred working hours on a painting. 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?
customguy 9 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
moffkalast 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Gigachad 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
Neither side is coming out smelling like roses here.
lkey 1 hours ago [-]
Thank God, a 'both sides'.
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.
aprilthird2021 43 minutes ago [-]
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
windexh8er 13 minutes ago [-]
Not only tone dead but also completely missed the point of their own article.
Craighead 49 minutes ago [-]
Ahh yes, my daily agitprop
grey-area 1 hours ago [-]
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.
class3shock 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
4 hours ago [-]
papergirl 7 hours ago [-]
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.
swiftcoder 5 hours ago [-]
It's good to know we all live rent-free in Dario Amodei's head
gizajob 5 hours ago [-]
Same as all the world’s copyright text lives rent-free in Claude and ChatGPT.
optimalsolver 5 hours ago [-]
You might be thinking of Demis Altman.
lensecat 5 hours ago [-]
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.”'
yorwba 4 hours ago [-]
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."
MisterMunchkin 4 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway27448 3 hours ago [-]
Surely anthropic has a customer service channel you can use
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
You’re jocking right?
throwaway27448 2 hours ago [-]
I just want to keep this crap off public spaces; anyone who gives money to anthropic can deal with that relationship separately
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
Sure but Anthropic customer support is infamous enough for being close to non existent
throwaway27448 2 hours ago [-]
Caveat emptor; please don't drag that here.
ssl-3 22 minutes ago [-]
I would to order two soft taco supremes, a beef chalupa, and some cinnamon crispas. I'm sorry, what? Cinnamon crispas are discontinued? Since when? 1988! Unbelievable!
gizajob 2 hours ago [-]
But Claude probably trawls HN so it’ll just tell him in its daily slop report.
locknitpicker 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wslack 4 hours ago [-]
Legal incentives against better internal communication/coordination create so much inefficiency. The legal system should focus on outcomes more than internal comms.
lukewarm707 3 hours ago [-]
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."
classified 1 hours ago [-]
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?
aaron695 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Skyy93 5 hours ago [-]
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.
quaintdev 5 hours ago [-]
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?
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
> 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).
yqx 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bezier-curve 2 hours ago [-]
You champion Aaron for freeing info in the first paragraph, and then defend the broken copyright status quo in the second.
I think if you take Aaron Swartz' ethos to its logical conclusion, he might be on board with training AI. Free information, no? Tragically, you can project a position on to a past figure in either direction. Maybe he would've changed his position. We will never know because the US does not take mental health seriously.
Macha 1 hours ago [-]
Obviously it's hard to predict the opinions of the dead, and I think a lot of the disagreement here comes from whether they view his ideas as being motivated by anti-copyright as a standalone idea or part of a larger pro-little-guy stance. I think depending on which you think it was, you can come to a different idea of what his view would be on open models. But surely both views would lead to an anti-closed models stance? Would a hypothetical generation later Aaron want to publish the weights for Claude rather than academic publisher articles?
parineum 46 minutes ago [-]
> Obviously it's hard to predict the opinions of the dead
So we shouldn't.
bezier-curve 55 minutes ago [-]
I am not talking about open models. I am talking about proprietary models being trained on public information. A lot of people want to posture about what an ideological person might think, and some of it seems conveniently positioned to use a past figure that can't speak for themselves.
I think copyright has real intrinsic value in our society, but having been subjected to threatening legal letters for legit fair use situations in my youth, as a result I don't think the legal structure behind it is sane. I always respect copyright when I can, but it's gotten to a point where fair use is not equally considered.
vaylian 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
smugglerFlynn 1 hours ago [-]
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.
applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago [-]
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?
michaelt 4 hours ago [-]
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.
masfuerte 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Aunche 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cgio 2 hours ago [-]
And to whom will this settlement be paid? To your random blogger or coder on GitHub?
Aunche 1 hours ago [-]
How does this have anything to do with what I said?
idiotsecant 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Aunche 1 hours ago [-]
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.
consensus1 4 hours ago [-]
Nothing is inverted. OpenAI was never engaged in any sort of distribution of pirated copies.
simianwords 4 hours ago [-]
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
applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
roenxi 4 hours ago [-]
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.
simianwords 4 hours ago [-]
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.
shakna 4 hours ago [-]
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.
consensus1 4 hours ago [-]
Give me one example of something distributed by OpenAI that is copyrighted by a third party.
Eddy_Viscosity2 2 hours ago [-]
Their models, all of them. This has been shown repeatedly when models can return, verbatim, copyrighted material when asked. New York Times is suing over this.
It would be like if I sold you a pizza, but when you opened the box it contained all the source code for the latest GTA. The pizza wasn't copyrighted by anyone, but the what was inside the box was.
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?
applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago [-]
> Intent to distribute licensed material
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!
quaintdev 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
yorwba 4 hours ago [-]
The article is about a lawsuit targeting OpenAI. That's how rules and laws are typically enforced.
thefounder 4 hours ago [-]
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.
nl 4 hours ago [-]
> Aaron Swartz and the fate he suffered?
I think what Swartz did was moral, and his prosecution was unjust.
I think what OpenAI did was moral, and them getting sued for it is unjust.
Why do you have one position for Swartz and a different one for OpenAI?
(Aaron Swartz was a mailing-list friend of mine, so I do have some bias here. But in part we knew each other because our moral position on this was similar)
SXX 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
isityettime 2 hours ago [-]
> Why do you have one position for Swartz and a different one for OpenAI?
"Why do you have one position for an activist and another for a eight-hundred and fifty-two billion dollar, for-profit corporation?"
"Why to you have one position for someone who wanted to grow the intellectual commons and another for a corporation trying to enclose it?"
"Why do you have one position for someone who gave his work away for free and another for a company that charges for access to proprietary tech?"
kannanvijayan 3 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
michaelt 3 hours ago [-]
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?
cwillu 4 hours ago [-]
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.
MattGaiser 5 hours ago [-]
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?”
Skyy93 5 hours ago [-]
Then you misunderstood my point. I think copyright law should be significantly changed and the current system hurts us all.
ares623 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ben_w 4 hours ago [-]
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
Skyy93 5 hours ago [-]
>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?
kenmacd 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jrflowers 4 hours ago [-]
> Then you misunderstood my point.
No, they were responding to the post defending OpenAI that you wrote. If you meant to communicate something other than “criticism of OpenAI in this context is unwarranted” then it looks like you forgot to do that and wrote something else instead
cwillu 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jrflowers 4 hours ago [-]
> 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”?
cisc 4 hours ago [-]
> the current system hurts us all
How? The current system enables the GPL. The GPL protects many open source projects.
ChickeNES 4 hours ago [-]
All the GPL does is restrict rights, unlike permissive licenses.
cisc 4 hours ago [-]
So.. Linux is bad and we should all use BSDs?
Why has restrictive Linux succeeded far more than any BSD ever has?
Macha 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ChickeNES 4 hours ago [-]
Why yes, I did order a new strawman, thanks so much!
cisc 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
>> All the GPL does is restrict rights, unlike permissive licenses.
> So.. Linux is bad and we should all use BSDs
I did not bring up Linux, much less called it bad, yet you made up a strawman and started attacking it. Good day.
cisc 3 hours ago [-]
We're talking about the GPL. Linux is a major project protected by the GPL.
A license in isolation isn't interesting. The practical results of projects under a license is interesting.
Linux is a very successful practical result under the GPL and copyright makes the GPL work. Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable.
simianwords 4 hours ago [-]
Aaron was sued for distributing and not for pirating. They are different offences
RossBencina 4 hours ago [-]
As far as I know Aaron never distributed that which was collected in the MIT data closet.
blini-kot 3 hours ago [-]
why?
uhhh... capitalism
sevenzero 4 hours ago [-]
Because this website is full of bootlickers without real friends. People cut off from social life. Losers that hate humans.
probably_wrong 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
trompetenaccoun 5 hours ago [-]
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?
qarl 5 hours ago [-]
> the largest copyright theft operation in human history
Many people think that it was fair use: training is akin to reading, not copying.
Especially the courts.
Trusteando 4 hours ago [-]
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.
qarl 4 hours ago [-]
> No only reading, because the content, style, selection of topics, and more is encoded, written, in the LLM weights
Exactly analogous to a human reading the material.
tomjen3 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Trusteando 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
consensus1 4 hours ago [-]
Please give me the location of any copyrighted work in the weights of any open source model or a prompt that will retrieve it.
echoangle 2 hours ago [-]
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.
trompetenaccoun 5 hours ago [-]
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.
qarl 5 hours ago [-]
> That's not been legally established
100% of the rulings agree with me.
The piracy is not in question. It is unarguably copyright violation.
But that's not what anyone means in this context. Training is what everyone means.
> The law is the law, there can't be different law for corporations with billions in backing.
I didn't say otherwise. That's a straw man.
trompetenaccoun 4 hours ago [-]
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?
qarl 4 hours ago [-]
> So we agree they have violated copyright at a much larger scale than LibGen
No.
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
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.
echoangle 2 hours ago [-]
> And if mere downloading and reading of copyrighted material were legal, how come torrent users have been fined for it in the thousands?
Because torrenting includes redistribution, since you also upload to other peers
wongarsu 1 hours ago [-]
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
throwa356262 2 hours ago [-]
Yet "distillation" which is essentially asking someone whose purpose is to answer questions is considered theft.
zaptheimpaler 4 hours ago [-]
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.
kenmacd 57 minutes ago [-]
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?
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
They didn't believe it was sketchy. They were just worried that the commentariat on HN will frame it in a dumb, manipulative way like that.
Judging by how AI threads look like for the past year, they were absolutely right to be worried.
> largest copyright theft operation in human history
In fact, you're doing exactly that right here.
probably_wrong 4 hours ago [-]
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's not citing, it's regurgitating, like a stochastic parrot.
throworangeaway 3 hours ago [-]
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.
discreteevent 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
zaptheimpaler 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ChickeNES 4 hours ago [-]
Who cares. IP is a fiction, all copyrights and patents should be abolished.
zaptheimpaler 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway173738 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
techpression 2 hours ago [-]
It can’t, it needs hundreds of thousands (if not multiple millions) of human hours spent making content for it.
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cornholio 2 hours ago [-]
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.
parineum 42 minutes ago [-]
Didn't I just read an article about Tesla employees not wanting to train their robot replacements?
4ndrewl 5 hours ago [-]
"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)
Skyy93 5 hours ago [-]
Simply look at the Wikipedia article?
>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.
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
> Do you have any evidence of them being a lobby organisation
Have you looked at their name?
4ndrewl 3 hours ago [-]
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.
thatsabadlook 3 hours ago [-]
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...
contubernio 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bdauvergne 3 hours ago [-]
If it's mainly public domain, AI weights should be too. No more copyright for them they don't deserve it.
abroszka33 5 hours ago [-]
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.
>Microsoft knew about OpenAI’s use of LibGen as early as April 2019
Andrew_nenakhov 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ZeWaka 5 hours ago [-]
They're talking about LibGen, per the article.
spwa4 5 hours ago [-]
Just go look: https://libgen.im/ (may be blocked by your isp, just find an alternate URL somehwere)
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.
latexr 5 hours ago [-]
“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.
jordemort 2 hours ago [-]
save some boot for the rest of us
Skyy93 59 minutes ago [-]
This comment left me chuckling. Thanks for that.
fzeroracer 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Skyy93 1 hours ago [-]
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.
lensecat 5 hours ago [-]
"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?
Skyy93 5 hours ago [-]
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.
bdauvergne 2 hours ago [-]
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.
latexr 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Skyy93 5 hours ago [-]
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?
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Skyy93 5 hours ago [-]
I agree with you, but I acknowledge that some people (not myself) might feel different about copyright.
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
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".
zaptheimpaler 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
5 hours ago [-]
mrqwen 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hn1rig3rak 5 hours ago [-]
Pulled datasets off libgen for a corpus once and it's overwhelmingly in-copyright textbooks, the public domain framing doesn't really hold up.
superboum 45 minutes ago [-]
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 that 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 like 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's business are for profit and that's their only _raison d'être_, that winning the AI race is all what's matter, and trusting any promise from a company/CEO/executive make you a fool. But not everyone think like that, and they are allowed to exist because many people expect some positive outcomes from their work. But a healthy society needs a bit more to work than that to work. And asking for the same level of responsibility/accountability as any other business would be, in my opinion, a good signal in this direction.
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 make creative work disappear - not helping it 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.
bananaboy 33 minutes ago [-]
Thank you for this
handoflixue 5 hours ago [-]
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.
anakaine 4 hours 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.
ChickeNES 4 hours ago [-]
Personally I dream of the end of all human labor.
MisterMunchkin 4 hours ago [-]
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?
ChickeNES 4 hours ago [-]
You’re arguing with a scenario you invented, then treating its most deranged conclusion as evidence.
hodgehog11 3 hours ago [-]
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.
handoflixue 2 hours ago [-]
> 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...
hodgehog11 2 hours ago [-]
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.
handoflixue 1 hours ago [-]
There's still a huge gap between "some people want to accumulate power" and "wiping out most of humanity". The former I accept, it's the latter I'm comfortable dismissing.
Especially when you insist that since someone has collected wealth, they must QED want limitless gain, and "must" proceed towards that objective, without any reference to other values or principles.
I'm sure you've earned a dollar or two in your life, so I suppose the simple question is: do you desire the eradication of humanity? If you somehow inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow, would that make you comfortable eradicating the rest of us?
bdauvergne 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
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.
hodgehog11 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
I think you'll find if you actually read the Nobel award, it's about institutions and prosperity. "Elite vs. masses" is one component of some of the models, not a complete theory of civilization.
hodgehog11 3 hours ago [-]
Forget reading the award, read the book. Yes, it is about institutions and prosperity. I'm not sure how this negates what I said? The lynchpin of their arguments is their construction of "inclusive vs. extractive institutions". We are talking about an extractive institution here. By design, the scenario described above points away from all of the drivers of democracy they propose. That's all you have to do to piece together that scenario as feasible within their model of civilization.
Beyond that, do you agree that their model is a good model of the world and civilization in general? Do you have a more preferable one in mind?
estearum 3 hours ago [-]
Do you think people with money employ people as an act of charity or prosocial goodness?
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
No
exe34 3 hours ago [-]
This position is hilarious, because it's the class war is the only thing they want you to avoid thinking about.
plastic-enjoyer 3 hours ago [-]
> Feudalism is the natural state of mankind
No, it's not. What we call feudalism arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
hodgehog11 3 hours ago [-]
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".
estearum 3 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway173738 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
spockz 3 hours ago [-]
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.
freecodeio 2 hours ago [-]
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
robotpepi 3 hours ago [-]
please tell us how you imagine things
well_ackshually 2 hours ago [-]
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.
MrGilbert 4 hours ago [-]
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.
plastic-enjoyer 3 hours ago [-]
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.
folkrav 2 hours ago [-]
This is run-of-the-mill neofeudalist techbro belief. Peter Thiel is a big fan.
skeptic_ai 3 hours ago [-]
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.
plastic-enjoyer 3 hours ago [-]
With so much defeatism and this grade of inferiority complexes, I really do wonder what keeps you even alive.
CodesInChaos 3 hours ago [-]
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.
spongebobstoes 1 hours ago [-]
democratic elections give power to the people without requiring labor, it's one of the pillars of western society
swed420 15 minutes ago [-]
> democratic elections give power to the people
Only when they aren't totally co-opted by capital interests and everything they own, including media/social media.
We haven't had democratic elections for decades. Just illusion of choice in a race to the bottom.
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.
ChickeNES 4 hours ago [-]
> So, how will you ensure that you have some influence over the world or power, if all human labour ends?
I don't want influence or power. Don't know what your short story has to do with anything, frankly a bizarre comparison to make.
impossiblefork 3 hours ago [-]
If you don't have power, somebody else gets it, and then they have that power over you.
well_ackshually 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ponector 3 hours ago [-]
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.
MrGilbert 3 hours ago [-]
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?
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
Remember the spaceship in WALL-E? That, but no one is fat.
robotpepi 3 hours ago [-]
how naive do you have to be to believe something like that...
noisy_boy 2 hours ago [-]
Or how delusional.
mzhaase 3 hours ago [-]
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?
spockz 3 hours ago [-]
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.
sunaurus 3 hours ago [-]
> which way depends on who controls the models.
Or if it's even possible to control the models.
literalAardvark 3 hours ago [-]
Great news then, the end is nigh
pluc 4 hours ago [-]
They will never let that happen. You need to keep the pleb busy or they start getting ideas.
ChickeNES 4 hours ago [-]
Who is "they" this week? The Trilateral Commission? Q-Anon? The YMCA?
exe34 3 hours ago [-]
The rich. But you knew this.
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
Which rich people, acting through what mechanism? "The rich" is not a single actor.
exe34 2 hours ago [-]
They just happen to control government. They are not a single actor, but they do want one thing: all the wealth and power.
adamddev1 10 minutes ago [-]
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 an 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.
seri4l 4 hours ago [-]
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?
handoflixue 1 hours ago [-]
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.
rowanajmarshall 4 hours ago [-]
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.
anakaine 4 hours ago [-]
And this is why we see ever better attempts to mimic human skin, faces, movement, emotions, etc, with robot manufacturers.
bananaflag 4 hours ago [-]
There's a book about that, here is its ACX review:
Machines still cannot make babies ... Just sayin'.
spockz 3 hours ago [-]
And as soon as they can construct it you will get a SkyNet or Horizon scenario.
jojobas 2 hours ago [-]
It would appear that with the exception of Africa and parts of Asia humans can't make many either.
sdcfgy 4 hours ago [-]
It’s not putting people out of work. It’s making jobs miserable by removing creativity and control from them.
literalAardvark 3 hours ago [-]
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.
sokoloff 3 hours ago [-]
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.
sdcfgy 3 hours ago [-]
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.
greenchair 2 hours ago [-]
hi load-bearing.
RobotToaster 4 hours ago [-]
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.
whh 4 hours ago [-]
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.
watwut 3 hours ago [-]
To be fair, internet companies are much worst rent seekers then publishers ever was.
geraneum 4 hours ago [-]
> It's wild how much weight "they're destroying jobs" has.
It’s wild how much people are scared for their livelihood. What a sad thing to read here.
exitb 4 hours ago [-]
> I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry
Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.
ChickeNES 4 hours ago [-]
> Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.
Good! End human labor.
exitb 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
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.
literalAardvark 3 hours ago [-]
I believe the parent may have assumed that you care about creature comforts such as water, food and shelter.
vrganj 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
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.
exitb 2 hours ago [-]
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.
vrganj 2 hours ago [-]
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.
fzeroracer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
deniska 4 hours ago [-]
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.
nylonstrung 3 hours ago [-]
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
onion2k 4 hours ago [-]
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.)
handoflixue 1 hours ago [-]
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.
numpad0 3 hours ago [-]
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.
sokoloff 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
vrganj 3 hours ago [-]
"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.
handoflixue 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cisc 5 hours ago [-]
> Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things
Why is book piracy a better way of doing things?
Skyy93 5 hours ago [-]
>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.
cisc 5 hours ago [-]
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.
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
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?
468854259853 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Jtarii 4 hours ago [-]
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.
literalAardvark 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Razengan 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many disruptive technologies all the people panting about AI have lived through..
jojobas 2 hours ago [-]
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?
conartist6 3 hours ago [-]
They are destroying fucking humanity. They are evil.
They have no will but to fill the world with hate and drivel
> “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.
bananaboy 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
TomGarden 53 minutes ago [-]
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
alansaber 5 hours ago [-]
Not even openai want to get flamed on show hn
maartin0 56 minutes ago [-]
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?
derwiki 43 minutes ago [-]
Given how the current president has a lot of family wealth tied up in OAI, I would not expect anything close to existential.
sidcool 4 hours ago [-]
HN is their AB testing playground.
swader999 1 hours ago [-]
A one time settlement for this would be laughable. They should pay royalties in perpetuity or be dismantled.
whatever1 5 hours ago [-]
Is our opinion that important ? Nice !
malcolmxxx 1 hours ago [-]
Mom, look: I'm news now!
usernametaken29 5 hours ago [-]
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?
consensus1 4 hours ago [-]
Funny thing is that on HN "declare copyright dead" was a popular opinion. For some reason that did a 180 a couple years ago.
Kiro 3 hours ago [-]
Sad to see hackers become copyright zealots.
ChickeNES 3 hours ago [-]
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...
lta 2 hours ago [-]
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.
spongebobstoes 1 hours ago [-]
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
lta 34 minutes ago [-]
I do agree, but I still feel angry to see how it's playing out on this specific topic
fwlr 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
Speak for yourself, mine did evolve a lot over the past year.
ReptileMan 2 hours ago [-]
Simple distinction between OpenAI and Anthropic - the one is sleazy, the other is creepy. Still makes OpenAI look better in comparison.
hnfong 5 hours ago [-]
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"
cwillu 4 hours ago [-]
Email hn@ycombinator.com and they'll fix it
adastra22 4 hours ago [-]
TFA is by the plaintiff. This is PR spin, not click bait.
cwillu 4 hours ago [-]
Regardless, the HN guidelines are clear that editorializing the title is inappropriate in a submission.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
That title is editorialized af
monster_truck 5 hours ago [-]
I could not care less
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
Posted by an account created to post this.
beanjuiceII 54 minutes ago [-]
wow people give hackernews too much credit lol
senectus1 4 hours ago [-]
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.
spacecadet 3 hours ago [-]
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.
skeptic_ai 3 hours ago [-]
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?
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Ylpertnodi 1 hours ago [-]
Not only a USA problem.
AraneaDev 5 hours ago [-]
Lol, the fear mongering is just part of the hype train at this point.
simianwords 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ChickeNES 4 hours ago [-]
> The reality is that these models can’t do basic mathematics.
Yet they solved a Millennium Prize problem, you people are delusional at this point.
5 hours ago [-]
iluvcommunism 41 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
camillomiller 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
amelius 5 hours ago [-]
Since OpenAI is a close partner of Microsoft, I wonder what Bill Gates' stance is on this topic.
skew-aberration 5 hours ago [-]
Gates seems to be having a change of hearts now that AI is accelerating so rapidly
spwa4 5 hours ago [-]
I think you mean he's siding with Dario Amodei and the strictest of government regulations cementing Microsoft's position and its investments is IMMEDIATELY needed, or "a billion people will die":
His position is not at all that AI itself should be limited or anything more drastic than slowing down Microsoft's spending (sorry I mean slowing down AI progress). Second, he still wants companies to adopt it on a very large scale, and fire everybody, but he's having to spend too much now. To put it bluntly, he wants the money currently paid to employees, but he doesn't want to or outright can't spend enough much to guarantee it's him getting the money. I mean, this is a bet on his part, so we can't be sure, I even think he himself is not entirely sure, but it's pretty clear he's not comfortable.
(because in a winner-take-all monopoly business billionnaires get one chance to outspend everyone else. Everyone but the top dog doesn't get the monopoly, they get scraps. It has become clear China is the biggest spender and so now he thinks the billionnaire-but-still-not-the-biggest-spender urgently need protection from the bigger dog)
I'm giving the less charitable interpretation of his words, because his demands come down to denying access to Chinese models, and of course Bill Gates can hardly be considered a neutral party here, he personally has a huge financial interests in OS, Cloud and AI.
trompetenaccoun 4 hours ago [-]
Spot on.
The sad part is this stragey often works because many in the general public don't see through these regulation lobbying schemes, however obvious they are.
The fearmongering always works on some part of the population as well. Feels like they were just waiting for the next end of the world scenario to be announced.
fahrvrgnugen 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
NamlchakKhandro 5 hours ago [-]
encouragement
as1mov 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bravetraveler 5 hours ago [-]
Easy, now. Pointing this out is reportedly against the rules, making the ground defacto plastic. In my opinion, of course, with the required curiosity.
as1mov 4 hours ago [-]
Lol the original comment was only in half jest knowing the ass lickers who congregate here, but it went from 4 points to 0 within 5 minutes. _Not suspicious at all._
pera 4 hours ago [-]
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
ArcHound 4 hours ago [-]
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.
OuterVale 4 hours ago [-]
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.
mrweasel 4 hours ago [-]
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).
pera 4 hours ago [-]
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?
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
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
vilius 4 hours ago [-]
It’s 2030, I open HN and top result is from 7 hours ago, 2100 points, 700 comments:
> AI agent accidentally publishes OpenAI’s unreleased model weights
The optics are bad. The submission marks a turning page in human history.
zkmon 1 hours ago [-]
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.
malfist 1 hours ago [-]
We who? I didn't choose this.
krapp 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
zkmon 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
Twitter 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."
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.
Let he who has not downloaded from Annas Archive cast the first stone
Specifics would help the credibility of this claim quite a bit.
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.
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?
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.
"Our model did an oopsy woopsie for the 35th time" does not seem like a valid legal defense.
Neither side is coming out smelling like roses here.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against 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.”'
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.
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.
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."
"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.
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).
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.
I think if you take Aaron Swartz' ethos to its logical conclusion, he might be on board with training AI. Free information, no? Tragically, you can project a position on to a past figure in either direction. Maybe he would've changed his position. We will never know because the US does not take mental health seriously.
So we shouldn't.
I think copyright has real intrinsic value in our society, but having been subjected to threatening legal letters for legit fair use situations in my youth, as a result I don't think the legal structure behind it is sane. I always respect copyright when I can, but it's gotten to a point where fair use is not equally considered.
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.
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.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would be like if I sold you a pizza, but when you opened the box it contained all the source code for the latest GTA. The pizza wasn't copyrighted by anyone, but the what was inside the box was.
Song lyrics for example
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!
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?
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 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.
"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?"
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.
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 are several multi billion dollar companies where the founding thesis was “what if we just ignore the law?”
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
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?
It's like if you read a plumbing book and then made YouTube videos on how to fix a sink.
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
Is quoting “criticism of OpenAI” without the rest of the post a way of saying “checkmate”?
How? The current system enables the GPL. The GPL protects many open source projects.
Why has restrictive Linux succeeded far more than any BSD ever has?
You still haven't articulated how that's restrictive.
I did not bring up Linux, much less called it bad, yet you made up a strawman and started attacking it. Good day.
A license in isolation isn't interesting. The practical results of projects under a license is interesting.
Linux is a very successful practical result under the GPL and copyright makes the GPL work. Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable.
uhhh... capitalism
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 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.
Exactly analogous to a human reading the material.
It will give you the complete song lyrics which are under copyright.
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.
> The law is the law, there can't be different law for corporations with billions in backing.
I didn't say otherwise. That's a straw man.
No.
Because torrenting includes redistribution, since you also upload to other peers
It will be interesting to see if any of those cases reach a judgement on that point, instead of both parties just settling
And the solution to avoid this piracy has been to buy up rare editions of old books, cut them up and scan them. Better?
Judging by how AI threads look like for the past year, they were absolutely right to be worried.
> largest copyright theft operation in human history
In fact, you're doing exactly that right here.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Have you looked at their name?
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...
I think they just used a Russian torrent site.
>Microsoft knew about OpenAI’s use of LibGen as early as April 2019
(note: https://z-library.sk/ is prettier/nicer)
you should not enclose the commons.
that is what openai and anthropic have done; capture the commons, lock the model, restrict the outputs.
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.
Plus you somehow didn't even read the article properly, given that "sketchy russian website" is part of a direct quote.
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.
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?
(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.
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".
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.
I know many people will think that's business as usual, and that's business are for profit and that's their only _raison d'être_, that winning the AI race is all what's matter, and trusting any promise from a company/CEO/executive make you a fool. But not everyone think like that, and they are allowed to exist because many people expect some positive outcomes from their work. But a healthy society needs a bit more to work than that to work. And asking for the same level of responsibility/accountability as any other business would be, in my opinion, a good signal in this direction.
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 make creative work disappear - not helping it 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.
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.
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.
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 am very hopeful that such scenarios would not come to pass, but dismissing them outright puts us on the path toward them.
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...
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.
Especially when you insist that since someone has collected wealth, they must QED want limitless gain, and "must" proceed towards that objective, without any reference to other values or principles.
I'm sure you've earned a dollar or two in your life, so I suppose the simple question is: do you desire the eradication of humanity? If you somehow inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow, would that make you comfortable eradicating the rest of us?
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.
Beyond that, do you agree that their model is a good model of the world and civilization in general? Do you have a more preferable one in mind?
No, it's not. What we call feudalism arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
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.
Human labor disappears tomorrow, Peter Thiel's first dream is to see if you can still be useful when made into a paste.
I'm amazed by the ignorance some people carry around.
But now that they actually still need us, they can’t even provide healthcare.
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.
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
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.
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?
Or if it's even possible to control the models.
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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s wild how much people are scared for their livelihood. What a sad thing to read here.
Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.
Good! End human labor.
He's not putting that in your mouth, that is just the reality of what you need leverage for.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously the authors should sue them to bankruptcy though.
Getting sued for fair value is the easier way out. Especially after a few billion in funding.
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?
They have no will but to fill the world with hate and drivel
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.
copyright sucks. it stifles individual creativity and serves to enrich big corporations
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.
the economics of those companies will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs across the board.
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.
Yet they solved a Millennium Prize problem, you people are delusional at this point.
https://www.ft.com/content/1ade33b1-b5eb-43bb-9ee4-2272ec91f...
His position is not at all that AI itself should be limited or anything more drastic than slowing down Microsoft's spending (sorry I mean slowing down AI progress). Second, he still wants companies to adopt it on a very large scale, and fire everybody, but he's having to spend too much now. To put it bluntly, he wants the money currently paid to employees, but he doesn't want to or outright can't spend enough much to guarantee it's him getting the money. I mean, this is a bet on his part, so we can't be sure, I even think he himself is not entirely sure, but it's pretty clear he's not comfortable.
(because in a winner-take-all monopoly business billionnaires get one chance to outspend everyone else. Everyone but the top dog doesn't get the monopoly, they get scraps. It has become clear China is the biggest spender and so now he thinks the billionnaire-but-still-not-the-biggest-spender urgently need protection from the bigger dog)
I'm giving the less charitable interpretation of his words, because his demands come down to denying access to Chinese models, and of course Bill Gates can hardly be considered a neutral party here, he personally has a huge financial interests in OS, Cloud and AI.
The sad part is this stragey often works because many in the general public don't see through these regulation lobbying schemes, however obvious they are. The fearmongering always works on some part of the population as well. Feels like they were just waiting for the next end of the world scenario to be announced.
Given the political power they have, particularly now with the Trump administration, whatever "optics" exist on this forum seems completely insignificant
It's easier to take over a resigned population. And stating "resistance is futile" is cheap and it might weaken opposition.
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).
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?
> AI agent accidentally publishes OpenAI’s unreleased model weights
The optics are bad. The submission marks a turning page in human history.
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.