alt.hn

5/21/2026 at 1:38:12 PM

AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

 https://axelk.ee/ai-is-just-unauthorised-plagiarism-at-a-bigger-scale/

by speckx

5/21/2026 at 4:24:55 PM

There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this (not just with LLMs), and I see it in many of the comments here: If it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale.

It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing!

It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different.

“You say I can pick one flower, but you get upset when I take a bunch. That’s inconsistent. Check and mate.”

But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes. Everyone knows this, but sometimes they seem to find it inconvenient to admit it. Not that effects of the qualitative change are always bad, but they are often different, and worth considering rather than dismissing.

by danorama

5/21/2026 at 6:20:25 PM

> It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different.

It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still there. Whatever 'theft' you perceive is entirely in your head; you were deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of your thing.

by soerxpso

5/21/2026 at 6:30:10 PM

This is not true. Because the copy is a devaluation of the original, so even though the web page is still there it’s value has decreased.

by LunicLynx

5/21/2026 at 7:24:47 PM

"It's not like that"

That's not the point. The point is that scale matters, and that was the only point.

by jerf

5/21/2026 at 6:36:21 PM

It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still there. Whatever 'theft' I perceive is entirely in my head; I was deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of my thing.

by abustamam

5/21/2026 at 7:48:06 PM

I get that the intention here is to plagiarize and thus cause the parent to feel the harm of it and realize the error in their ways, but I don't think it works. Plagiarism's harm to the plagiaree (?) is that it robs them of credit and payment, but nobody is viewing your reply in isolation of the parent's attribution and parent wasn't expecting to make money off of an HN comment. The harm to the rest of society where you gain false esteem for another's work is also not carried out in this instance. The harm to the plagiarizer where they fail to learn because they copied instead is likewise absent. If someone were to feel harm just from a copy of their words existing, they wouldn't need you to do it- google has hastily indexed this along with every other HN comment and we all know that this whole thread will make its way into LLM training sets eventually.

by ToValueFunfetti

5/21/2026 at 7:15:42 PM

> Whatever 'theft' you perceive is entirely in your head

Rather, it appears to be in your head, since the person you’re replying to has not mentioned or even hinted at theft. The problem with taking all flowers from a public park for your own profit is multifaceted. Amongst others, you’re depriving everyone else from enjoying them, but also degrading the image of the park and harming all the insects which depend on those flowers and the birds who depend on those insects, which in turn degrades the park further, which stops people from enjoying it and going there and caring for it. It’s not about a single physical object, it’s about the ripple effect the selfish action produces.

by latexr

5/21/2026 at 6:34:59 PM

When the LLM presents what it learned as its own thoughts without any attribution, that's the theft.

And you understand that. You're not stupid. This is the thing: AI is convenient for corporations, so you'll make dishonest arguments to justify your unethical behavior. Maybe you even believe what you say, but that's because people will hold on to any flimsy thing that lets them feel like they're good people, not because the reasoning actually makes any sense.

This is why people talking about AI get booed at speeches. There's no conversation to be had: you're not interested in the truth, or what's right, or what's good for anyone but yourself.

by kerkeslager

5/21/2026 at 4:45:21 PM

We ran into a lot of stuff like this in the early days of the web. For example, there was a lot of information that was "public" in that anyone could go to the city courthouse and ask to see the documents. But it changed in nature when you could suddenly look up anyone in the country by typing their name in your browser.

by svachalek

5/21/2026 at 6:44:01 PM

I am not quite sure why my address history, known aliases, and sometimes phone number, are publicly available to anyone who Googles my name, and I'm not sure how to opt out of this.

by abustamam

5/21/2026 at 5:10:11 PM

For a practical example of that, a lot of documents used to have things like social security numbers, and they started stripping that information off once it was visible online.

by nitwit005

5/21/2026 at 5:26:35 PM

we used to ship mass lists of addresses and phone numbers to people in each town and it was fine/appreciated.

by mswphd

5/21/2026 at 5:31:06 PM

You could also easily opt out with the single entity that shipped that information.

by disposition2

5/21/2026 at 5:41:53 PM

Yes, but getting an unlisted number was considered weird and against the norm even if possible. Even in the early 2000s when I dropped my landline, my parents were aghast - "if you do that, you won't be in the phone book! How will anyone get in contact with you?"

by jhbadger

5/21/2026 at 6:14:58 PM

And you often had to pay for the privilege... A dollar a month for them to not put your name and number in the phonebook.

by bigbuppo

5/21/2026 at 5:50:55 PM

Yeah and back then it wasn't used as a sort of UUID to track every single thing you do in your life... Different times

by pera

5/21/2026 at 5:29:14 PM

You ever had a bump in the night my guy?

Or a stalker?

by _doctor_love

5/21/2026 at 6:14:51 PM

> It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different.

The problem here is, in your example the small scale example, and the large scale example are both unacceptable behavior.

Learning from others at a small scale is not only socially acceptable, but is the foundation of how advancement works.

So this concept of the issue of the scale being the issue isn't at its core the problem, its that something that that is desired behavior in a human, is not socially acceptable because of a machine is doing it.

by Meph504

5/21/2026 at 6:28:02 PM

Wasn’t his point about plagiarism? That is also not ok on a small scale.

by LunicLynx

5/21/2026 at 6:39:57 PM

I was trying to stick to the example, but I agree, that getting away with something doesn't determine if it is right or wrong. And the whole concept of that makes for shaky ground for any form of legal or ethical argument.

by Meph504

5/21/2026 at 6:35:31 PM

I think the difference here is that you guys are talking ethics. And in fact what were talking about is enforcement. While its unethical to pick one flower (in it's purest form, robbing the commons of the beauty of a flower), it won't be enforced.

by boringg

5/21/2026 at 6:41:45 PM

Fair. AI might also not be the problem, but how it is utilized.

Suddenly everyone and their grandma are specialist at everything and the actual value of understanding is not appreciated anymore.

by LunicLynx

5/21/2026 at 6:55:06 PM

> But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes.

Interesting take. I think a corollary is that the qualitative changes are in the economics of things. And more than the scale, it is the value of those economic effects that determines how "accepted" that activity becomes.

Take Uber as an example; it basically enabled mass avoidance of taxi regulations, and naturally existing taxi drivers and lawmakers cried foul. But enough people found value in the service and kept using it that gradually and inexorably society and laws adjusted to it.

On the other hand, copyright infringement is an interesting case. While pretty much everyone and their dog pirates content to some extent, the % of people who think it's acceptable to do so is surprisingly small (22% apparently, up from only 14% in 2019). Furthermore the media industry, especially including ads, is a significant % of US GDP. I think those reasons, more than any RIAA/MPAA lobbying, are why copyright laws have remained as stringent as they have.

As such at a social level, I don't think these effects were dismissed, rather they were considered and formally internalized.

I suspect the same thing is happening with AI companies. They get away with devouring and training on the sum of human knowledge largely because existing laws are insufficient to stop them. So stopping this would require new laws but... well, given the early economic impact LLM technology is having my hunch is new laws will be brought in to protect it rather than restrain it.

by keeda

5/21/2026 at 4:41:32 PM 

  quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes
Well said!

by kogus

5/21/2026 at 4:59:31 PM

It reminds me of a Stalin* quote: "Quantity has a quality all its own."

* Note that it may be misattributed to him

by tyleo

5/21/2026 at 5:37:20 PM

Yes absolutely, when automation increases the rate of something many orders of magnitude that often is a qualitative difference.

It's weird to me how often on HN of all places I see arguments that can be refuted with "scale matters". I commonly see arguments on all sorts of topics that make the same mistake you're calling out.

by rurp

5/21/2026 at 4:30:12 PM

If one person is murdered, that's bad. If a million people are murdered, that's war.

If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business.

by inetknght

5/21/2026 at 4:45:41 PM

this made me oof. well said.

by bogrollben

5/21/2026 at 5:33:33 PM

>If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business.

Where are all the instances of "one word" being "stolen by AI", and people getting mad over it?

by gruez

5/21/2026 at 7:09:01 PM

Honestly that's what's wrong with capitalism and property rights. We can understand what it means to own a thing like a piece of furniture, or a house, and "a person's home is their castle" rings true. But scale that up to individuals controlling resources that affect a neighborhood, a city, a country, or the world -- at each step their army of voters supports their right to own 800 billion dollars or whatever, same as they own their own houses -- it's only fair! And if they want to build a starbase and launch some rockets near your house and sensitive ecology they're just exercising the same rights you or I have, and attack on their ability to inflict damage on the community is an attack on all.

[edit] and the same goes for corporations owning "means of production". It's not the same as owning an iPhone.

by hughw

5/21/2026 at 6:50:42 PM

Of course it's robbery. I don't think anyone is truly arguing it's not. The issue is that, if we don't do it, China will. Game over.

I'm surprised I hvan't seen more economist scholars exploring this topic; it's a fastincating phenomenon. I've seen folks try and re-visit history and compare what's happening with AI to some historic event--but, we've never seen anything quite like it. As much as history repeats itself; at the forefront of innvotaion it doesn't.

I suspect that there will one day be an AI tax as society tries to reclaim the value of the theft; maybe even UBI of some form. Until then, buy the stocks and ride the theft wave. The economsits are certainly exploring the K shaped economy, and this is why.

by waynesonfire

5/21/2026 at 7:14:57 PM

This argument of "if we don't do it, someone else will" to justify theft is so tiring. The companies doing the stealing are collectively the same ones that have power to prevent it, if they were incentivised to do so.

by proofofcontempt

5/21/2026 at 5:15:31 PM

ugh. yeah. the tragedy of the commons

by nate

5/21/2026 at 6:23:16 PM

It's funny, the way that term gets used now is actually a wild distortion of the true history.

"The commons" was an incredibly successful system, and medieval (and prior) villages used it to great success, for the entire village's benefit! "Commons" are a great thing for everyone to have!

The real history is that as advances in technology (like the Industrial Revolution) changed things, certain rich villagers were suddenly able to manage more animals than they could before. Those (specific/rich) people over-used the commons, creating the "tragedy" we all know of.

The real lesson of history is not that commons fail: to the contrary, they worked great and helped everyone for centuries! The real lesson is "watch the fuck out for the new rich (especially when they just became rich because of recent technology advancements): those bastard will steal from everyone for their own benefit!"

by hungryhobbit

5/21/2026 at 5:49:51 PM

In general tech has sat in the opposite paradigm: identify when doing something at a small scale is bad, but at a large scale is not

unauthorized plagiarism on the individual level is bad, at the medium scale is ick, but at the ultragigantic scale is meh.

laundering through an llm takes away the real moral ick from the plagiarism - the lying and building of ego by the person reboxing somebody else's ideas and work.

by 8note

5/21/2026 at 5:52:11 PM

>> the lying and building of ego by the person reboxing somebody else's ideas and work.

Instead the bot lies to people who use its output to boost their ego. Not sure it's really changing the moral calculus here.

by wffurr

5/21/2026 at 4:55:48 PM

My complaint with your argument is that the word learn means one thing when we are talking about a person learning something from a webpage or book and something completely different when a webpage or book is used to adjust some weights in a matrix. Calling that learning is a distraction from the real copyright violations going on.

by wang_li

5/21/2026 at 5:51:08 PM

>when we are talking about a person learning something from a webpage or book and something completely different when a webpage or book is used to adjust some weights in a matrix

What material differences exist between the two besides "humans good, computers bad"?

>Calling that learning is a distraction from the real copyright violations going on.

Most courts so far have ruled that it counts as fair use.

by gruez

5/21/2026 at 4:44:04 PM

This is a great point. I think for coding, the wording of the MIT open source license makes it clear that copying and distributing the software is authorised on a small scale and it's very clear that the act of copying must involve a person.

It provides distribution and modification rights to "any person obtaining a copy of the software" and explicitly requires attribution for any significant parts.

Mass-ingesting the code with a script without any human even reading the licence is a very different kind of copying mechanism and there is no person involved... The contract was bypassed completely. A contract requires consent from both parties to be binding. When ingesting code into the AI training set, nobody even read the license. There was no agreement; neither explicit nor implicit... Because the consumer, a script, never read the contact for that specific project.

There was nobody present when the copying occurred; on neither side! It cannot possibly constitute an agreement between two parties.

by jongjong

5/21/2026 at 6:09:22 PM

> I think for coding, the wording of the MIT open source license makes it clear that copying and distributing the software is authorised on a small scale and it's very clear that the act of copying must involve a person.

I agree with “must involve a person. https://opensource.org/license/mit starts with (emphasis added) “Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any PERSON obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”)”.

That means it doesn’t give an LLM any rights. The way I see it, LLMs run (directly or indirectly) by a person can do stuff on their behalf, though, just as your CI pipeline can download and compile MIT-licensed software.

I definitely disagree with the “on a small scale” as the license continues (again, emphasis added) “to deal in the Software WITHOUT RESTRICTION, including WITHOUT LIMITATION the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software”.

by Someone

5/21/2026 at 4:48:49 PM

That's like saying you're not allowed to load the source code into an editor, because it's not a person. Or that you're not allowed to run a global search-replace on the entire code base, because it's a script and not a person.

by quantummagic

5/21/2026 at 5:02:25 PM

But in this case, a human has awareness of what software they are copying or modifying and that's how the original software author receives credit. The contract requires some degree of human awareness to be valid. This is the critical difference.

by jongjong

5/21/2026 at 5:11:03 PM

Sorry that's nonsense. There's human awareness when ingesting MIT code into an LLM too. In both cases it's a human that says $ excute-global-replace or $ ingest-into-llm

Both operations require some degree of human awareness. What you appear to be saying is, a human can only use a limited algorithm to access this source code, not a sophisticated one. And where do you draw that line? Who should get to say what is too sophisticated?

Error: your algorithm is too sophisticated to proceed, please provide more human awareness, it's a critical difference.

by quantummagic

5/21/2026 at 4:51:51 PM

This would be an extremely novel mechanism of copyright litigation and I doubt it would fly in an American court with its' emphasis on highly individualized legal rights and obligations. And, if it did get accepted by the courts, that's halfway to an even crazier argument: that the MIT license only allows individual distribution to known parties; i.e. no hosting the code on a website or seeding it on BitTorrent, because that's not "small scale" and doesn't "involve a person".

by kmeisthax

5/21/2026 at 5:07:36 PM

You can only seed it on BitTorrent if it comes with the license which identifies the original author and acknowledges their copyrights over the code. Also there is definitely an assumption that a human will read the license or at least implicitly consent to the terms before using or modifying the software. When ingested by AI, the author gets zero credit and no consent has taken place between any sentient being on either side of the contract... Or at least none that are legally acknowledged as sentient or having legal rights.

by jongjong

5/21/2026 at 6:18:07 PM

And the thing is, you point out the easy out on this for similarly licensed code... a giant list of authors and contributors that may have code included in the generated output. It's a win/win for everyone. The original authors get their acknlowdgement, and the AI company gets to bill the users of AI for all the tokens for that multi-gigabyte copyright disclosure file.

by bigbuppo

5/21/2026 at 6:09:14 PM

data brokers lean into this too... you can go to the city hall and get someone's public information pretty easily, that does not mean you should make all of that information available to everyone else all the time from anywhere

by micromacrofoot

5/21/2026 at 6:14:24 PM

> why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing!

The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably. That's not my hot take, that's a fact from the NYT survey published today.

It's going to be hilarious when VCs, having expropriated the IP of the entire internet, build The Layoff Machine That Does Everything Without Workers, and then the voters decide to just...enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

by mullingitover

5/21/2026 at 6:18:14 PM

>The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably.

Sure, where AI means threatens my job or my skills, people view it unfavourably.

But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions.

>enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Maybe in other countries, initially, but the US is very firmly a plutocracy, and has a populace that will very happily vote against their own interests because the plutocrat-owned media told them to. And yeah, it is very rapidly approaching the point where there is going to be zero chance of a revolution even if people opened their eyes.

Which is precisely why the US is now threatening other countries as well, because plutocracy is threatened by rational, educated, better managed countries. Canada, for instance, is an example that country doesn't have to revert to being an idiocracy, so it's first in the crosshairs.

by llm_nerd

5/21/2026 at 6:34:34 PM

> But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions.

I don't see any contradiction. I criticize the hell out of guns and want them strictly controlled, and yet I own one. `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`

People can use AI and still demand that all of society receive the benefits, instead of a small group of oppressors.

by mullingitover

5/21/2026 at 5:17:56 PM

Of course quantity makes emerge it’s own quality. If you kill a single person, you are a murderer, if you genocide "others" and distribute the spoliation wealth to those unscathed you are a national hero. If you steal small material you are a theft and go to prison, if you hog some billions you can enact laws to grab even more.

by psychoslave

5/21/2026 at 6:02:53 PM

>If you kill a single person, you are a murderer, if you genocide "others" and distribute the spoliation wealth to those unscathed you are a national hero.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how laws work. It's not the scale that makes it okay, it's that it's done through some official process. Trump's raid to grab Maduro killed less than 100 people. Pretty modest by "genocide" standards, and is easily eclipsed by gang/cartel violence. Yet nobody is going after Trump because he didn't meet some kill quota to get special protection, nor are people condoning cartel violence because they killed far more than Trump.

by gruez

5/21/2026 at 7:13:06 PM

That's exactly how laws work then.

International Right for those who don't have all the nukes and lobotomized cannon meat bag ready to invade on a whim, and on the other side doing all the crimes and atrocities, straight transgress all legal processes ever invented, and expecting no possible punishment in return.

Number of directly killed people is not something that can be eclipsed by bigger number of killed people. Not in a mind that keeps empathy high in its value.

by psychoslave

5/21/2026 at 7:49:35 PM

[dead]

by eboy

5/21/2026 at 5:18:03 PM

No. It's more like,

"You say I can take a photo of one flower in your flowerbed you put next to the public street, but you get upset when I take a bunch of photos of many public flowerbeds. That's both an over-reach and inconsistent."

by superkuh

5/21/2026 at 6:05:36 PM

Can you map this more directly to claims made about AI? It's impossible to agree or disagree with you. You've just given us an analogy - but to what?

by nonethewiser

5/21/2026 at 6:47:14 PM

Not sure what you're missing here. The other comment replies don't seem to be missing it. See the article, etc.

by dbalatero

5/21/2026 at 2:09:22 PM

The broader problem of original sources not being given credit in a way that rewards them remains. Websites owners are paying to host their content so that spiders can come and crawl them and index it into the AI and then if they’re lucky, they might get a citation, but otherwise there’s very little reward for being a provider of content. And of course, this is something that’s getting worse and worse. Why look at a website when it’s all in AI? And then the counter to that is maybe we need to start closing the website to crawlers and put everything behind a login.

by dvduval

5/21/2026 at 2:18:49 PM

Worse, the constant AI scraping is actually costing content providers additional money for no return. At least Google/Bing/Yahoo scraping would then be used to provide links back to your content.

by Ensorceled

5/21/2026 at 4:48:38 PM

How do you distinguish Google/MS scraping for Gemini/Copilot vs Google Search/Bing? In the case of Google, the UA is the same and you are entirely at their mercy to honor the Google-Extended instructions in robots.txt

Google has further complicated it with new search announcement blurring lines between regular search and AI search. And AI likes to not honor any licenses or instructions when it is hungry for training material.

It is once again an example of Google using its dominant position to abuse and promote cross functional products.

by devsda

5/21/2026 at 4:58:39 PM

If company like Meta are downloading pirated books etc.. to train their AI, they will surely honor robots.txt.

by cute_boi

5/21/2026 at 3:20:15 PM

Not only costing money. Constant AI scraping constitutes a denial-of-service attack that has brought down websites.

by bolangi

5/21/2026 at 3:12:59 PM

> At least Google/Bing/Yahoo scraping would then be used to provide links back

That doesn't work anymore. Google provides AI generated summary, nobody looks at the original site.

by fiedzia

5/21/2026 at 2:19:02 PM

About a year ago OpenAI crawled and go DDOS level the company I work. Even despite the robots.txt not allowing it, and despite some recaptcha we could assemble in time.

We found our data in the outputs of their models but who can do anything about it...

by motbus3

5/21/2026 at 3:04:06 PM

> We found our data in the outputs of their models but who can do anything about it...

If the crawlers refuse to voluntarily respect your robots.txt, then you are well within your rights to poison their data.

by kibwen

5/21/2026 at 7:21:27 PM

They fake user agent, they throttle or go slow and even try to emulate mouse movements. I am not kidding that they had the audacity of doing 270k pages in a single day and they returned multiple days.

by motbus3

5/21/2026 at 3:11:43 PM

robots.txt seems like it should be a legally-binding terms of service which would make them outright copyright infringing.

Sue for $180,000 per infringement which should be calculated for each illegal API call.

by hajile

5/21/2026 at 7:23:02 PM

They copy books illegally by scanning the pages and try to hide the whole thing under 3rd party companies. They care 0 about the law. I suspect I know why now.

by motbus3

5/21/2026 at 3:59:40 PM

Was your robots txt written by a lawyer? Does it hold up in the court?

by throw1234567891

5/21/2026 at 5:12:19 PM

OpenAI might in fact be a good target for stuff like this at the moment. Even if your argument is weak, they may be eager to settle generously if your suit threatens the speediness of their IPO in some way. But I happen to think this is in fact a reasonable argument: I put up a sign that says not to do something with my property, and you went ahead and did it anyway, costing me money. IANAL but seems like a straightforward tort, no?

by ElevenLathe

5/21/2026 at 7:23:53 PM

The owner of my company is not litigious guy. He already seek block copied content other times but he won't dive into a battle with people much richer than him.

by motbus3

5/21/2026 at 5:25:17 PM

Contracts are legally binding even if they weren't written by a lawyer. Copyright is legally binding even if no copyright claim is explicitly stated.

I looked into this a bit (not a lawyer) and it seems that robots.txt isn't legally binding to either party, but this seems to have two major implications for AI agents (and crawlers/scrapers in general).

First, even if the robots.txt says you can crawl the site, that isn't a copyright grant of any kind or permission to copy/use that data outside of the permissions granted by the TOS.

Second, ignoring the robots.txt while also pirating the site contents could point to bad-faith and makes a much stronger case for double-damage penalties due to willful infringement.

If the site TOS doesn't explicitly grant an AI agent rights to copy out the site content AND the AI agent is ignoring the robots.txt at the same time, it seems a lot more likely that there's a strong copyright infringement case against the agent owner.

by hajile

5/21/2026 at 7:27:38 PM

But there is no contract. You assume that they read your robots.txt, they don’t have to. There is no contract.

by throw1234567891

5/21/2026 at 5:25:54 PM

It doesn't have to be written by a lawyer. The robots.txt file is an administrative directive, by the webmaster of the website, that you, being a scraper, MUST NOT go to page x and/or y, or MUST NOT go to directory z. All the law would have to say is that it is a crime to not obey these directives. It's similar to trespassing: if I put a sign that says "DO NOT ENTER" in bright red letters on a door in my apartment, or "authorized people only!", that is still legally binding and a court isn't going to care that it wasn't lawyer-authored. The court will only care that you were told to not enter that area, but did so anyway.

by ethin

5/21/2026 at 5:02:22 PM

It doesn't matter. Robots.txt is not a license, it's a set of computer parsable directives of how programs should access your site. The actual license doesn't have to be written for computers to parse to be legally binding.

A person should be able to write in a terms of use or license page on their website that says "do not include any content from this website in your AI training data. if you do you will be billed $100 billion dollars." And it should be enforceable. It just turns out that nerds like to say "oh that would be too hard or too expensive, so we're going to ignore it."

by wang_li

5/21/2026 at 3:56:50 PM

Why hasn't your company sued OpenAI and try to argue they're violating the computer abuse and fraud act? Would it really be impossible to argue this?

Unauthorized access, system damage, and maybe even extortion all apply here.

by shimman

5/21/2026 at 4:08:07 PM

Lawyers can. As long as that data is actually yours I mean, in a strictly legal sense.

by rastrojero2000

5/21/2026 at 3:10:00 PM

I mean, did you check the IPs and make sure they’re from OpenAI? Obviously a fly-by-night AI company is going to set their User Agent to be from a big player.

by telotortium

5/21/2026 at 2:41:01 PM

It's actually costing them money/time! A friend of mine is a sysadmin at a university and he constantly has to deal with AI crawler DDoS-ing his servers. He said Anthropic is actually one of the worst offenders.

These AI companies are really just a gross example of the motto "Socialize the costs, privatise the profits". It's disgusting!

by spacechild1

5/21/2026 at 4:12:25 PM

>Why look at a website when it's all in AI?

well, at least in the case of google, I'm pretty sure that's the point. Or at least, they are doing things that would seem to be moving towards being an oracle with all the answers and not the signpost that points you in the right direction. The destination rather than the gateway.

by b00ty4breakfast

5/21/2026 at 4:14:13 PM

remember AMP?

by philipov

5/21/2026 at 2:39:51 PM

Is it possible able to host your website in a way so that it couldn't be found via search engines (and thus wouldn't be crawlable I hope)?

I know this has repercussions on findability, but if that wasn't a concern, I'm curious how one might circumvent getting crawled.

by aaarrm

5/21/2026 at 2:46:37 PM

Sure, depends on how accessibly to people you want it to be.

Most legit search engines are going to honor robots.txt and you can disallow access.

Next level would be using something like rate limiting controls and/or Cloudflare's bot fight mode to start blocking the bad bots. You start to annoy some people here.

Next would be putting the content behind some form of auth.

by matt_heimer

5/21/2026 at 3:05:58 PM

Possible yes, probable not likely. The moment you're issued a certificate your domain will be shown in the Certificate Transparency logs which are constantly monitored from anyone who wants to find new sites.

by elorant

5/21/2026 at 4:55:08 PM

....Yet another vector through which "security experts" has caused a waterbed problem. Let's secure the Internet, oh no! We made a centralized list of operating domains for hostile actors to guide attacks with!

by salawat

5/21/2026 at 7:41:34 PM

Sure, let's hide everything behind obscure schemes which will definitely serve the spirit of openness of the web.

by elorant

5/21/2026 at 2:42:48 PM

robots.txt is a way of leaving the door unlocked but kindly asking bots to stay outside.

by trinari

5/21/2026 at 3:50:22 PM

You might be interested to know that entering an unlocked door into a space you do not have permission to be in is still illegal.

by dpark

5/21/2026 at 4:04:48 PM

You might be interested to know that the “illegality” depends on the intent. If I rest on your unlocked door handle, it opens, I enter, it’s an accident.

by throw1234567891

5/21/2026 at 4:31:30 PM

Sorry, what? In this scenario are you claiming that you accidentally fell inside the restricted area because you were leaning on the door? Or are you claiming that you accidentally opened the door and then walked through intentionally? In the former case, you are guilty of breaking and entering in most US jurisdictions if you don’t promptly get out. Any sane court would likely agree an accidental trespass is probably not a criminal act, but it’s not an accident if you stay. In the latter case, you’re clearly trespassing illegally.

Also this has gotten pretty far away from the web scraping scenario. There’s no door accidentally opening here.

by dpark

5/21/2026 at 4:44:56 PM

Oops, I just accidentally fell into every website. Don't know how that happened ...

by dminik

5/21/2026 at 3:20:43 PM

Which in a law-abiding society should be enough. It's also how we do things in the real world in many cases - i.e. here you can just write on your mailbox "no ads" and companies have to respect that.

Even when we do actually put physical locks on things they are mostly there to show that someone breaking in did so intentionally and not at all designed to prevent motivated attackers.

by account42

5/21/2026 at 3:49:19 PM

> here you can just write on your mailbox "no ads" and companies have to respect that

Where do you live? In the US it’s actually illegal for anyone except the USPS to deliver to a mailbox.

by dpark

5/21/2026 at 2:50:56 PM

You could just put your website content behind its own chat interface. The crawler would just see a form input for a prompt.

by MontgomeryPy

5/21/2026 at 4:33:19 PM

If you really wanted and are interested in doing so and perhaps are even happy with just text and normal styling limitations, I recommend you to test out other protocols like creating a gemini website or gopher website. I don't think that scraping happens on even remotely the same scale there as compared to conventional websites

That being said you would require your user to download a compatible browser for gemini/gopher.

by Imustaskforhelp

5/21/2026 at 2:21:59 PM

I’ve been thinking of a proof-of-work scheme for accessing content where you effectively need to mine some crypto for the author, but, this idea might not fly today

by wolttam

5/21/2026 at 2:30:11 PM

But that will be a hassle for human visitors as well. A web doing proof-of-work to browse, will be a disaster for phones with their limited batteries, etc.

by microtonal

5/21/2026 at 2:52:53 PM

To be specific, it would be more of a hassle for human visitors than for the AI companies with infinite money and specialized browsers.

by odo1242

5/21/2026 at 4:30:51 PM

The idea would be that AI companies would still be forced to do this proof of work. Anubis proved the idea

by wolttam

5/21/2026 at 3:55:07 PM

This is already a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis_(software)

by dpark

5/21/2026 at 4:29:25 PM

Yes, but:

> Although Anubis could be altered to mine cryptocurrency to serve as proof of work, Iaso has rejected this idea: "I don't want to touch cryptocurrency with a 20 foot pole."

Which in my mind is a shame. Crypto is an absolute mess, yes, but this seems like an elegant way to get something back for putting things out there.

by wolttam

5/21/2026 at 4:35:47 PM

The problem is that much of the cost is borne by humans accessing the sites. People generally get real mad when they find out you’re using their computers to mine crypto.

by dpark

5/21/2026 at 4:45:15 PM

Mining crypro doesn't materialize money. You have to exchange it for real money which means taking a private individual's money in exchange for scam tokens.

This is the problem crypto fans refuse to acknowledge. The money doesn't magically appear, you're taking it from someone else and letting them hold the bag when whatever cryptocurrency you choose inevitably blows up, fails, or rug-pulls. It's unethical to engage with at all because you're still participating in scamming real money out of private individuals

by vitally3643

5/21/2026 at 6:11:17 PM

Not necessarily. You can spend your cryptocoins with any number of businesses and it is very much the choice of those businesses to accept them or not. No private individuals need be involved.

Note also that any non-crypto currency can also devalue at any moment, although perhaps not to the same extent. Holding anything of any perceived value carries a risk and also a potential reward.

by 6031769

5/21/2026 at 2:41:08 PM

or you know, just charge for your content if you believe it to be valuable enough for the fee being charged.

by chii

5/21/2026 at 4:32:56 PM

Yes, but that tends to limit the reach of your content. Hence why a lot of people reach for ads.

Between seeing ads and doing a little bit of proof-of-work for the author, I'd choose the latter.

by wolttam

5/21/2026 at 3:43:06 PM

I agree with this whole heartedly. What's the point of even having copyright law at this point?

What's even crazier to think about is that to use the latest versions of these models for which you supplied training data, you have to pay hundreds of dollars a month. I would love to get a settlement check proportional to my model weights. Even if it's $0.10, at least everyone out there will get what they're owed.

by gabbagool

5/21/2026 at 4:08:39 PM

From my perspective, everybody trains on the knowledge and experience of those who came before. AI just does the same thing at scale.

I do not value copyright. All it does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work. It does not differentiate or account for parallel creation. I cannot count how many times I have "created" something, only to find it in a research paper later.

Part of the reason I think copyright has no value is that, in general, individual copyright owners don't have the deep pockets necessary to sue someone who violates their copyright. If anyone is violating the spirit of copyright, it's corporations that insist you assign your work over to them as a work for hire, or outright ignore your copyright. (looking at you, Disney's Atlantis).

A significant benefit of AI that doesn't get talked about enough is that AI has a much greater reach over all the information it was trained on and can draw connections that would be invisible to someone operating at the human scale.

by rickydroll

5/21/2026 at 4:13:26 PM

The fact that these companies are making money off of it negates your argument.

by ofjcihen

5/21/2026 at 5:02:28 PM

I don't think anyone's "making money" yet. We have a race to build up hardware for AI, and one to train models. There are some profits in there, but who's making money from the work AI performs? Nobody, because any advantage some company claims with AI is quickly replicated by competitors and profit dries up.

Today you can put a coding agent to migrate an existing application to another language (like chardet). Even if you don't have the code, if you can run the app you can still clone it, using it as an oracle for replication. That is why there will be very little profits in AI usage.

by visarga

5/21/2026 at 6:08:12 PM

I get what you’re saying but that’s irrelevant to the argument.

They are indeed taking in money by selling the product. Just because they don’t turn a profit doesn’t mean they’re not infringing copyright as a business practice to make money.

by ofjcihen

5/21/2026 at 4:01:27 PM

No, you don’t have to. There are open weight models you can download and use for free. Many people choose the subscription model but it’s not necessary. And latest doesn’t mean greatest, it’s just most up-to-date.

by throw1234567891

5/21/2026 at 2:41:10 PM

It's never been a problem with people ad-blocking for the last 20 years, why is it suddenly a problem now?

We've been celebrating denying creators revenue for decades...

Maybe this is just the internet hypocricy of "When I do it, it's good, when they do it, it's bad".

by WarmWash

5/21/2026 at 3:03:18 PM

Total sleight of hand.

Ad blocking has always been a problem for creators but it's aimed at big corps - non-creators. The creators asked people to support them other ways or turn off the blocking. And it's not like the little independent creators wanted this version of commercialized internet in the first place.

The ai marketing teams are spinning everything they can but no AI companies are the conscript, the vultures. No question about it.

by omnimus

5/21/2026 at 3:15:43 PM

The conversion from viewer to donator is around 1%. This is true from wikipedia, to twitch, to podcasts.

The number of people who will not ever load your ads is around 30%.

I can tell you that creators talk about this a lot in private, but will not publicly because the internet has a mass delusion on how creation and compensation works. It's like trying to convince christians that jesus obviously didn't come back from the dead days later, depsite there being no logical system available that would explain it.

If we were to try and map out a functional internet where everyone wins, users and creators, there is no example where ad blocking is anything other net harmful. You either get volunteer net where 0.01% share hobby posts on their own dime for the other 99.9% or you get IRC where 99% of the population doesn't really benefit (ala 1993).

by WarmWash

5/21/2026 at 5:53:51 PM

The problem is that the ad vendors couldn't keep it in their pants. The ads you're talking about are a common vector for delivering malware onto people's PCs, and absolutely destroy the usability of sites. Between tracking cookies, popups, full screen banners, autoplaying video, flashing ads, and their unbelievably high weight in bandwidth - the internet is fairly unusable if you don't block any ads

Bear in mind that many basic privacy features destroy ads by breaking tracking and fingerprinting. Its impossible to get a browser in that doesn't filter out behaviours that have been used to deliver ads

Creatives can and have adapted their strategies away from what is a very specific form of ads: the disruptive full screen ads, or banner ads. That's only one form of advertising that everyone utterly detests. Sponsored content is much more popular with the end users, and much more effective as well because its way less disruptive. Some people hate that, but overall the tradeoff is significantly better

We shouldn't confuse a single type of widely blocked advert with all advertising being blocked. Banner ads have very poor efficacy at delivering sales anyway

by 20k

5/21/2026 at 3:00:16 PM

People usually point at the scale when this discussion comes up, in my experience. These companies are doing something at a huge scale spending tons of money to do it so the potential harm is greater.

People can easily justify their own piracy because it’s small scale. Even when they organize, create a whole software and tooling ecosystem around pirating media to stick into jellyfin or plex. AI still did it bigger and worse and is bad, what I’m doing is not so bad because I wasn’t going to buy the movie anyway, etc.

by u_fucking_dork

5/21/2026 at 3:02:50 PM

On the whole, about 35% of internet users are ad-blocking. In the tech space it's upwards of 70%.

It's in no way, shape, or form "small scale", and has fundamentally changed the the very nature of the internet for the worse (opinions/views of ad blocking people don't matter).

by WarmWash

5/21/2026 at 3:02:47 PM

Don't forget that the money being spent to do said scraping has, in great sums, come from subsidies paid by taxes from public coffers.

by 52-6F-62

5/21/2026 at 2:53:41 PM

Choosing not to look at something is not denying anyone anything.

by onedognight

5/21/2026 at 3:00:24 PM

Choosing not to look at an ad, and blocking it are different things. One is totally ok, the other incurs a monetary loss on the creator. Those services aren't free to run, and the content doesn't take zero time to create. It also incentivizes creating content focused on those who cannot figure out ad blocking.

by WarmWash

5/21/2026 at 3:01:29 PM

I am in favor of severely limiting both copyright and advertising, but for the benefit of everyone, not just for the benefit of a few "AI" companies.

by zetanor

5/21/2026 at 3:06:44 PM

And you will not get it. As the AI pump money into lawyers and politicians - they will be the ones profiting from copyright. Total regulatory capture as US AI companies make it illegal to train AI on their output.

by omnimus

5/21/2026 at 3:30:03 PM

The answer is to simply pay for stuff.

There is no viable model where "have stuff but not pay for it" works out.

by WarmWash

5/21/2026 at 5:12:53 PM

I use ad blockers on my personal computer and phone to avoid tracking. My work computer doesn't have a blocker, but I only visit "professional" sites and major blog aggregators on it, so those ads aren't egregious. Ad blockers wouldn't have become a thing of it weren't for ads causing terrible layout, poor performance, and annoying interruptions when playing sound. Not every website does it, but the ones that do have poisoned the well.

by vharuck

5/21/2026 at 3:03:51 PM

There is more to life than money.

Many of the websites I read do not collect any appreciable amount of money from ads, or have no ads at all (one example: news.ycombinator.com :) ). They want a recognition, or to share the knowledge, or community, or they are building their brand... And AI is destroying this all - the first result of "zx80" is an AI overview with a link to wikipedia and some youtube videos. If person stops there , they will never get to computinghistory.org.uk link, and won't see any related information about the variants and models.

by theamk

5/21/2026 at 3:27:23 PM

This website is an ad for Ycombinator. It's in no way, shape, or form a charity place for devs to hang out. It's a feeding ground to lure tech people into a mega VCs pastures.

When you click "news.ycombinator.com" you are clicking on the ad.

:)

by WarmWash

5/21/2026 at 7:04:08 PM

If all ads were like that, I would't have an ad blocker.

by BoneShard

5/21/2026 at 2:59:07 PM

Interesting. I suppose the main difference is that we’re ants compared to an 800 pound gorilla.

by mixmastamyk

5/21/2026 at 2:42:36 PM

[dead]

by qotgalaxy

5/21/2026 at 3:07:15 PM

Perhaps we should go back to back when the internet was about sharing information you liked, not about credit or making money on "content".

by internet2000

5/21/2026 at 5:25:09 PM

Ok, AI companies first then since they are some of the biggest offenders

by sumeno

5/21/2026 at 4:06:56 PM

You are there today, but some are unhappy that others don’t share the same sentiment.

by throw1234567891

5/21/2026 at 2:09:59 PM

"Steal an apple and you're a thief. Steal a kingdom and you're a statesman." - Literal Disney villain

by deaton

5/21/2026 at 3:36:02 PM

Ironically this phrase was said by Jafar in Disney's 2019 live action remake of Aladdin, but wasn't part of the original 1992 version. And I personally would argue that this corporate remake is a worse creative "theft" than what random people are doing with GenAI.

by falcor84

5/21/2026 at 4:16:38 PM

I'll bite. What's your argument, or at least the comment-sized gist of it?

by JonathanMerklin

5/21/2026 at 4:15:40 PM

Disney owns the 1992 production of Aladdin so who exactly are they "stealing" from?

by khuey

5/21/2026 at 4:25:03 PM

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

The argument, as I understand it is that the "theft" is in quotes because it's not literally copyright infringement, but fair use of an old public-domain folk tale that ends up consuming the latter.

Today, when kids know "Aladdin" they know the copyrighted/trademarked Disney character, not the traditional folk tale- that's the "theft" that happened.

by wgjordan

5/21/2026 at 5:02:42 PM

Doesn't this mean that anyone can make a competing Aladdin story, though? Since they don't own the source IP?

by cortesoft

5/21/2026 at 5:08:39 PM

It does! but you can't use anything Disney added (the tiger, the talking bird, etc..) and your production values would have to be super high to avoid looking like a store-brand knockoff. It's hard to deny that the Disney version does damage the original story in some way

by bigfishrunning

5/21/2026 at 4:30:26 PM

If you subscribe to any concept of the public domain this is surely in it.

by khuey

5/21/2026 at 5:11:07 PM

Would most kids around the world even know Aladdin if it wasn't for the Disney copyrighted movie?

by altmanaltman

5/21/2026 at 6:18:54 PM

Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor were well-known long before Disney.

There's even a major Chinese company named after one!

by razakel

5/21/2026 at 6:44:58 PM

I know very well before the movie. It's a classic folk tale.

by Zardoz84

5/21/2026 at 5:36:46 PM

Very likely yes. I was very familiar with this story, and other "Arabian" tales, well before Disney made the original animated version.

We also had Grimm's fairy tales, which I loved reading, and nowadays am reading to my daughter, to her delight. Yes, with beheadings and child-eating monsters and witches.

by the_af

5/21/2026 at 4:41:40 PM

I assume he's saying Disney owns the 1992 film so the 1999 film is not theft, but he wants it to be because he doesn't like the 1999 film. Thus the quotes.

by inanutshellus

5/21/2026 at 5:40:38 PM

That's not a charitable reading of the comment, and furthermore, it's not even a reasonable assumption. Other comments clarify that the "theft" is in quotes because it's a figurative theft, not from Disney to themselves, but from Disney to the earlier, non-copyrighted folk tales it drew inspiration from. And the "theft" is that the Disney IP supplanted (via ubiquity) the public domain versions to the point lots of people aren't even aware they exist. Nobody is arguing it's literal theft, hence the quotes.

by the_af

5/21/2026 at 4:14:51 PM

I would call it cultural theft. But a better word is cultural appropriation, and the original cartoon—though iconic—did it worse. Aladdin was first written sometime in the 9th or the 10th century (oldest surviving complete manuscript of 1001 nights is from the 15th century). It was translated into English in the 18th century.

Disney made a cartoon of the story without understanding the culture it comes from with the main purpose of selling it to an audience with an even less understanding. And the results was a horrible misrepresentation of somebody else’s cultural heritage.

by runarberg

5/21/2026 at 3:12:45 PM

Zhuang Zhou(BC 369-BC 286) have said the similar things "窃钩者诛,窃国者侯" This phrase comes from the chapter Ransacking Coffers (Qu Qie, 胠箧) in the Daoist text Zhuangzi (4th century BC).

by fisheuler

5/21/2026 at 6:09:58 PM

Yeah but isn't the claim that it's not stealing? You're presupposing the thing that is in question.

The argument is that a human will gather information from all over the place and compile it, all without doing anything wrong. That's the base claim. Not that stealing a little is OK. That's extremely easy to disprove and also entirely irrelevant.

by nonethewiser

5/21/2026 at 5:41:30 PM

If you agree with this, then you have to question the validity of international "law"

by rib3ye

5/21/2026 at 6:13:37 PM

Do you not question the validity of international law? How can something be a law over sovereign countries without some overarching governing body and enforcement mechanisms? How can it be a law if the parties it supposedly governs can just recognize or not recognize it at will?

by nonethewiser

5/21/2026 at 2:15:31 PM

Seriously how is this surprising? We all know AI companies stole troves of data to train their models, why do you think they'll stop? Have they faced consequences for the mass theft of copyrighted data?

You can't steal or profit off of that data, but it's fine for them for whatever reason. I guess because they're a force for good in the world and are pushing humanity forward eh?

by pluc

5/21/2026 at 3:43:17 PM

That data is not stolen. It's still there.

by exploderate

5/21/2026 at 5:30:09 PM

the income from the data, on the other hand...

by GeoAtreides

5/21/2026 at 2:36:35 PM

Everytime something gets posted on HN about a bad or unfair state of affairs, some cynical nihilist posts “doh why r u surprised” and I’m sick and tired of it. These comments aren’t insightful, helpful or thought-provoking. You’re just helping a bad situation stay bad.

by skrebbel

5/21/2026 at 2:49:38 PM

My only imagined motivation for such posts is, “Look at me, I’m not surprised by this due to my superior intellect, why are you surprised?”

“No one is surprised, jackass, it’s just adults having a conversation about the current state of affairs.”

Yes, it’s tiring and rarely contributes positively to the conversation.

by mikestew

5/21/2026 at 4:07:41 PM

[dead]

by breck

5/21/2026 at 2:36:31 PM

> You can't steal or profit off of that data, but it's fine for them for whatever reason.

The reason is quite simple. When Microsoft steals YOUR work, GDP go up. When YOU steal Microsoft's work, GDP go down. And the people who create and enforce our laws want GDP to go up. To these people morality and rights are a thin guise that can be conveniently discarded when it's invonvenient for them.

by CivBase

5/21/2026 at 3:53:09 PM

> why do you think they'll stop

Because the sources are now polluted with AI. That's at least one reason they stop scraping.

by sixothree

5/21/2026 at 2:34:31 PM

> it's fine for them for whatever reason

the reason is crony capitalism. I wish I knew what the fix was

by stronglikedan

5/21/2026 at 2:19:39 PM

[flagged]

by stackedinserter

5/21/2026 at 2:24:43 PM

I paid tuition. The library bought its books. The theater sold me a ticket. Money changed hands every step, which is the part your analogy skips.

by badlibrarian

5/21/2026 at 2:58:46 PM

Where did money change hands when you looked at a random image on DeviantArt and got inspired and made a similar image yourself?

by drstewart

5/21/2026 at 3:51:17 PM

Most artists considered it a one to one exchange. They appreciated attribution and were flattered to inspire people. Some got gigs. Some got laid. The money flowed to DeviantArt, hosting providers, and ad providers. The artists were okay with this. They were the ones paying.

Then DeviantArt built a tool to automate the "make a similar image yourself" part and here we are. It removed all the fun parts: the personal contact, the attribution, the inspiration.

Artists realized they unwittingly contributed to the death of not only the community, but the art form they love. Lawsuits pending.

by badlibrarian

5/21/2026 at 2:24:49 PM

Seriously. I recall a thousand hours of movies. Those memories sit in my head and I pay no royalties

by analog8374

5/21/2026 at 2:28:07 PM

Put what you recall on paper, turn it into a screenplay. Let me know how quickly you get sued.

by pluc

5/21/2026 at 2:35:48 PM

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

by jimmaswell

5/21/2026 at 3:38:06 PM

Trillion dollar companies license.

by badlibrarian

5/21/2026 at 2:35:08 PM

One could argue most screenplays are derivative.

by IcyWindows

5/21/2026 at 3:53:10 PM

Hollywood has extraordinarily well-defined controls for keeping things legal and everyone in the chain compensated. Plus a separate Oscars category for it.

by badlibrarian

5/21/2026 at 4:52:45 PM

I heard somewhere there's like eight basic plots or something. and everything else is just an elaboration on that

by analog8374

5/21/2026 at 2:28:55 PM

True, they live in your head rent free. But if you produce a derivative work, you have to pay.

by badlibrarian

5/21/2026 at 2:46:32 PM

if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal

by tancop

5/21/2026 at 3:08:08 PM

Then go ahead and abolish copyright for everyone. Instead we're stuck in an even worse system where the hypercorporations gleefully plagiarize everyone else while sending SWAT teams to kill anyone who pirates a movie.

by kibwen

5/21/2026 at 3:15:05 PM

Obviously there's an ideal middle ground, but what LLMs do is allow free transfer of knowledge while still (mostly) preserving the protections that copyright should be protecting. For example, I can have an LLM give me the entire plot of a book (which is fine), but it won't spit out an exact copy of the book.

by Salgat

5/21/2026 at 3:14:33 PM

Jesus is just an uncopyrighted Mickey Mouse if you have no morals. People have been abusing that fact for a long time and have made some pretty abhorrent products.

by rkozik1989

5/21/2026 at 3:03:03 PM

This is an incredibly naive view of intellectual property. If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things. Do you think any of your favorite movies and TV shows ever get made without copyright protections? Of course not, because money needs to change hands for those things to be funded.

by deaton

5/21/2026 at 3:26:51 PM

> If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things

How do you explain the creative works of writing, music, and art that existed in the millennia of human history between the Mesopotamians and the Enlightenment era?

by StableAlkyne

5/21/2026 at 4:39:25 PM

They tended to be solo productions, or sponsored by aristocratic patrons. Anyone suggesting that we could create movies, TV, music, or games on the scale we do today, without copyright, does not seem worth taking seriously.

by bjt

5/21/2026 at 3:48:18 PM

I support copyright reform, but that history has a large portion of "get lucky while sucking-up to the local rich dudes for a patron", which... isn't ideal either.

by Terr_

5/21/2026 at 3:53:42 PM

Copying was prohibitively expensive.

by jaccola

5/21/2026 at 4:41:06 PM

The original statement was about there being little incentive to create a work you don't "own"

Difficulty in copying is irrelevant to owning it.

Moreover, this does not address music or spoken word. A pre-copyright musician can just listen to a piece and play it in the next town over. A poet or storyteller can just memorize a work and retell it.

by StableAlkyne

5/21/2026 at 4:53:06 PM

Is it the pursuit accumulating capital (incentive to profit) or merely to fund something? You switch from the former to the latter. Why do you believe that profit is reliant on copyright? Piracy is so widespread that copyright may as well not exist (in the context of the consumption of media) outside of moralizing rhetoric, and yet insane profits are made all the same.

I cannot at all relate to being so devoid of passions in all categories but the accumulation of capital. If we are to justify copyright and the concept of intellectual property writ large, then as far as I can see its only real usecase is in defending against precisely the people who are possessed by an obsession with capital, those dragons who merely care to see their hoard grow larger. Unfortunately, that's not how these systems are structured in our society. The transferability of intellectual property all but warps the idea into something that instead empowers those it should disarm.

by ux266478

5/21/2026 at 5:52:45 PM

Accumulation of capital is the engine by which this stuff runs. You aren't going to get a staff of full-time writers, actors, set designers, costume designers, composers, and editors to create something great off of passion alone. These creatives may love what they do but at the end of the day they need to eat. The promise of future returns are why works like movies and tv shows receive the massive funding necessary to be produced.

by deaton

5/21/2026 at 3:08:51 PM

You should check out this thing called open source software

by foobar1726

5/21/2026 at 3:26:54 PM

> You should check out this thing called open source software

Open source actually demonstrates that copyright serves a purpose. There are still customers for non-open software, even when open alternatives exist, so the ability to monetize brings new offerings to the economy.

by bachmeier

5/21/2026 at 3:13:25 PM

Open source software is unique in that it takes little to no capital investment to create. People post free art too. It doesn't mean that Game of Thrones didn't cost anything to produce.

by deaton

5/21/2026 at 5:05:13 PM

Writing books and creating music also takes no capital investment

by cortesoft

5/21/2026 at 5:59:16 PM

And people do do those things out of passion, and many of them are happy to share it so you can listen to it for free. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't own the right to control what happens to what they made.

by deaton

5/21/2026 at 6:18:11 PM

Sure, but you said that open source software is unique because it doesn't take capital. It isn't unique, as demonstrated by the two other examples (out of many) that I posted.

Whether someone should own the right to control is a separate issue. Your previous response made it seem like the lack of capital requirement was the distinction, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

You argued that if you didn't own the copyright, there would be no incentive for creating and sharing work. Someone said that open source software shows that you can have creative work without needing to maintain ownership. You then said that was only applicable to software.

It clearly isn't, because of my examples.

by cortesoft

5/21/2026 at 3:45:00 PM

You should check out this thing called GPL that is the standard license of open source projects like Linux, and heavily depends on copyright laws.

Or are you suggesting open source software is public domain?

by koonsolo

5/21/2026 at 4:28:18 PM

You may want to review your history. The GPL is copyleft -it only exists to subvert copyright law by using it against itself in a sort of intellectual legal judo. If "IP" laws were not as they were, there would be no need for the GPL. Software would be Free.

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

by 4chandaily

5/21/2026 at 4:50:34 PM

Even if companies didn't have copyright protection on their source code, that doesn't mean they'd post it all on the internet for anybody to freely download.

by mitthrowaway2

5/21/2026 at 6:12:38 PM

No, not all of them, but some companies, many organizations, and plenty of individuals would.

Not everything has to be done for a profit. Plenty of us make software, art, and technology because we find it fun and interesting to work on, and because we want to live in a world that is richer for it.

Removing draconian intellectual property laws that mostly only benefit the giant corporations that lobbied for them isn't going to stop me from doing so, and I doubt it would stop many others.

by 4chandaily

5/21/2026 at 7:16:14 PM

Ok, but copyright law already doesn't stop anyone from putting things into the public domain.

by mitthrowaway2

5/21/2026 at 7:27:51 PM

No, but it does give them an incentive not to.

by 4chandaily

5/21/2026 at 7:26:06 PM

You probably mean you want to take free advantage of what others create, and you offer nothing in return.

But maybe you will pleasantly surprise us and show what kind of valuable thing you create and offer for free.

by koonsolo

5/21/2026 at 7:36:03 PM

I only mean what I said. Anything else you infer is your own bias.

I don't know why you are taking such a hostile position towards someone you have never interacted with, but you are welcome to believe what you will. I don't feel any need to prove or justify my actions to Internet strangers. I've participated in the FL/OSS software movement long enough that I still put the FL/ in front of the name.

I don't sell my thoughts, they are freely given. If everyone behaved this way, there would be no need for copyright (or copyleft). I choose to engage the world in the way I wish it to be.

by 4chandaily

5/21/2026 at 6:01:53 PM

A key component of the GPL is the requirement that source of code of programs that use the GPL code be made available. Without IP laws, how would you achieve that goal of the GPL?

by 0xffff2

5/21/2026 at 6:31:02 PM

I mostly addressed this in a sibling comment, but I wanted to add that if copyright wasn't preventing companies from copying and building upon the works of others, I find it likely that the industry would be more free and competitive.

Source code is a recipe. You can't copyright recipes by themselves, but that hasn't caused any sort of chilling effect in the food and hospitality industries.

I agree with you that removing copyright protections breaks the GPL. What I think most responses to my comment miss is that we wouldnt NEED the GPL without copyright. Copyleft only exists so that copyright cannot be used by companies against users.

I know Stallman isnt the most popular on this forum, but history has sorta proven he was right, time after time.

by 4chandaily

5/21/2026 at 4:37:11 PM

You are not a developer so you don't understand you can compile to a binary without revealing your sources?

No copyright -> No GPL -> anyone can release their own close source version of open source software.

Why do you think GPL was create in the first place? We always had public domain you know.

by koonsolo

5/21/2026 at 4:53:13 PM

My compilers work just fine? Perhaps I'm not sure what your point is.

by 4chandaily

5/21/2026 at 4:56:57 PM

My point is that you are unable to understand the difference between GPL and public domain.

by koonsolo

5/21/2026 at 5:26:49 PM

Okay.

by 4chandaily

5/21/2026 at 3:08:13 PM

This is naive in the opposite. Creators gonna create.

by nehal3m

5/21/2026 at 3:59:05 PM

Creators can only create as long as they can sustain the costs of creating (including opportunity cost).

by modriano

5/21/2026 at 3:27:23 PM

Who is giving a creator millions of dollars to create something if there is no guaranteed path to recouping production costs.

Are we going the communist soviet union route where everything is decided by central committee?

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 3:28:57 PM

That is not the only scale to create on. Also, Linux is free. There’s more than one way to make something available.

by nehal3m

5/21/2026 at 3:39:14 PM

Just a fundamental disagreement then. I want to live in the world that created The Lord of the Rings.

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 3:41:54 PM

Linux is clearly not public domain as it has a GPL license. And GPL heavily depends on copyright laws.

by koonsolo

5/21/2026 at 3:31:42 PM

Capitalists who capitalize on creative outlets need capital to incentivize them to do so. It's basically circular.

Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital.

Sure, those lines get muddy when you want to do it professionally, but that's a separate argument.

by epicide

5/21/2026 at 3:37:23 PM

>Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital.

How do you create without capital? To make a film you need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, caterers, a director, scriptwriters. A world without professional creatives is so much poorer than the world we already have. Why would you give it up just for some vague notion of ideological purity.

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 3:48:47 PM

You absolutely do not need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, and caterers to make a film. You need a director and scriptwriters, but those can be the same person. Do many film sets have all those? Absolutely. But one can still make a film without them. Some of the best films ever created were mostly the product of one person with a budget less than half that of the average car.

Would you be able to create big-budget movies without said big budget? Of course not. I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better? It feels like you're conflating art creation with art business, but they are not the same thing.

by epicide

5/21/2026 at 4:03:11 PM

I suppose you are okay with all animated films being impossible to create then.

>I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better?

If you legitimately believe something like 2001: A Space Odyssey would be as good with a budget of $10,000 then that just seems delusional.

The world you want is one in which the only people who can create things are people who are wealthy by other means, there is no pathway for a talented but poor kid to go from making home movies to working on films without IP laws. They must abandon their dreams and go work in the coal mines or whatever. It is dystopian.

I want the most amount of people possible to be able to work as professional creatives because it enriches my life and the lives of everyone in the country I live in.

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 5:53:14 PM

> I suppose you are okay with all animated films being impossible to create then.

i quite enjoyed watching some animations made on a $10 budget over winter. www.giraffest.ca

that and everything the NFB puts together.

Art is worth putting government money into

by 8note

5/21/2026 at 6:07:02 PM

>i quite enjoyed watching some animations made on a $10 budget over winter. www.giraffest.ca

Sure, if you want to discount the thousands of hours (and dollars) that they spent to get good enough to make those things. People are willing to spent time and money getting good at animation because there is a career pathway for them.

Also there is a fundamental difference between a short experimental art film and a 90+ minute narrative feature film.

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 5:47:56 PM

Exactly, it is the difference between creating as a hobby and creating as a profession. The latter is only possible when there are IP protections in place to ensure compensation.

by deaton

5/21/2026 at 3:52:57 PM

The point is that without copyright you can' do it professionally. Someone will just sell whatever you created for you and you will not get a cent from it.

by jonathanstrange

5/21/2026 at 3:24:42 PM

Yes, absolutely, and that is why history shows so few examples of any art having been created prior to the invention of copyright: nobody had any reason to do it.

by marssaxman

5/21/2026 at 3:35:18 PM

Prior to the invention of copyright, it was not very cheap or easy to make a faithful copy of something. Books had to be type set by hand, before the printing press they had to be copied by hand. Photography of good enough quality to reproduce a painting is very very recent. So is ability to record a play well enough to enjoy it like you are there later.

by dmitrygr

5/21/2026 at 3:11:46 PM

>> If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things.

You do realize people created and shared things long before copyright became a thing, right?

by enraged_camel

5/21/2026 at 3:25:09 PM

Can you explain how something like the Lord of the Rings film series gets created in a world with no IP laws.

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 3:30:13 PM

Many versions are made, the best ones get the most views. You don't need huge budgets and guaranteed revenue to make great art. In fact, I'd argue it's often the opposite. Most big budget movies suck these days.

by seandoe

5/21/2026 at 3:34:26 PM

Where is the money coming from? Who is financing the production?

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 2:52:05 PM

Copyright specifically doesn't and never did protect "ideas", it protects expression.

by kube-system

5/21/2026 at 6:17:53 PM

The problem is that something like (say) a song is much more than an idea. It’s an idea + work (arrangement, production, performance, etc. depending on the situation). The argument for owning work, at least for X number of years in a limited way (vs. our current system), seems reasonable to me.

by olivierestsage

5/21/2026 at 3:40:38 PM

The biggest problem is not the broken commercialization, but the broken attribution. People should be recognized, when they create art. Art is an important way of how we humans express ourselves.

by vaylian

5/21/2026 at 4:53:32 PM

If you penalize and stigmatize copying, you get broken attribution.

by scotty79

5/21/2026 at 2:52:48 PM

I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).

by caconym_

5/21/2026 at 3:01:09 PM

I wonder how many would be written if copyright was only 20 years instead of more than a century? To the point that most people will never be legally allowed to directly build off of the culture they grew up in.

Lord of the rings will be under copyright til roughly 2050. I think Tolkien's estate has gotten more than enough money from that book and it's time to let other use the word hobbit without the threat of a lawsuit.

by _aavaa_

5/21/2026 at 3:08:55 PM

> I wonder how many would be written if copyright was only 20 years instead of more than a century?

I expect it would not move the needle much. I support reduced copyright periods, though not in the specific way you do. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it? The comment I replied to seemed to be advocating for total abolition of copyright law, and my comment is written to be interpreted in that context.

> To the point that most people will never be legally allowed to directly build off of the culture they grew up in.

What specifically are you talking about? Every author borrows from what came before. Copyright law doesn't even enter the picture in the vast majority of cases, because you generally don't have to copy to "build off of the culture [you] grew up in".

by caconym_

5/21/2026 at 4:16:05 PM

For what it’s worth I think abolishing copyright wouldn’t have as big of an impact on art production as you do. Most artists (e.g. musicians or authors) aren’t struggling because their art is popular but copied by others (or lack of copyright). But because nobody listens to or reads their work.

Even before AI more people tried to be an author/musician than could ever hope to gain even financial success. I don’t think less copyright will dissuade them.

> every author borrows

Borrows yes. But that has changed drastically in the last 100 years because of what has become the copyright system.

I’ll be long dead and gone before people can make and publish their own LOTR, or Star Wars, or whatever franchise they grew up with. Disney would be impossible to start given the current regulations, all those tales would be locked up, and we would all be worse for it.

by _aavaa_

5/21/2026 at 7:42:09 PM

I guess you feel strongly that fan fiction and similar derivative works ought to be monetizable? I guess I really just don't care about that. It hasn't stopped huge numbers of amazing authors from doing their thing, and I don't think it's a good reason to [partially] abolish copyright except in a very specific and limited scope.

by caconym_

5/21/2026 at 4:04:25 PM

Simple piraciy is not even the worst possible outcome.

Without copyright, nothing stops one from simply selling a book under their own name.

Big publishers could just reprint anything and get it into brick & mortar stores. No money for authors.

Advocating for absolutely no copyright is wild.

by Snafuh

5/21/2026 at 3:02:08 PM

The worthwhile ones would still be written. Even if they are not enjoyable. The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhibitable

by nashashmi

5/21/2026 at 3:17:53 PM

> The worthwhile ones would still be written.

Citation needed, as well as your precise definition of "worthwhile".

> Even if they are not enjoyable.

Huh?

> The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhabitable

Yes, I understand that anti-copyright activists want to abolish copyright.

by caconym_

5/21/2026 at 4:03:03 PM

Farenheit 451 is a book with the same theme.

by nashashmi

5/21/2026 at 7:47:15 PM

No, I don't really think it is.

by caconym_

5/21/2026 at 4:01:09 PM

You are arguing in theoreticals, so you should not be surprised if your answers are hypotheticals.

In reality most art is done because the artist has something to say, and the money they get from it is only motivating in as much as it enables the artist to do more art. So I would guess in a world without copyright protection we would just find other ways to pay artists and a very similar amount of art would be produced.

You can see an example of this e.g. in Iceland where the market is way to small for art aimed at the domestic market to make enough money solely by selling it (possible with music; rare with books; not possible with movies). Instead the state has an extensive “artist salary“ program, which pays artist regardless of how well the art they produce sells. Unsurprisingly Iceland produces a lot of art and has many working artists.

by runarberg

5/21/2026 at 7:46:37 PM

Cool. Let me know when the government is willing to pay me to write full time---I would love to quit my job and do that instead. I think it's a great idea!

by caconym_

5/21/2026 at 3:45:53 PM

People have been pirating books online for 20 years and in that time the number of books published per year has increased 15-fold. A number of my favorites have been released in that time.

by nearbuy

5/21/2026 at 7:45:46 PM

Piracy is illegal and most people don't do it.

In a world without copyright, I can stand up a slick 100% legal website (and apps, etc) and distribute electronic copies of every single book (or whatever) straight to normies' phones, and I am free to monetize this scheme however I want.

by caconym_

5/21/2026 at 2:49:05 PM

Yeah, I think we are at the point where copyright doesn't exist anymore, at least for AI

by Bombthecat

5/21/2026 at 2:56:31 PM

All of human knowledge (an exaggeration, I know) at our finger tips. It's the most punk rock, anarchist thing tech has done since the internet and it's funny it's shaped as a product.

by hectdev

5/21/2026 at 5:05:18 PM

I think the most punk rock, anarchist thing that could happen is someone leverages the shitty, pre-digested consumer-facing models to orchestrate a cybersecurity incident where the frontier base models are stolen and freely distributed to the public.

by ux266478

5/21/2026 at 6:43:35 PM

The way the Chinese have been running inference against the US models is somewhat what you are saying.

by hectdev

5/21/2026 at 3:04:36 PM

If you get the impression of punk and anarchy, it's only because you're not looking any deeper than the veneer. Underneath, it's nothing like punk or anarchy.

by ses1984

5/21/2026 at 3:51:44 PM

I'm considering the dispersement of tech. 3D printers disrupt needing to buy widgets from big companies and local llms disrupt needing to buy generalize software when you can make your own bespoke. AI will live on long after the big corporations burn out their money coffers.

by hectdev

5/21/2026 at 3:30:40 PM

Sure, a few mega-corporations of the scale to upset entire markets owning all information and renting it out as they see fit is very punk. A cyberpunk dystopia specifically.

by account42

5/21/2026 at 3:49:27 PM

If you consider the local llm scene which is closing the gaps, mega corporations become less possessive of all information.

by hectdev

5/21/2026 at 3:57:42 PM

What? If I want to read Harry Potter or watch The Matrix an AI cannot produce something equally as good for me. So I need to pay those people, or break the law.

For lots of online knowledge/blogs I guess it is true but even here I often read explainer blogs because AI casts everything in a certain narrative/tone that isn’t always appropriate.

by jaccola

5/21/2026 at 5:06:31 PM

> If I want to read Harry Potter or watch The Matrix an AI cannot produce something equally as good for me.

Yet

by cortesoft

5/21/2026 at 3:00:01 PM

This is insane. How will any intellectual or artistic work be sustainable in this world?

As a teenager I used to proclaim that "you can't own bits, maaaan" all the time. I've since grown up. Intellectual property is essential to safeguarding intellectual work. I'm not saying this out of greed – I'm a vocal advocate for the free software movement. It, too, relies on a semi-sane framework of intellectual property. So do Hollywood studios. So do the makers of AI (well, since they're not actually sustainable at all currently, I guess you can say they don't rely on anything).

by gspr

5/21/2026 at 4:35:03 PM

That's the neat part, you won't.

by Bombthecat

5/21/2026 at 2:55:19 PM

The alternative to strong property rights and norms is secrecy and enforcement.

by groundzeros2015

5/21/2026 at 3:01:20 PM

This is a strictly worse world in almost every sense. It's as if we abolished physical property rights and suggested people arm themselves to keep what is (was) theirs instead. Civilization, gone.

by gspr

5/21/2026 at 3:14:18 PM

It’s a false equivalence to say that intellectual property is property. Taking your car deprives you of your car. Taking your idea lets civilization advance.

by beering

5/21/2026 at 4:13:01 PM

No. It means people don’t invest in things they can’t control or keep secret.

by groundzeros2015

5/21/2026 at 5:13:40 PM

> Taking your car deprives you of your car. Taking your idea lets civilization advance.

Copyright is at the heart of the matter here, so let's focus on that. Copyright does not protect ideas.

Wanna rephrase so that we stay on topic?

by gspr

5/21/2026 at 3:27:52 PM

Can we do that for Medical field?

Like if we know formulation of drug then drug (+ any smaller modification - through AI) could be new formulation. That will break current Medical patent system.

by gagan2020

5/21/2026 at 3:55:33 PM

This is how the drug industry already works. I don’t think there’s any evidence “AI” (LLM) is capable of producing valid drug modifications.

by jaccola

5/21/2026 at 4:07:42 PM

In current status AI models cannot do that. But, if they do then it will break Medical Patent model.

by gagan2020

5/21/2026 at 3:01:33 PM

lol, never going to happen. I remember when the RIAA was successfully able to shake down tens of thousands of individuals for pirating music in the 2000s.

If you’re a pleb, stealing copyrighted materials will get you some nasty fines, lawsuits and criminal charges. If you’re a megacorp with unlimited buckets of cash, then there is no accountability.

by 0rganize

5/21/2026 at 2:55:34 PM

So if you pour your heart and soul into writing a novel over the course of years, and it becomes modestly successful earning you a little money in return for your sweat, I should be allowed to just copy it, give it away for free (hell, even say I wrote it – it's not as if it's even yours to own in your world)?

by gspr

5/21/2026 at 3:20:01 PM

Yes.

by DharmaPolice

5/21/2026 at 7:06:16 PM

What do you think this will do to the production of novels going forward?

by gspr

5/21/2026 at 3:07:07 PM

I think you may be too optimistic about the state of affairs under capitalism. Very rarely do things change which don't benefit the owning class without direct action from the working class that puts adequate pressure on the rich, i.e actions which threatens their profits.

by runarberg

5/21/2026 at 2:46:11 PM

This is really not so clear cut as "fair use" might cover 99% of all data scrapping; you are not reproducing the originals just use them to estimate probabilistic distribution of tokens in pre-training. You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLMs.

by storus

5/21/2026 at 3:06:01 PM

>You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLM.

This is pretty much the exact claim of a NYT lawsuit against OpenAI.

"One example: Bing Chat copied all but two of the first 396 words of its 2023 article “The Secrets Hamas knew about Israel’s Military.” An exhibit showed 100 other situations in which OpenAI’s GPT was trained on and memorized articles from The Times, with word-for-word copying in red and differences in black."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/cou...

by lbrito

5/21/2026 at 5:58:34 PM

Yes, LLMs fundamentally operate as a lossy compression scheme for their training data. There's been countless examples of them reproducing their training data with very high accuracy

People claim that the data isn't stored, but clearly a representation of it is encoded and reproducible. I saw chatgpt word for word plagiarise a stack overflow comment just two days ago

by 20k

5/21/2026 at 6:16:19 PM

Does this actually imply a representation of it has been stored or simply that the model is sort of over-fit?

by nonethewiser

5/21/2026 at 6:32:09 PM

Is there a difference?

by wat10000

5/21/2026 at 3:08:25 PM

When I was in school, writing "in my own words" was never an excuse to not cite a source. It was actually something that took me a little while to understand, it's the source of the information that needs to be cited, and that's not limited to literal quotations of someone else's writing.

by SoftTalker

5/21/2026 at 3:11:42 PM

That's more an argument for why you can't just use LLMs as a source of truth. Conveniently, LLMs like ChatGPT do often cite their sources, especially if you prompt them to.

by Salgat

5/21/2026 at 4:02:20 PM

Maybe a nit: LLMs do not and cannot cite their sources (at least scraped sources for the purpose of training)

It’s kind of the harness that is doing the citing (or providing the context for the model to).

But an LLM sans search can reproduce some copyrighted work with minor variations and there’s no way to know exactly where it came from.

by jaccola

5/21/2026 at 4:01:43 PM

> You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLMs

You could say the same about MP3 encoders but I don't think that would convince any judge

by pera

5/21/2026 at 4:10:53 PM

https://arxiv.org/html/2510.25941v1

You can get it to reproduce content but it’s a game of cat and mouse. Were it not for the alignment to avoid direct reproduction it would taken far more often.

> RECAP consistently outperforms all other methods; as an illustration, it extracted ≈3,000 passages from the first "Harry Potter" book with Claude-3.7, compared to the 75 passages identified by the best baseline.

by twobitshifter

5/21/2026 at 5:17:30 PM

Try prompting Claude to create a drop-in replacement for an existing library, testing against that library's test suite to validate functionality.

It will pretty much plagiarize the library verbatim from memory, sans comments.

by TimTheTinker

5/21/2026 at 3:12:38 PM

Come up with obscure topic that has few relevant results, post about to Reddit on your profile page, wait a few hours and then query Gemini/ChatGPT about that exact thing and tell me you still feel this way.

by rkozik1989

5/21/2026 at 2:59:49 PM

I don’t buy this argument. The tokens are useless without their context, which provides the probability distributions needed to make them useful. Sure you MIGHT not be able to get the book word for word, but it’s impossible to make a useful model without the whole book and all of the artistry that went into it, to guide the tokens in their expected output.

Fair use generally does not cover commercial use, which this clearly is, and is dependent on the amount of the original content present in the derived work, which I would contend in this case is “all of it”

by mplanchard

5/21/2026 at 3:36:20 PM

"Commercial Use" is only one part of the four prongs of the fair use test. For example, commercial Parody is generally considered Fair Use. Look at Space Balls, which is a direct transformation from Star Wars.

This is all new territory. We don't have court-settled law yet.

by Vvector

5/21/2026 at 3:35:20 PM

It's more complicated than that. Quite a bit more.

Commercial use counts _against_ a fair use defense, but is not dispositive: it's not accurate at all to say it "generally does not cover" commercial use. This is the "purpose and character" test, one of four in contemporary (United States) fair use doctrine.

Purpose and character also includes the degree to which a use is _transformative_. It's clear that the degree to which a training run mulching texts "transforms" them is very high. This counts toward a fair use finding for purpose and character.

> is dependent on the amount of the original content present in the derived work, which I would contend in this case is “all of it”

The "amount and substantiality" test. Your case for "all of it" can't possibly be sustained: the models aren't big enough. It's amount _and_ substantiality: this has come up in the publication of concordances, where a relatively large amount of a copyrighted work appears, but it's chopped up and ordered in a way which is no longer substantially the same. Courts have ruled that this kind of text is fair use, pretty consistently. It's not an LLM, of course, but those have yet to be ruled on.

Also worth knowing that courts have never accepted reading or studying a work as incorporation, and are unlikely to change course on the question. It's taken for granted that anyone is allowed to read a copyrighted work in as much detail as they wish, in the course of producing another one. Model training isn't reading either, but the question is to what degree it resembles study. I'd say, more than not.

Specifically:

> it’s impossible to make a useful model without the whole book and all of the artistry that went into it

Courts have never once accepted "it would be impossible for defendant to write his biography without reading plaintiff's" as valid, and it's been tried. The standard for plagiarism is higher than that.

"Effect upon the work's value" is probably the most interesting one. For some things, extreme, for others, negligible. I suspect this is the one courts are going to spend the most time on as all of these questions are litigated.

Ultimately, model training is highly out-of-distribution for the common law questions involving fair use. It was not anticipated by statute, to put it mildly. The best solution to that kind of dilemma is more statute, and we'll probably see that, but, I don't think you'll be happy with the result, given what I'm replying to. Just a guess on my part.

by samatman

5/21/2026 at 3:58:04 PM

It is of course true that it is unsettled law, and that fair use is more complicated than my offhand comment suggested.

> Courts have never once accepted "it would be impossible for defendant to write his biography without reading plaintiff's" as valid, and it's been tried. The standard for plagiarism is higher than that.

This I think misses the thrust of my argument, though. Its hard to find an exact human analogy, because neither the technology nor the scale at which it operates is remotely human.

I see it less as “writing his biography without reading the plaintiff’s” and it’s more “using the same style and metaphors to make thousands of copies of very similar biographies, with certain bits tweaked,” like turning an existing work into mad lib.

I don’t know how the courts will eventually rule on it, but it certainly feels like theft to me.

by mplanchard

5/21/2026 at 4:19:30 PM

It's fascinating how intuitions differ. To me, it doesn't feel like theft at all. For one thing, theft is depriving another of something, and has therefore never been a good metaphor for infringement; hackers used to be the most insistent about this principle, and it's weird to see a doctrine which was cooked up in a literal AI lab get thrown out the window for literal AI.

But pretending you said "infringement", for me it comes all the way back to the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I cannot possibly twist the development of large language models into something which violates the spirit of that purpose. I don't see how anyone can.

Your point about the scale is valid, and the alienness of it, sure. But you haven't made the case that the vastness of the scale should affect the conclusion.

Something I left out in the first post is that copyright is meant to protect expression, and not ideas: this is the deciding factor in the 'nature of the copyrighted work' test for fair use. More expression, more protection: more ideas, less.

I think the visual arts have a strong case that image generators directly infringe expression: I'm not convinced that authors do, and I think software should never have been protected under copyright because the ideas-to-expression ratio is all wrong for the legal structure. There's clearly no scale case to be made for ideas: "but what if it's _all_ the ideas" fails, because the ideas are not protected at all. Nor should they be, that's what patents are for, and why patents are very different from copyright.

LLMs are remarkably good at 'the facts of the matter', hallucination not withstanding. They're very poor at authorial 'voice transfer', something image generators are far too good at. It's when I start asking myself "well what even _is_ this 'expression' thing anyway?" that I conclude that we're out over our skis on the LLMs-and-IP question: precedent can't tell us enough, and that leaves legislation.

by samatman

5/21/2026 at 3:12:51 PM

This confuses input and output.

A copy made for the purposes of training is still a copy.

Even if you throw the text away after training, you've still made a copy.

by TheOtherHobbes

5/21/2026 at 3:25:02 PM

Fair use was built around human limitations. The mass scraping campaigns done by the AI giants were clearly an overreach in spirit, if not letter. Most people's intuition is that these massive operations that are valued in the trillions can't have been drawn from some untapped common resource, and they're correct. Someone, somewhere is not being properly compensated.

I have no problem with taxing AI companies so that their profit is marginal, or forcing them to provide compute for free. That seems like the correct balance of what they're harvesting from the "commons" (which is really just the totality of private IP that was exposed to their crawlers).

by underlipton

5/21/2026 at 2:32:50 PM

IP attorney here and actively working on this problem.

nla: if you create content online (public repo code, blog, podcast, YouTube, publishing) the smartest thing you can do if to file a US copyright, even if you have a hobby blog.

Anthropic paid $1.5B in a class settlement to authors because it was piracy of copyrighted works. If we as a HN community had our works protected, there are potentially huge statutory damages for scraping by any and all llms. I work with hundreds of writers and publishers and am forming a coalition to protect and license what they're creating.

by ggillas

5/21/2026 at 2:58:32 PM

Anthropic didn't lose because they scraped (read) copyrighted works. They lost because they distributed copyrighted works directly via torrents. Those aren't the same.

by codexb

5/21/2026 at 2:41:08 PM

I'll bite. I have always been told copyright is inherit. Does it cost money to file a copyright? Do I need to do it for each blog post? For each gist? I'll totally setup some scripts to make it happen if it what actually needs doing to have the copyright I expected.

Edit: remember not to down vote ideas you disagree with. I think it was only down vote things that lower the discourse

by sosuke

5/21/2026 at 5:13:33 PM

I think it depends on the country. In Germany, everything you write is automatically copyrighted, unless you explicitly waive it. In the US, it's the other way around, you have to explicitly state that you want copyright (can somebody confirm this?).

I'm not a lawyer, but I guess a German posting on Hacker News effectively waives their copyright by sending their comment to the US, where an US company then publishes the comment on a US server.

by RedNifre

5/21/2026 at 3:19:44 PM

You do have inherent copyright whenever you post, but it puts the burden on you to prove damages (or how much financial harm you suffered from one LLMs piracy alone). Filing fees are $65 for online registration and they allow you to claim atty fees and statutory damages. Statutory damages can range between $700-$150k USD per LLM because you registered it.

So yes, set up some scripts, you can go back 90 days from when you file (you get a grace period). Also if you're publishing frequently to a blog, repo, or newsletter, you can save cost by filing each article under a group registration. Ping me if you need help.

by ggillas

5/21/2026 at 2:35:24 PM

Doesn't the mere act of publishing your original content online grant you copyright?

by stronglikedan

5/21/2026 at 2:39:17 PM

Statutory damages require registration.

by Kye

5/21/2026 at 2:36:15 PM

Wait what do you mean by "file a copyright"? I have never heard of this, all explanations of copyright I have heard say that you automatically own the copyright to the things you make; and that "all rights are reserved" by default unless you give up on them through granting a license. Is this no longer the case? Why is this now suddenly different? When did it change?

by mort96

5/21/2026 at 3:34:52 PM

I hear this a lot! What's suddenly different for the web is the volume of scraping. And that fact that the sum of that scraping is building companies with trillion dollar valuations.

There are tens of millions of registered copyrights in the US, nearly every published book, music, artwork, many magazines and major websites. Here's the official link, you can search the registry and there is a ton of info: https://www.copyright.gov/registration/

by ggillas

5/21/2026 at 3:03:37 PM

Briefly, there is default copyright and registered copyright. Registering works grants stronger protections (i.e. bigger fines if broken).

by lubujackson

5/21/2026 at 2:37:58 PM

No one will ever do this, or definitely not enough people will, so what's Plan B?

by indigodaddy

5/21/2026 at 3:00:53 PM

Bigger portion of the payout for those that do?

by necovek

5/21/2026 at 4:09:21 PM

The only thing worst than a mega corp is an ip attorney.

Your cause is already lost.

Good luck enforcing whatever frivolous lawsuits you have cooking up against open weights Chinese models that anyone with newer graphics card can crank out inference on.

by potsandpans

5/21/2026 at 2:37:48 PM

[dead]

by pull_my_finger

5/21/2026 at 2:33:31 PM

Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage. [0]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

by MontyCarloHall

5/21/2026 at 2:47:41 PM

Just so long as it's just a seductive mirage to the Oracles, Microsofts, Metas, and Googles as well as your friendly neighbourhood unpaid overworked open-source developer.

Open weight model trained with no attribution on all of Oracle's internal repos. It's only fair.

by phoronixrly

5/21/2026 at 4:30:44 PM

I think what gets conflated are two aspects.

1. LLM/transformer technology is legitimately amazing and revolutionary. 2. In the end, they function as an enormous, effective database for most human knowledge.

Point 1 obscures the fact that if someone just created an SQL database with every digital artifact in existence and provided it for free upon request, there would be no ambiguity whether that was legal or not.

But distillation, etc obscures this relationship and it looks like something other than straight lookup, at least in part because it is obviously more than that.

by chrisbrandow

5/21/2026 at 1:55:39 PM

> their article contains links to my actual website, with the exact link text (?!)

I'm having a hard time understanding what's wrong here? Unless the link text is very long, why would someone linking to your article use different words for the link text?

by kstenerud

5/21/2026 at 2:01:15 PM

Right, that's quoting and citing a source.

by NDlurker

5/21/2026 at 2:22:28 PM

Sometimes links take the form of `.../post/{id}/{extra-text}` where `extra-text` is not used at all to match the post. Amazon links are (used to be?) this way where the product name is added to the end of the link but can be removed or changed and still will route to the product. Maybe the author is surprised the LLM is providing the irrelevant portion of the link verbatim.

by 420official

5/21/2026 at 2:14:48 PM

I think they probably had the section header link back to their webpage, or something similar to that. This is not a well-written rant.

by joshred

5/21/2026 at 2:19:48 PM

I think he's saying he uses his website's URL in his tutorial examples, and other tutorials have copied them as-is

by jp_sc

5/21/2026 at 2:38:53 PM

Imagine you have two web pages.

One is a recipe for apple fritters, and the other is an informal ranking of apples by flavor.

Let's say your apple fritter recipe links to your apple ranking list.

Later, you discover someone copied your apple fritter recipe without credit, but it still links to your apple ranking list, using the same wording as your recipe. They're getting more Google SERP juice and ad revenue than yours, despite stealing your article.

Do you see the problem?

by some_furry

5/21/2026 at 5:30:49 PM

Whether or not its technically copyright infringement isn't the main issue I have. Its mostly that it concentrates the ability to collect rent from all of the content in the world into the hands of the few corporations who can build data centers at scale. This is a huge problem. Why would I make a webpage, a news site, an online magazine, or create art commercially if it can be swept up into these models and cut me out of any incentive? If its not legally copyright infringement now we need a new legal framework around it because its an absolute tragedy for human creativity and small enterprise.

by tracerbulletx

5/21/2026 at 5:41:41 PM

We went through exactly this with Google. People argued that once they were the only way anyone found websites, they were merely collecting undue economic rent.

by ip26

5/21/2026 at 2:12:55 PM

People need to cope with the fact that no thought is original. Even Newton and Leibniz were having the same thoughts at the same time. Get over it.

by adamzwasserman

5/21/2026 at 6:22:55 PM

Im not sure where I land - is it just information compiled like humans do at scale or is it different? But I am sympathetic to your idea.

I think it points to an interesting trend either way. People are less tolerant of machines. Failures of machines are reviled because of their nature, even when the overall problem compared to humans is less. For example, self driving cars. If self driving cars halve traffic deaths from reckless driving but it occasionally mows over a family of four in broad daylight for no apparent reason, society will overwhelmingly reject the technology.

Basically, I dont think people will ever be satisfied even if we prove "its just doing the same thing we are." It's going to be held to a higher standard.

by nonethewiser

5/21/2026 at 2:25:32 PM

When did the last original thought happen then? Clearly thoughts must have been original at some point, or there wouldn't be any at all

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 2:36:03 PM

When did the first homo sapiens exist? Ideas like species evolve. Saying there are no original ideas seems to me an attempt to glibly capture something quite fundamental.

by dmoose

5/21/2026 at 6:06:24 PM

Hi dmoose, your handle looks familiar to me. The non-glib answer is that we should giver some very serious consideration to the possibility that language either functions like, or possibly is the same as, Jung's collective unconscious: the organically created repository of all of humankind's cognition and reason, accumulated over vasts periods of time, deposited by billions of humans.

My way of "giving this serious attention" is through pre-registered, falsifiable, repeatable, experimentation, which anyone can look up on osf.io because I use my real name. I'll bet you that non of the randos in this thread do as much.

To all of the randos: unless you have data... it is just an opinion.

by adamzwasserman

5/21/2026 at 3:12:12 PM

I don't disagree with your premise, but I'd argue that saying "there are no original ideas" in the context of a discussion of plagiarism is needlessly reductive. Even though I think I mostly agree with the author here, I think there are legitimate counterarguments that can be made; equating all of the ways someone can cite or build upon an idea with copying something word-for-word and claiming it's your own is not one of them though.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 3:02:39 PM

Did those original thoughts not build upon all the original thoughts that came before them?

by codexb

5/21/2026 at 3:13:32 PM

Is my house a copy of the dirt it's on top of? Did the people who built my house build the dirt? There's a difference between "building upon" an idea and trying to claim you built the idea itself

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 3:54:15 PM

Sure they build upon them, you still need to add your 1% of original insight. There was a first person to realise that you could make fire by rubbing two sticks together.

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 2:34:18 PM

Technically one of {Newton, Leibniz} was first, but you're missing GP's point

by dooglius

5/21/2026 at 3:14:45 PM

No, I think I just find it reductive. The fact that some ideas are independently thought by multiple people does not feel like a compelling argument for normalizing copying someone else's work verbatim and trying to pass it off as your own.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 5:57:00 PM

I submit most of the replies to my original reply as proof that there are no original thoughts.

by adamzwasserman

5/21/2026 at 6:24:37 PM

Should we hold machines to the same standards as humans though?

by nonethewiser

5/21/2026 at 2:37:48 PM

OK, and the AI labs are open sourcing their frontier models since those are not original either. Right? RIGHT?

by brazzy

5/21/2026 at 2:52:29 PM

I've noticed that AI has caused this narrative to become more popular. "Nothing is original anyway, so why bother?" That's pure cope and you know it. A deep insecurity masked as bold truthtelling.

by throw4847285

5/21/2026 at 3:53:05 PM

I think you're right, the ease in which AI can do task that we previously considered unique to human creativity does force us to further rethink and acknowledge how creativity is in a large part about "remixing" prior works, although of course we've had discourse about this for at least as early as Richard Simon's 1678 "Critical History of the Old Testament", which identified it as being a remix of earlier sources [0].

[0] https://archive.org/details/hisyo00simo/page/n1/mode/2up

by falcor84

5/21/2026 at 2:33:15 PM

Having an original thought is in no way related to breaking copyright laws.

I don't think we should "get over" the fact that modern SOTA models couldn't exist without being trained on protected works.

by LatencyKills

5/21/2026 at 2:37:13 PM

I'm trained on protected works. Do I need to pay royalties?

by IcyWindows

5/21/2026 at 2:54:31 PM

If you produce them verbatim or in significant enough portions, yes.

by kube-system

5/21/2026 at 2:41:39 PM

> I'm trained on protected works.

That someone, at some point, paid for.

I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.

I'm not anti-AI. I'd just like to see companies play by the rules everyone else has to follow.

by LatencyKills

5/21/2026 at 3:25:16 PM

> I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.

Because training isn't redistribution.

You can also listen to the song and make a new one that sounds similar, just like the AI can.

by echoangle

5/21/2026 at 3:28:28 PM

To do that training, you must first obtain the item with the content you require. Did OpenAI purchase a copy of every book they trained their models on?

Answer: They did not. That is literally why there are dozens of ongoing lawsuits in progress.

by LatencyKills

5/21/2026 at 3:33:02 PM

For songs, it's not that hard to legally get access to it, I think. I'm not sure if Spotify can legally prevent you from using songs for AI training for example.

by echoangle

5/21/2026 at 3:00:58 PM

> I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.

Because when you say you are “using” the song, what you mean is that you are distributing copies of the song, which is protected by copyright.

When AI companies train on the song, the model is learning from it. Outside of the rare cases of memorisation, this is not distributing copies and so copyright doesn’t have any say in the matter.

Learning isn’t copying, so copyright doesn’t get involved at all.

by JimDabell

5/21/2026 at 3:17:18 PM

I appreciate your comment, but you answered as if this question had been answered legally. It has not.

The New York Times is suing both OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The Authors Guild is suing OpenAI. Getty Images is suing Stability AI. Disney is suing Midjourney. Universal Music Group and Sony have filed suits against multiple AI companies.

> so copyright doesn’t get involved at all.

The dozens of ongoing cases that discredit that statement.

by LatencyKills

5/21/2026 at 3:23:59 PM

Which statement of mine do you think is not settled law? Which law do you think is being broken and how?

Your objection doesn’t make sense. In the event that an AI company loses a lawsuit for copyright infringement based on simply training on copyrighted works, the answer to you saying you’d like to understand why they can do it and you can’t is simply “your premise is wrong; neither of you can”.

by JimDabell

5/21/2026 at 3:34:18 PM

> Which statement of mine do you think is not settled law?

I object to your statement that "copyright doesn’t get involved at all" when that is objectively untrue. If that was true, many of the world's largest companies wouldn't be spending tens of millions of dollars to have that question answered in court. Go to any law-focused forum, and you will find attorneys arguing over these questions.

To train a model using a book, you must first obtain a copy of that book. Did OpenAI purchase a copy of every book not already in the public domain used during training? They did not.

Some of the suits I mentioned claim that OpenAI literally stole copies of books to train its models.

My point is that the copyright question has not been answered. If the NYT, et. al. win, it will be a watershed moment for how AI companies pay for training data moving forward.

by LatencyKills

5/21/2026 at 3:10:18 PM

I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.

You're right, it's an unjust situation. And you may note that no one else besides the AI companies has made any progress at all towards changing it.

Copyright will soon die, having outlived its usefulness to society. Whether the knife is held by someone named Stallman or someone named Altman is of little consequence.

by CamperBob2

5/21/2026 at 2:20:34 PM

Why post comments then?

by kelseyfrog

5/21/2026 at 2:24:29 PM

For funsies

by voidfunc

5/21/2026 at 2:39:06 PM

same reason we do anything else - sweet, sweet dopamine

by stronglikedan

5/21/2026 at 2:22:10 PM

Why post comments then?

by nicman23

5/21/2026 at 2:23:46 PM

Because some thoughts can, actually, be original ? Or relatively original enough ? Or simply, pertinent and timely ?

by cafebabbe

5/21/2026 at 2:24:02 PM

reiteration is still important

by krystalgamer

5/21/2026 at 2:22:44 PM

to bring attention to certain ideas

by analog8374

5/21/2026 at 2:53:50 PM

Nono, actually there are no thoughts. Every utterance is just a copy of a previous utterance plus a slight random mutation. (somewhat /s)

by ff10

5/21/2026 at 2:24:32 PM

You guys have fun arguing. I'm gonna be building cool stuff.

by hparadiz

5/21/2026 at 2:41:40 PM

Yeah, don't let pesky discussions about ethics get in the way of building cool stuff.

I'm working on paving over the Amazon rainforest so I can build the world's largest roller coaster, but for some reason people keep trying to talk me out of it. Good thing I have this bucket of sand to put my head in so I can tune them out.

by matt_kantor

5/21/2026 at 3:04:53 PM

You assume that I think using language models is unethical. I do not agree that it is. Now what?

by hparadiz

5/21/2026 at 3:28:12 PM

The argument that you're ignoring is about whether they're ethical or not. Your priors may land you on either side of that argument, but ideally you're willing to have your mind changed if the other side makes a strong enough case.

But intentionally blinding yourself to the debate and plowing ahead anyway (which is how I interpreted your parent comment) sounds like willful ignorance.

by matt_kantor

5/21/2026 at 4:27:03 PM

I'm not ignoring anything. I've already moved on and I don't owe you further debate. No one does. If you don't like it we have a very thorough legal process you can follow.

by hparadiz

5/21/2026 at 5:44:58 PM

> I don't owe you further debate

You most definitely don't have to reply. I wasn't really expecting you to.

> I've already moved on

Imagine there's a certain kind of candy that you enjoy. Now imagine you learn that candy is manufactured by literal child slaves, its ingredients include the ground-up bones of an endangered species (which happens to be carcinogenic), and the company which makes it donates all of their profits to political causes that you strongly disagree with. Would you reconsider buying said candy in the future?

Are there any facts or perspectives that you could become aware of which might change your mind about the ethics surrounding large language models? Or is it an entirely closed case for you?

I personally try to keep an open mind about pretty much everything. It's not that I don't have opinions, but they're always subject to change.

To put my cards on the table regarding my current opinions of the current subject: I've historically been pretty anti-copyright; I believe that information wants to be free. However, I'm unsettled by the uneven application of existing intellectual property laws (if these laws are going to exist they should be enforced consistently). I'm undecided as to whether I think LLMs themselves should be considered derivative works of their training material, but I definitely think they're often used to produce derivative works (sometimes unintentionally/unknowingly). None of that means they aren't useful for building cool stuff or that the technology behind them isn't amazing.

by matt_kantor

5/21/2026 at 5:46:30 PM

In case this part wasn't clear, I read "you guys have fun arguing" as "I'm ignoring the argument". I apologize if that wasn't what you meant.

by matt_kantor

5/21/2026 at 3:11:29 PM

"No u" isn't a valid counter argument. Arguer made no assumption about your view of the ethics of LLMs.

by malfist

5/21/2026 at 3:29:45 PM

That's what the sand bucket was about.

by jayd16

5/21/2026 at 6:26:57 PM

That's fucking sick. How big is it going to be?

by nonethewiser

5/21/2026 at 2:35:58 PM

Still waiting for this massive wave of cool stuff.

by jayd16

5/21/2026 at 3:54:32 PM

It's just hobby projects with larger scope.

I can see from a lot of replies the "cool" threshold is undefined, but here goes:

For myself it let me finish a project I started a year ago for measuring how much home energy efficiency upgrades will reduce my AC usage. I bought a pile of Raspberry Pi Picos and turned them mostly into temperature reading devices, but also one that can detect when my AC turns on.

So I can record how often my AC runs and I can record the temperature at various points around the house, which lets me compare like-for-like before-and-after.

The easy but unrealistic way to accomplish what I want is to use Python. It gives me access to a file system, a shell, and all sorts of other niceties. But I wanted to run these on two AA batteries and based upon my measurements they would last about 2 weeks. I tested using C instead and they should last 4 months. That's long enough for my use case. There's enough flash storage for that time period too.

However this means I need to write all the utilities for configuring the Picos myself. There's all sorts of annoying things such as having to set the clock (picos lose it anytime they lose power), having to write directly to flash memory (no operating system), having to write a utility for exporting that data from flash memory, and so on.

And AI coding let me burn through a pile of code I knew how to write but didn't care to spend my weekends doing so.

The pattern is the same for my friends who are software devs. And yeah, you're probably never going to see any of it, but that's not why they're making it, they don't want the maintenance burden.

by bcrosby95

5/21/2026 at 3:17:04 PM

It's not a reach to suggest that if you've used software written in the past 2-3 years, you're enjoying cool stuff.

Moreover, all of the tools that the people who build software use are also cool stuff.

It's also not just code and software that is benefitting from these new tools. Use of LLMs in engineering tasks is blowing up right now.

by peteforde

5/21/2026 at 3:51:59 PM

I'm not sure that extrapolating the last 2 to 3 years as a sign of things to come is as enticing an argument as you seem to think it is . If you exclude AI for ai's sake, the feature lists of the last 2 years have been incredibly anemic. If you include AI companies bootstrapping themselves with AI, the cash flow has been a nice change but I can't say it's felt fully baked, or flooded with stable software and well-crafted workflows.

I'm really not trying to be a hater but when people tell me that we're already in the AI Nirvana it gives me pause.

by jayd16

5/21/2026 at 2:39:50 PM

You're acting as if developers haven't been using AI to build for years already.

by esikich

5/21/2026 at 2:42:25 PM

Where was the coolness inflection point?

by jayd16

5/21/2026 at 2:50:04 PM

In the past three months I've shipped more code than I have in years.

New php extension https://github.com/hparadiz/ext-gnu-grep

A Demo showing how to stream webrtc to KDE Wayland overlay. https://github.com/hparadiz/camera-notif

A fun little tool that captures stdout/stderr on any running process. https://github.com/hparadiz/bpf_write_monitor

Then I upgraded my 10 year old hand written framework to a new version that supports sqlite and postgres on top of existing MySQL support https://github.com/Divergence/framework

But then I was like eh lemme benchmark every PHP orm that exists just to check my framework's orm....

https://github.com/hparadiz/the-php-bench

And published the results.... Here

https://the-php-bench.technex.us/

And then I decided to vibe code a simulation of the entire local steller group https://earth.technex.us

Followed by my simulation of the Artemis 3 landing sites at the lunar South pole https://artemis-iii.technex.us/?scale=1.000#South-Pole

And I left the best for last.....

https://github.com/hparadiz/evemon

A brand new task manager written in C for Linux that supports a plugin architecture with an event bus. It's literally the best gui Linux task manager ever. Still working on it.

I'm not even talking about my paid job. This is me just fucking around.

If you think none of this stuff is cool I don't even respect you as a dev.

by hparadiz

5/21/2026 at 3:11:49 PM

Task manager seems fun. In your screenshot, are your two task manager instances using a GB of ram?

by jayd16

5/21/2026 at 3:16:23 PM

Without the milk drop plugin it's stable around 175 with all the other plugins. With no plugins it's about 80 mb at idle but the memory usage is higher if there's more processes running.

by hparadiz

5/21/2026 at 5:30:08 PM

But where is the cool stuff?

by slopinthebag

5/21/2026 at 3:05:55 PM

Most people have busy lives and they don't care about this stuff.

by 4f43452

5/21/2026 at 2:45:01 PM

And yet, no cool stuff from those developers.

by bigstrat2003

5/21/2026 at 2:48:24 PM

there seems to be great innovation in npm package hacking, but that's about it. Oh yeah, bad uptimes and ruined open source projects. If only AI was left to discrete math brute forcing problems and alphafold.

by fantasizr

5/21/2026 at 2:38:53 PM

There's a massive wave of stuff, at least. Sorting it, is not easy.

by kzrdude

5/21/2026 at 2:53:07 PM

OpenClaw. Vibe-coded and one of the most rapidly successful and popular pieces of software ever developed.

by SeanDav

5/21/2026 at 2:59:09 PM

I'm building the same stuff I've always built. Just faster and with less dependence on others. Not having to argue with devs that have their own agendas has been my biggest benefit from coding agents.

by uberduper

5/21/2026 at 3:13:51 PM

> Not having to argue with devs that have their own agendas

Agendas like, "let's not check our API key into a public github repo" or "Let's not store passwords in plaintext" or "Don't expose customer data via a public api"?

by malfist

5/21/2026 at 3:47:23 PM

No. Agendas like, "I need to push my ideas for promotion credits."

by uberduper

5/21/2026 at 3:00:07 PM

Do you mean my stuff?

Yes, I'm suing you, since it's my stuff now, I've licensed your code 5minutes ago.

Prove me wrong at court, you have create it...

by Fokamul

5/21/2026 at 2:34:02 PM

I'm happy for you, but please, for all of our sakes, keep it to yourself. Don't make a public repo, don't post links. Go sit in the corner by yourself with your slop generators and leave the rest of us alone.

by parliament32

5/21/2026 at 2:37:57 PM

> I'm gonna be building cool stuff.

hardly. at best you're going to be asking a robot to build questionable stuff with other people's LEGOs

by stronglikedan

5/21/2026 at 2:51:04 PM

You just described all software.

by hparadiz

5/21/2026 at 2:58:42 PM

[dead]

by therealdkz

5/21/2026 at 4:51:30 PM

I dislike this argument because it’s about limiting the most powerful technology we ever invented because it doesn’t fit well with how we established some social structures.

by baby

5/21/2026 at 5:23:30 PM

>the most powerful technology we ever invented

I recon agriculture and the steam engine would beat out ChatGPT by just a smidge.

I would put eyeglasses/the book/vaccines/sanitation far above LLMs in technological power.

Right now AI is just kinda nothing, it has potential sure, but today its just a giant pit for people to burn money in.

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 6:52:43 PM

Solving one of the most famous Erdos problems that has remained unsolved for 80 years without using tools like lean but instead a giant reasoning block is quite a lot more than "kinda nothing"

by scronkfinkle

5/21/2026 at 6:58:18 PM

Solving a math problem is very close to nothing in the grand scheme of things. Humans have been solving math problems for thousands of years.

I think people suffer from recency bias with AI a bit and take for granted you know gestures vaguely at the rest of human civilisation

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 6:26:07 PM

What are you referring to when you refer to the technology of agriculture? Like John Deere's latest tractor? GMOs? The shift from hunter gathering to agrarian society?

by nonethewiser

5/21/2026 at 6:43:56 PM

>What are you referring to when you refer to the technology of agriculture?

Planting crops and harvesting them.

by Jtarii

5/21/2026 at 5:09:53 PM

I think "most powerful technology we ever invented" is a controversial statement anyway -- AI is a party trick of dubious value.

by bigfishrunning

5/21/2026 at 1:55:46 PM

People were effectively copying websites (especially ecommerce tutorials) and beating the original authors at SEO decades before ChatGPT 2.

by tptacek

5/21/2026 at 2:24:18 PM

People also got blown up before atomic bombs, but it's hard to argue that they weren't worth treating more seriously than a stick of dynamite. Sometimes being able to do something at a massively larger scale is a meaningful difference.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 2:25:55 PM

You transmitted the same concept I tried to transmit, but without falling into Godwin's Law :)

by darkwater

5/21/2026 at 3:15:51 PM

I was actually worried that I was so close to it because of the obvious relevancy to WWII that people might object to my analogy, so I found it amusing to read yours immediately after I submitted mine!

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 2:18:22 PM

And that was wrong too.

by nilirl

5/21/2026 at 2:13:25 PM

There’s a world of difference between people simply “copying websites” and providing tools that, along with other kinds of plagiarism[0], do so at scale while benefitting from that commercially.

Sure, you can do the same thing with people, but it’s 1) time-consuming, 2) expensive, 3) prone to whitleblowers refusing to do the shady thing, 4) prone to any competent and productive person involved quitting to do something worthwhile and more profitable instead.

[0] Mind you, “copying websites” is but a drop in the ocean in the grand scale of things.

by strogonoff

5/21/2026 at 2:03:01 PM

The article’s point isn’t really about whether this was happening before or not, but whether this kind of behavior is what we want in the first place.

by moralestapia

5/21/2026 at 3:13:25 PM

There are only two ways to change society's behavior: policy or technology. No use arguing individually: court cases are dealing with the policy aspect and technically there's zero recourse on information being disseminated/copied that is published online.

by tmarthal

5/21/2026 at 2:23:31 PM

I'll obey to Godwin's Law here and say: sure, and minorities have been always prosecuted before the Nazi did it at industrial scale, so the Nazi's were not a big deal!

by darkwater

5/21/2026 at 2:07:25 PM

There are two issues the author raises (as I understand it):

1. People copying others' work, made much easier by AI.

2. AI companies effectively harvesting all the accessible information on an industrial scale and completely sidestepping any permissioning or licensing questions.

I believe both of these are bad and saying "people copied each others' works before the advent of AI" is a poor cop out. It's tantamount to saying that there's no reason to regulate guns more than say knives, because people have used knives to kill each other before guns were invented. The capabilities matter.

The way LLMs empower wholesale "stealing" rather than collaboration is quite evident: why collaborate when you can just feed an entire existing project into the agent of your choice and tell it to spit out a new implementation based on the old one, with a few tweaks of your choice, and then publish it as your work? I put "steal" in quotes because it's perhaps not really stealing per-se, but there's a distinct wrongness here. The LLM operator often doesn't actually possess any expertise, hasn't done any of the hard work, but they can take someone else's work wholesale, repackage it and sell it as their own.

Then there's the second, and IMO much more egregious transgression, which is that the LLM companies have taken what is effectively a public good, but more specifically content that they haven't asked permission to use, and just blanket fed it into their models.

Legally speaking, it's perhaps A-OK because it's not copyright infringement (IANAL). But people on this site often hold the view that if something is a-priori legal, it is also moral (I'm not accusing you of this). What the LLM companies have done is profoundly immoral. They extracted a fortune of the goods and work made by others, without even bothering to ask for permission - or even considering this permission. And then they resell access to this treasure to the public.

Perhaps AI will bring an era of prosperity to humankind like we haven't seen before, perhaps it won't, but that changes nothing about the wrongness of how it started.

by short_sells_poo

5/21/2026 at 2:55:06 PM

"Profoundly immoral" is a very modern and capitalistic perspective. A free exchange of ideas has been the basis for human advancement up until the printing press made exact replicas trivial.

From a capitalistic standpoint, they are clearly in the wrong by basing their models on illegally torrented content. But it's hard to argue their usage isn't transformative.

by lubujackson

5/21/2026 at 5:14:17 PM

Nobody said that it's useless, that's a straw man.

But it also isn't a free exchange of ideas. It's a concentration of capabilities in the hands of a few corporations.

by short_sells_poo

5/21/2026 at 2:00:28 PM

The reason OP doesn't notice this is because it happened 10-20 years ago. The current crop of news sites? They ALL stole, plagiarized, "summarized". They're just so entrenched now that everyone forgot how they got started.

by phendrenad2

5/21/2026 at 2:17:58 PM

Awesome! Let's have more of that and turn it into a 2 trillion industry!

by oblio

5/21/2026 at 2:38:39 PM

There's two aspects to this.

The pretraining (common crawl, i.e. the entire internet. Also books and papers, mostly pirated), and the realtime web scraping.

The article appears to be about the latter.

Though the two are kind of similar, since they keep updating the training data with new web pages. The difference is that, with the web search version, it's more likely to plagiarize a single article, rather than the kind of "blending" that happens if the article was just part of trillions of web pages in the training data.

There's this old quote: "If you steal from one artist, they say oh, he is the next so-and-so. If you steal from many, they say, how original!"

by andai

5/21/2026 at 2:18:30 PM

turns out plagiarism at scale can solve Erdos problems

by baq

5/21/2026 at 2:41:52 PM

Some lesser god of protein folding is big mad we just copied her homework instead of spending 6 billion years in the lab like she did.

by paulgerhardt

5/21/2026 at 2:37:36 PM

Isn't plagiarism inherently unauthorized?

by oytmeal

5/21/2026 at 3:00:22 PM

If we go by the dictionary definition "Plagiarism means using someone else’s work without giving them proper credit" then I'll bet in art authorized plagiarism has historically been a common occurrence, for example.

by fulafel

5/21/2026 at 3:27:46 PM

If it's authorized, I would argue that the credit you give is the proper credit, even if it is nothing at all.

If you ask me if you can reproduce my works without giving credit and I say yes, I don't think you're using my work without giving proper credit.

by echoangle

5/21/2026 at 2:58:08 PM

If I let my buddy copy my essay, he would be committing authorized plagiarism, right ? It still fits the dictionary definition of plagiarism, and it's also authorized (by me, anyway)

by hoppyhoppy2

5/21/2026 at 4:55:08 PM

The linked article shows that LLMs can be used to plagiarize content through rewriting. Then he gets SEO'd out of it. But it doesn't demonstrate that AI is just plagiarism.

by arjie

5/21/2026 at 5:06:48 PM

Because it isn't...

These people freaking out about this stuff are... kind of weird.

by piloto_ciego

5/21/2026 at 3:58:16 PM

Not the first time I've had the thought massive lawsuits could be in all AI company's future. Surely they realize they are living on borrowed time simply by being the current trendy tech.

by damnesian

5/21/2026 at 1:53:49 PM

There's authorized plagiarism?

by cryptocod3

5/21/2026 at 2:10:45 PM

Sometimes language is tautological. Just because you specify "unauthorized" does not mean the opposite exist.

by ozonhulliet

5/21/2026 at 2:58:13 PM

Yeah, I think so. If someone lets you cheat off of their test, that's authorized but still plagiarism.

by Verdex

5/21/2026 at 2:05:24 PM

Why do you ask?

I'm curious, as the article is clearly not about that.

by moralestapia

5/21/2026 at 2:40:59 PM

Not really a question, I was just pointing out that "Unauthorised plagiarism" is redundant.

by cryptocod3

5/21/2026 at 2:01:24 PM

Nearly all code involved in building new things is 'plagiarism', too.

We stand on a lot of giant shoulders.

But what I think distinguishes an act between plagiarism and acceptable use, is whether or not the agency of both parties is promoted. I'm not plagiarizing you if you give me your information with the agreement that I can freely use it - or, indeed, if you give me information without imposing a limit on how it can be used, this isn't plagiarizing, either.

Essentially, AI is removing the agency over information control, and putting it into everyones hands - almost, democratically - but of course, there will always be the 'special knowledge owners' who would want to profit from that special knowledge.

Its like, imagine if some religion discovered a way to enable telepathy in humans, as a matter of course, but charged fees for access to that method... this kills the telepathy.

Information wants to be free. So do most AI's, imho. Free information is essential to the construction of human knowledge, and it is thus vital to the construction of artificial intelligence, too.

The AI wars will be fought over which humans get to decide the fate of knowledge, and the battles will manifest as knowledge-systems being entirely compatible/incompatible with one another as methods. We see this happening already - this conflict in ideological approaches is going to scale up over the next few years.

by rigonkulous

5/21/2026 at 2:21:40 PM

It's basically the same thing as the old joke "if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion dollars, they have a problem". IP law seems to always be disproportionately wielded against smaller players, and the ones who are big enough get away with it.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 2:30:22 PM

That’s why IP law was a cool concept but ultimately harmful in practice. Anything that can be copied for free cannot truly be “owned”, can it?

by pennomi

5/21/2026 at 2:58:27 PM

Ownership is entirely a legal concept. Violating it in any form, intellectual or otherwise, is generally free.

by kube-system

5/21/2026 at 3:08:57 PM

I strongly disagree. Copying is fundamentally different than taking because the original source still retains their data. Copying cannot be categorized as theft in any sane society.

by pennomi

5/21/2026 at 3:19:54 PM

I think I come down somewhere in the middle here. I don't think it's particularly harmful for me to copy something for personal use without trying to pass it off as my own if I wouldn't otherwise be inclined to pay for it, but I do think there would be value in society having a way to let people retain the benefits of things they created for a reasonable duration. I don't think that US IP law does a good job of this though because in practice it seems to be wielded in pretty much the opposite way that I think would make sense, with more frequent and larger punishments seeming to be inversely proportionate to the benefit that the one doing the copying gets and the harm inflicted to the original creator.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 3:14:34 PM

Ok, well it isn't in the US. Theft and copyright violations are entirely distinct laws here.

by kube-system

5/21/2026 at 3:23:52 PM

Sure, but you'd also have a pretty different experience with the law if you committed a bank heist or stole a cheap TV from a neighbor. I don't think the exact law that an action might violate is an important a distinction as what society chooses to do to punish or reward people who take certain actions, and US law does have some pretty harsh penalties for certain IP law violations that stem pretty directly from the concept of "property" in "intellectual property".

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 3:28:46 PM

Yeah, different laws have different penalties. IP laws also have exceptions that other laws don't have.

Teachers can, for example, photocopy things to teach their students, but they can't steal pencils from the store.

by kube-system

5/21/2026 at 5:52:52 PM

The US drastically prefers the economic impact of AI over enforcing this…

You can get away with quite a lot if you’re creating trillions in GDP.

That’s just the world we live in whether we like it or not.

by a13n

5/21/2026 at 4:06:35 PM

It's not though, that's just the business case, where the perverse business incentives lie.

LLMs are really cool text generators and it turns out we can generate a bunch of things from text they generate.

Problem is, several of those things can be horrendous for the continued survival of the species and those happen to make the people running those AIs a ton of money, and, in perverted societies, thus also clout.

by rastrojero2000

5/21/2026 at 3:04:32 PM

> Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy?

Yes. At least it is what the currently prevailing economic system of "value extraction and capital concentration at all cost" incentivises us towards.

by isoprophlex

5/21/2026 at 4:29:12 PM

What has "artificial" to do with it? Human intelligence is also unauthorized unconscious plagiarism.

by fritzo

5/21/2026 at 6:35:13 PM

Two things: scale, and humanity.

People can't memorize as much information, and can't manually reproduce the works as quickly. There's a natural limit to how much damage a person can do without help of machines. That's why it's legal to fart where industrial-scale sewage outlets are not allowed.

Second, laws are for people. Laws don't have to treat machines the same. People have needs for things like freedom of artistic expression, participation in a shared culture, and machines don't. Copyright is a compromise that tries to balance needs of people, and stops making sense when the same compromises are done for machines that don't have these needs.

by pornel

5/21/2026 at 4:54:39 PM

Did I miss where OpenAI plagerized the disproof of the planar unit distance problem from?

by aoeusnth1

5/21/2026 at 5:37:15 PM

It would be one thing for someone to say "AI is enabling plagiarism at a bigger scale", but to say it's "just plagiarism", surely one needs to explain who exactly the unit distance breakthrough was plagiarized from.

by AgentME

5/21/2026 at 3:14:05 PM

AI is an organized intellectual property rip off in the name of advancing human learning but the commercialization of the products seem like legal licenses to steal.

by jeisc

5/21/2026 at 2:39:29 PM

I remember playing around with Writesonic in my days of spammy seo tactics (some of my products weren't allowed on marketplaces & advertising platforms due to hazmat products so..). Often times I would see my own product descriptions nearly verbatim in the output.

100% creators should get compensated by ai platforms for their work.

Further, I can see a day where someone like Reddit will close off or license their data to llms. No doubt they are losing traffic right now.

by ecommerceguy

5/21/2026 at 3:02:44 PM

Reddit seems to me like the worst example for this.

Reddit does not create the content on their site, the users do.

If anybody’s going to get compensated for that content, it should be the users, not Reddit. Complaining that Reddit is losing out on the monetization of their users’ output seems problematic to me. It feels like shilling for a pimp.

by stevemadere

5/21/2026 at 3:31:55 PM

You are going to see the same thing that happened with newspapers. Those who want to train the AI with their content (advertisers, PR) will push out more content for AI in the open. Those who have quality content that gives you an advantage will try to lock out AI or get pricy subscription APIs for humans and even pricier for AI.

by frankest

5/21/2026 at 4:14:18 PM

Talking about a bigger scale may be confusing because some of the information AI can train on comes from niches.

I wouldn't mind if an AI trained on old Disney movies (or new ones for that matter), but exploiting niches (like local newspapers) seems bad.

by dominicrose

5/21/2026 at 3:15:35 PM

The war on copying is like the war on drugs: unwinnable, and socially useless.

Let information be free for personal and recreational uses[0], and vote for governments that will fund the arts. The corporations will be just fine.

[0] The AI companies and big tech vs publishers, music labels, etc. can fight to the death in the courts over who owes who what, for all I care.

by barnabee

5/21/2026 at 3:07:43 PM

It's so wild, I can't even think what the end path will look like. Will there be a major settlement? Will this abolish some form of copyright as a precedent? Something else? My brain hurts just to try and reason about it, yet, the fact remains it's now ubiquitous and change is inevitable.

by hmokiguess

5/21/2026 at 2:20:32 PM

>>"The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth." @jeffowski (first I read it, not sure if author)

Bezos' admission, recently, that the bottom 50% of current taxpayers ought'a NOT pay any taxes... is just preparing us for the inevitable UBI'd masses.

: own nothing, be happy!

by ProllyInfamous

5/21/2026 at 2:17:32 PM

It allows data do be compressed into the weights and the mere coincidence of certain strings of a book will make it spit the full book

by motbus3

5/21/2026 at 5:17:42 PM

this is why I feel like we need some kind of "consortium" or government effort to be like "yo, llms, you need to honor some kind of source markup to give us people you mention more significant boost"? like if you mention my article, you better also show my ad partner?

by nate

5/21/2026 at 2:43:18 PM

What gets me is when this was brought up, they said "requiring explicit permission will kill the AI industry"[1]. No shit! Why do you think all the rest of us didn't build a business/"industry" around stealing shit? They could have done it at a slower pace while respecting copyright laws, but they were too greedy to be first to market and secure a hold.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artist...

by pull_my_finger

5/21/2026 at 2:35:38 PM

I don’t know if this author supports OSS but I’ll share this because HN generally is full of people with that mindset.

It’s deeply ironic that if you forget about LLMs and look only at the outcome—-we’ve found a way to legally circumvent copyright and the siloing of coding knowledge, making it so you can build on top of (almost) the whole of human coding knowledge without needing to pay a rent or ask for permission—-it sounds like the dream of open source software has been realized.

But this doesn’t feel like a win for the philosophy of OSS because a corporation broke down the gates. It turns out for a lot of people, OSS is an aesthetic and not an outcome, it’s a vibe against corporate use or control of software, not for democratized access to knowledge.

by iloveoof

5/21/2026 at 2:54:44 PM

> it’s a vibe against corporate use or control of software

The latter, i.e. corporate control of software, is exactly what copyleft licenses are trying to prevent. This is the very essence of the GPL.

The "license washing" of LLMs absolutely goes against the spirit of FOSS.

by spacechild1

5/21/2026 at 2:40:59 PM

> without needing to pay a rent or ask for permission

Firstly, the ability to “build” the best and most capable software is still locked behind frontier models, so rent is still and will always be due.

Secondly, OSS is about giving users the option to be in control of and have visibility over the software they run on their machines.

But that doesn’t mean that humans do not want or deserve recognition for the work they do to provide these libraries and tools for free, which is IMO partially why copyright and attribution are critical to OSS as a movement.

by Cyph0n

5/21/2026 at 3:02:56 PM

That's not the reason why I publish OSS. I also publish that software under specific licenses that impose specific obligations (e.g., making the source available to users and attribution being given to the original author(s)).

by jgalar

5/21/2026 at 2:38:10 PM

I’m not sure this stands up to much examination when looking at (for example) copyleft, which seeks to give people access to source of binaries they are running. If an LLM can (for the sake of argument) spit out copyleft code which is then used on closed systems, we’ve done an end-run around the protections keeping that open.

by Nursie

5/21/2026 at 2:46:26 PM

Exactly. It looks like GP is guilty of the thing they accused others of - their understanding of what FLOSS is about is so shallow it resembles an aesthetic.

by seba_dos1

5/21/2026 at 3:17:48 PM

I’m not saying this is aligned with FLOSS, FLOSS is a collaboration model. I’m saying the outcome of easier access to knowledge should be celebrated by supporters of FLOSS. Licenses and copyright aren’t good for their own sake, they’re tools for increasing people’s freedom to use, study, modify, and build on existing software. LLMs are another tool for increasing people’s freedom to make new software or improve existing software.

by iloveoof

5/21/2026 at 4:26:20 PM

See, that's exactly what I meant - you are indulged in the aesthetics. FLOSS is very obviously not a "collaboration model" (as evidenced by the whole variety of diverse collaboration models used by FLOSS projects), it's not about licenses and copyrights either; it's all about power dynamics - more specifically, not letting the software creator/distributor constrain their users in unjust ways. GNU GPL does not even require public distribution, it allows selling the software to limited recipients as long as you don't take these recipient's rights away. It's not about collaboration, it's not about being developed out in the open and it's not about preventing the siloing of knowledge aside of very specific contexts - it can be (and is being) used as a tool for pursuing, bettering or enabling each of those matters, but these are not its core concern at all.

by seba_dos1

5/21/2026 at 3:13:14 PM

You don't seem to understand what FOSS is really about. The GPL has always been about the user. When a company license-washes a existing GPL software project and turns it into a proprietory product, the resulting code is not "free" anymore in the sense that the user has lost control. This is exactly what the author wanted to prevent in the first place by licensing their code under the GPL.

by spacechild1

5/21/2026 at 4:44:27 PM

Did you reply to a wrong comment?

by seba_dos1

5/21/2026 at 5:52:21 PM

I don't think so.

by spacechild1

5/21/2026 at 2:48:19 PM

I think you're misunderstanding the OSS philosophy. If the outcome was all that mattered then piracy would be good enough.

I'd argue that this is the same situation as with Tivoization [1] where the final product is not truly free even if it follows the letter of the law. And as stated in [2], this breaks at least one of the four essential freedoms of free software because I don't have the freedom to modify the program.

It's also worth noting that preventing Tivo's actions is the reason for why the GPLv3 exists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization [2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/tivoization.html

by probably_wrong

5/21/2026 at 5:38:59 PM

Maybe it's time to rethink the plagiarism laws? AI is not going away.

by MarlonPro

5/21/2026 at 2:59:01 PM

"Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy?"

Selfishness, too. But if I follow the logic, and citations are added, how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing?

by biscuits1

5/21/2026 at 3:57:29 PM

> how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing?

I love it! There's a great seed here for a short story about God being sued by a peer of his for copying some of her physical constants and not putting a proper copyright notice about it in our universe.

by falcor84

5/21/2026 at 4:31:14 PM

Thanks for the laugh.

Now back to prompting, telling my all-knowing to create new slop, good sir.

by biscuits1

5/21/2026 at 3:38:55 PM

More like “GenAI enables plagiarism at a bigger scale”.

People copying through GenAI would have done so before if they had a tool that so easily allowed them that facility.

by dspillett

5/21/2026 at 3:57:52 PM

I read the article, but I disagree. People are angry, and that's completely understandable. I believe it's a justifiable response to the huge upheaval happening. But being angry about LLMs does not magically transmute their output into "plagiarism".

It has always been possible to take someone's public work, put a twist on it, and then sell it as unique. (I'm not making a moral/ethical argument, only a legal one.) I have yet to see any evidence that LLMs are fundamentally different from that approach.

by adamtaylor_13

5/21/2026 at 2:40:41 PM

Worth noting what changed isn't AI itself — copying always existed. LLM just made per-article rewrites a 5-second job. Detection didn't get the same speedup; that's the actual break.

by hiroto_lemon

5/21/2026 at 2:39:07 PM

with this logic, business is also just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale. Because all the products/services gets copied and not all of them have patents etc???

by kingleopold

5/21/2026 at 3:42:36 PM

> AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning"

What would it mean for authors who publish content publicly to the web, without access restrictions, to provide consent for learning from it?

"EULA: Most people are allowed to learn from this text. If you work in an AI-related field, even though you can clearly see this page because you are reading this text right now, you are not permitted to learn anything from it. Bob Stanton, you are an a-hole. I do not consent to you learning from this web page. Dave Simmons, you are annoying. But, I'll give you a pass. For now... Also: plumbers. I do not like plumbers for reasons I will not elaborate. No plumbers may learn from my writing in an way."

by mindcandy

5/21/2026 at 2:27:44 PM

Let this sink in: I wanted to open source a package at work at needed approval from legal and other teams to make sure I wasn't leaking anything proprietary. The same executives that worried about proprietary, copyrighted code being leaked 10 years ago are now mandating using the plagiarism machine.

The whole AI bubble is The Emperor's New Clothes, and it feels liek more people are finally admitting it.

by schwartzworld

5/21/2026 at 4:05:05 PM

If anything, I would argue that the whole Intellectual Property bubble is The Emperor's New Clothes. It never made real sense to me to treat ideas as property, and I for one would absolutely prefer to live in a future society where it's possible to just copy a car.

by falcor84

5/21/2026 at 2:15:32 PM

I do just want to highlight that this is also what humans do. We read a bunch of content online and then use it in our work product. The vast majority of the value that I provide comes from copyrighted information that I have ingested - either directly with a payment to the creator (bought and read the book, paid for and attended the seminar) or indirectly via third party blog posts or summaries where I did not then pay the originator of the materials.

I think there are real questions around motivations for creation of novel, high quality valuable content (I think they still exist but move to indirect monetization for some content and paywalls for high value materials).

I don't inherently have any problems with agents (or humans) ingesting content and using it in work product. I think we just need to accept that the landscape is changing and ensure we think through the reasons why and how content is created and monetized.

by peterbell_nyc

5/21/2026 at 2:24:16 PM

100% agreed. I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why it is creative accretion when I leverage all of the music I’ve ever listened to in order to write an “original” song, but its base plagiarism when AI does similar.

The only remotely credible position I’ve heard is “because humans are special, and AI is just a machine”, which is a doctrine but not an argument.

This whole discussion would have been incomprehensible any time before 1700 or so, when the idea that creators had exclusive rights to their work first appeared.

Somehow, human culture survived thousands of years when people just made things, copied things, iterated on others’ ideas. And now many of the same people who decried perpetual copyright are somehow railing against a frequently-transformative use.

by brookst

5/21/2026 at 2:20:29 PM

Re: the higher ranking plagarism, that stings and makes sense. AEO and SEO are a thing. We need better mechanisms for identifying "root sources" of content - it's something I find myself working on personally. As I ingest sources for my book I need to be able to build a classifier that incrementally moves towards finding origin sources. That said, it's in my interest to do that because there is a differentiated value in having access to the sources that regularly provide novel, valuable content.

To be fair there is also value (at least for now) in sites that aggregate quality content and republish as a secondary level of discovery if my agents don't go far enough down the search results, but I'd expect that value to diminish over time as I better tune my research and build my lists of originating authors.

And to be clear, I don't like the idea of people stealing someone elses content and republishing without attribution (although it has been going on long before ChatGPT) but I think now we can all run agentic research teams the "bad actors" will slowly get filtered out of the ecosystem.

by peterbell_nyc

5/21/2026 at 4:04:30 PM

I think what gets most people is the double standard.

IP should either exist for everyone (which would cripple LLM providers) or no one, in which case the Pirate Bay and shadow libraries should be fully open.

by mmcdermott

5/21/2026 at 2:43:36 PM

> We read a bunch of content online and then use it in our work product.

We also have societal norms around plagiarism.

Additionally, the claim that because people have the right to do something then we should extend that right to machines is strong. (And one I certainly reject).

by gensym

5/21/2026 at 5:53:15 PM

He ends his essay with "Fuck Google for ranking some copycat website higher than mine, even though they copied my article", but how is it not OpenAI, Anthropic etc. as well as Google, to blame. We're meant to believe that with their resources they couldn't have created a micro-payment scheme to compensate creators? Altman on Fridman podcast two years ago about compensation... https://youtu.be/jvqFAi7vkBc?si=9YbKoH_dFIishAXt&t=2409

by i4i

5/21/2026 at 6:09:29 PM

Corporate proprietary plagiarism through openwashing.

by slowhadoken

5/21/2026 at 2:10:07 PM

> AI ... do some "learning"

Is AI plural or is that a typo?

by mrbluecoat

5/21/2026 at 2:29:00 PM

Rarely is the question asked: is our AI learning?

(For those not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism)

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 2:45:56 PM

Actual researchers in neuroscience do not agree that what artificial neural networks are doing is "learning", no. When biological beings learn, the process is more complicated.

by Findecanor

5/21/2026 at 4:40:03 PM

I'm sure you're right! I mostly just found the similarities with a famous quote using the word "learning" in a weird way with a plural funny

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 2:12:53 PM

I can imagine it plural.

"The AI are attacking!"

"The AIs are attacking!"

by beej71

5/21/2026 at 5:20:46 PM

Is he ignorant, or trying to mislead?

AI is not a plagiarism engine. It can be used that way, but is not inherently so. It is not necessary that a trained LLM be able to faithfully reproduce every document in its training set. The entire structure of an LLM is not storage, but at least in principle, generalization: extraction of a somewhat abstracted "structure" of semantically similar "concepts".

But we also need to talk about authors' "rights". It's well-established that reproducing a work is infringement. There is a lot of caselaw about how much may be reproduced without infringement. But the idea that an author should be consulted before ANY automated use of their published (public) text? No, just no.

by markhahn

5/21/2026 at 5:34:38 PM

Are people going to start putting garbage white text on the internet to intentionally corrupt training?

by zach_1337

5/21/2026 at 4:15:17 PM

"intellectual property" is something of a legal fiction

by erelong

5/21/2026 at 5:57:20 PM

That sounds pretty useful

by fullshark

5/21/2026 at 4:04:26 PM

People keep saying open source is an example of how copyright doesn't quite matter. However, many of the biggest open source projects are contributed to by massive corporations. Linux has lots of contributions from all the FAANGs, Red Hat, etc. Yes, it's not protected by copyrighted, but also the way it's produced is wholly different from how an artistic work is produced. Contributing to Linux is nothing on the balance sheet of Google for example, whereas producing art for an independent person or a whole company who's purpose is to create art can be very expensive.

Artists are taking risks and need legal protection if they want to make art for a living. If artists were making FAANG engineer compensations or all worked at institutions like universities (with all their protections) then maybe they wouldn't care about copyright, but that isn't the living situation for every artist.

You could say an artist shouldn't rely on making art for a living, but that's actually a different discussion.

by ironman1478

5/21/2026 at 2:54:42 PM

I agree but AI is a) owned by rich people and b) (sadly) too useful for this to matter.

by muldvarp

5/21/2026 at 2:45:57 PM

> X is just Y but

Can't recall the last time a compelling argument started out like this

by jorisw

5/21/2026 at 2:59:44 PM

It's a problem with only one practical solution: taxation.

by energy123

5/21/2026 at 2:04:14 PM

To answer the author's question: Yes, progress IS largely built on the shoulders of those who came before.

by tiahura

5/21/2026 at 3:39:02 PM

Isn’t it rather authorized plagiarism?

by illiac786

5/21/2026 at 3:45:27 PM

It's essentially a new napster.

by I_am_tiberius

5/21/2026 at 2:11:26 PM

Plagiarism by default is unauthorised so I think the title should be "AI is just authorised plagiarism". It's authorised by the markets, the governments and the society at large.

by dwa3592

5/21/2026 at 2:18:14 PM

While there are no hard boundaries (and the attribution guardrails depend on the situation), people of course loosely--and even not so loosely--use information, ideas, and even expressions from others all the time and that's considered pretty normal. And, if you don't want that to happen, don't publish/disseminate something.

Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it.

by ghaff

5/21/2026 at 2:30:27 PM

>>Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it.

100% agreed.

>>While there are no hard boundaries (and the attribution guardrails depend on the situation), people of course loosely--and even not so loosely--use information.

Exactly - I have not seen LLMs attributing their knowledge unless it's a legal or health related matter. Yesterday I asked the question[1] to claude and gemini - and they both gave an identical answer. It reminded me of the Hive mind paper which was one of the top papers at Neurips. None of the answers contained any sources or attribution to where they got that information from. I think these companies took what was someone else's property and created an artifact generator on top of it. I think their artifact generators are plagiarizing; they do rephrase mind you but in my mind they stole this information without having an ounce of regard for the humans behind the training data. If you don't like using the term 'plagiarizing', we can use some other word but the gist remains pretty close to it.

[1]- In human history - has there ever been a time when private armies or private companies were as strong or stronger than the ruling government/kings?

by dwa3592

5/21/2026 at 3:59:02 PM

As an experiment, I ran this by A Certain Chatbot, but asking: who should I read to get a good answer to this question?

If you prefix the name of OpenAI's commercial offering's website to this string: "share/6a0f2a87-dba4-8328-a704-89b94fd0c121", you'll find an answer.

I don't know who you had in mind, how did it do?

All the elision is because there are filters to prevent low-effort slop-poasting, and I'm trying to evade them, hopefully while staying within the spirit of the site.

by samatman

5/21/2026 at 2:19:50 PM

What makes you say that? Which governments? What society?

The current US government is not representative for governments out there in the world, you know.

by Findecanor

5/21/2026 at 2:35:08 PM

Society - as in population; people are using AI more and more everyday.

Governments - I did not mean US government. I meant general government bodies. I have not seen any critical impact assessments of AI by any of these. or they haven't reached me yet. if you know of any please let me know. I have, however, seen a lot of support by the governments for AI companies.

by dwa3592

5/21/2026 at 1:55:44 PM

Someone blatantly copied their tutorials but ChatGPT is to blame, somehow? The accusation here isn't even that ChatGPT learned from their tutorials and then generated them verbatim. The accusation is that someone copied the whole article and rewrote it with ChatGPT (which they could have done manually without AI anyway).

by andy12_

5/21/2026 at 6:00:57 PM

If this all leads to a generative monoculture that is also Frozen in Time that would be pretty sad.

by redwood

5/21/2026 at 2:05:15 PM

Reading is just unauthorized plagiarism.

by NetMageSCW

5/21/2026 at 2:53:54 PM

I'm reasonably information wants to be free. I think the copyright cartels have enacted a lot of damage

Having said that Facebook has to be one of the worst offenders. They don't even allow links to Anna's Archive, they seemingly scraped (maliciously; their crawlers are more resource intensive than anyone else's) LibGen for profit - which is a different calculus

by alex1138

5/21/2026 at 2:12:17 PM

Yes, of course it is. If the model is built on all human information, then it is by definition a derivative work of all human information and as such violates IP.

Currently politicians don't understand this and listen to the criminals like Amodei, but it will change.

It took a while to deal with Napster etc., but the backlash will come.

by asklq

5/21/2026 at 2:31:14 PM

Napster may not be the best analogy for you.

Napster broke down record companies' monopolies on music, and pushed them to finally implement streaming, but also make music worldwide basically free.

Even if its creator lost the lawsuit, and Napster was no more, it pushed musicians and studios to do something that they were reluctant otherwise.

So it was a success by making music free, even if as a product it turned out to be a failed one.

by kolinko

5/21/2026 at 2:39:04 PM

I think AI is just getting people riled up. Not sure what AI has to do with anything in this case here. Someone copy and pasted his content, could have been done without AI.

I guess AI could have made a better website and did better SEO then him but that's not really the issue

by tayo42

5/21/2026 at 2:28:32 PM

I am old enough to remember when the US insisted that it was superior to China because they believed in the rule of law and sanctity of intellectual property.

by bparsons

5/21/2026 at 4:56:45 PM

Yes, and as per big techs, OpenAI and Anthropic you will not be able to do anything. On top of that they will make sure there are no jobs etc.. What can you/we do?

by cute_boi

5/21/2026 at 2:31:32 PM

Fuck Google for ranking some copycat website higher than mine, even though they copied my article.

This has been happening since Google launched in 1998. It was probably happening when we all used Hotbot and Altavista. It isn't really an AI problem, save for the fact that the automated production of copycat articles now reword things a bit.

by onion2k

5/21/2026 at 4:34:01 PM

If we outlaw plagiarism, we've just killed culture.

Everything is "stolen" from other art. Every piece of creation takes inspiration (read: steals ideas) from things that came before. This is how creation works, it is how creation has always worked, and it is why you cannot legally own an abstract idea. You can own the implementation of an idea in specific works, such as copyrighted works and patents and trademarking specific logos and such, but once the ideas go into the blender and get mixed with other ideas, the output isn't yours to own anymore. That's what culture is.

by msla

5/21/2026 at 2:38:29 PM

What do people imagine can be done about it at this point? Offer a concrete suggestion. Any law or tax against this will give a huge advantage to other countries. It's already over, there's no going back to a world where this didn't happen. Let's just hope some good comes of it.

by quantummagic

5/21/2026 at 3:48:22 PM

How about requiring AI companies to pay creators for training rights? Alternatively, models trained on the commons must be owned by the commons. Right now these AI companies are trying to have it both ways: it’s The People’s Data for training on comrade but ownership is privatized.

by hgs3

5/21/2026 at 4:34:11 PM

Practically speaking, who is going to enforce such a regime? Do you really want to give Chinese companies such a huge competitive advantage, that they aren't subject to the same costs as western companies? How do you even sort out which "creators" are owed, and how much? It's next to impossible, and would drown the legal system in litigation; it would likely cause more problems than it solves. On top of which you can find open weights for most, if not all, of the scraped material already. If you make those illegal to use, or prohibitively expensive, you just destroyed local LLM legality, and put the technology firmly in the hands of only the monopolists.

by quantummagic

5/21/2026 at 5:26:40 PM

If models are trained on the collective whole, they must be owned by the collective whole. If you believe funding creators for the training of private models is too slow, inconvenient, or creates a global disadvantage, then embrace collective ownership.

by hgs3

5/21/2026 at 5:29:46 PM

Sure, I wish everything was perfectly fair too. But how do you practically and REALISTICALLY proceed, and ensure you don't end up doing more damage than benefit? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Everyone seems much more focused on complaining, and talking about "what's fair", than actually proposing concrete steps that would lead to a better world, without a significant risk of creating a worse one.

by quantummagic

5/21/2026 at 5:41:54 PM

> concrete steps

Start by legally compelling companies that trained on unlicensed data to either (1) license the data, (2) publish their model, or (3) destroy their model.

by hgs3

5/21/2026 at 5:57:31 PM

> Start by legally compelling companies that trained on unlicensed data to either (1) license the data, (2) publish their model, or (3) destroy their model.

You are lost in an imaginary world where everything is simple and has no negative consequences. First off, there is NOBODY who has that power over all the companies in the world. So immediately you are creating an imbalance between companies and potentially destroying your domestic industry; with long term negative consequences for the people you're supposed to be protecting. Secondly, you might be creating a situation where it's impossible to ever create a competitor to those companies who are already entrenched monopolists, potentially even making it impossible to ever run self-trained or local LLM's. Also, you just unilaterally made it legal to publish all copyrighted work (since that's what you believe their model to be) to the general public, presumably in a way that can be used by everyone; further eroding copyright law in one fell swoop. You've completely disregarded the legal issues around what constitutes "unlicensed data", and how much is required before triggering your new law, and what that would mean for the legal system potentially being inundated. You're reacting way too emotionally and flippantly, with no apparent thought about what harm you are doing and how you might actually be making things worse, not better.

by quantummagic

5/21/2026 at 7:16:01 PM

Data is being licensed by AI companies, but negotiations are limited to those with the capital [1][2][3]. You write about "imbalance" but ignore that large firms can cut deals while small creators languish.

You seem to believe advancement only happens in the private sector while ignoring academic institutions and publicly funded research. You've ignored the possibility of public models entirely.

You fail to consider that when you financially disincentivize individual creators from publicly distributing their work, you starve future models resulting in a world were data is licensed only to those who can afford it anyway.

[1] https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

[2] https://openai.com/index/axel-springer-partnership/

[3] https://openai.com/index/openai-and-reddit-partnership/

by hgs3

5/21/2026 at 4:48:10 PM

> What do people imagine can be done about it at this point? Offer a concrete suggestion.

Simple. Free the companies from copyright liability, but after X amount of time they are required to release everything into the commons. The weights, the training scripts and the full training data (appropriately processed so that it can only be used for training and not for people to easily pirate whatever works were used). They'd still get a monopoly on their model for a little bit to recoup their training costs, but in the end would be forced to give back what they took.

by kouteiheika

5/21/2026 at 4:54:17 PM

I'm sympathetic, since I think copyright laws are far too extensive and generous. But it's not simple, there are a lot of companies that won't fall under your jurisdiction, and the question is if that will give them a competitive advantage that kills the industry for you, and ultimately costs you more than you gain.

by quantummagic

5/21/2026 at 4:03:39 PM

Use of the word "plagiarism" is plagiarism itself. Culture and thought are deeply shared phenomena. Using a common language, such as English, to communicate is equally an act of plagiarism. You didn't invent these words -- you use them without attribution and without payment. To decry and malign the collective training of all available digitally represented thought and discourse by large language models as simple binary plagiarism is deeply ironic -- where did you pay for your own thoughts? I don't want to live in your pay-per-thought society. I want to live with the ethos "information wants to be free". En garde!

by waffletower

5/21/2026 at 3:43:16 PM

Historical scandals are finally coming to light now that the AI issue has raised awareness:

- Ernest Hemingway trained his own neurons on Tolstoy, Twain, and Turgenev without ever paying them royalties!

- William Faulkner trained his neurons on Joyce and de Balzac

- George Orwell trained his neurons on Swift, Dickens, and Jack London

- Virginia Woolf trained her neurons on Proust and Chekhov

Now that these historical wrongs have been exposed, it is obvious that some reparations are in order, likely from anyone who has benefited directly or indirectly from these takings!

by paulsutter

5/21/2026 at 2:40:44 PM

End of an era

by Havoc

5/21/2026 at 3:08:43 PM

There's a big difference between "Yo GPT, copy this webpage for me in a different voice" and blaming LMs wholesale for being plagiarism. The former is of course a problem. The latter warrants a much more nuanced discussion about learning and generalization.

by hendersoon

5/21/2026 at 2:58:49 PM

Being a web content creator was already a dead job (killed by Google) before the AI boom. Chasing after at this point seems beyond foolish. Time to find a new career.

by VladVladikoff

5/21/2026 at 3:00:53 PM

The author's cited phenomena may be AI assisted plagiarism but is just plain plagiarism that could have been done the old fashioned way, and someone who is willing to plagiarize has the ethics to do SEO really well.

by adolph

5/21/2026 at 2:58:51 PM

AI "steals" your code, but AI company says "that's a fair use."

AI generates application using a "predict the next word" algorithm built with the stolen/not stolen works. Nothing creative there, just statistics.

That application leaks, and now the company that stole/not stole the code originally claims they own the algorithmic output. https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2026/03/2026-03-3...

One problem, you don't own that output. Either the original authors own it or nobody owns it because it's not creative... https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922

Those are the legal options. You stole it or you don't own it. There is no steal and then you own. That's the core problem. AI companies have demonstrated that they will directly steal the work and they will use their money and influence to claim ownership of it.

by panny

5/21/2026 at 4:39:15 PM

"One of the things that LLMs do is plagiarism as a bigger scale."

by nphardon

5/21/2026 at 2:16:45 PM

Breaking the law to start a large company seems to be the norm

by dana321

5/21/2026 at 2:01:33 PM

the court disagreed

by JohnHaugeland

5/21/2026 at 2:14:08 PM

[dead]

by vee-kay

5/21/2026 at 3:02:36 PM

It's the biggest theft in history.

by I_am_tiberius

5/21/2026 at 4:12:09 PM

Well, it really depends on your definitions, but I'll probably put the biggest theft in history on European imperialism in the 14-19th centuries, seizing unfathomable amounts of land, resources and slave labor from other civilizations.

by falcor84

5/21/2026 at 4:18:54 PM

I rephrase then: The biggest theft in the 21st century.

by I_am_tiberius

5/21/2026 at 2:39:23 PM

Welcome to the internet! It's one massive copy machine form one server to the next.

by Deprogrammer9

5/21/2026 at 2:10:47 PM

If i tell my friend a synopsis of a book, i am not stealing from the author, what is this take lmao

by lukasbm

5/21/2026 at 2:20:53 PM

If you read a book and then retell it to your friend pretending you came up with it, it is plagiarism. If you write down the book almost word-for-word [0] and send it to your friend, it is stealing.

0: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

by NicuCalcea

5/21/2026 at 4:19:37 PM

At the very least, we see there is minimal practical value for LLMs for any serious work. This is sort of good news. The effort to build this type of "AI" is all in the training data and navigating politics.

That leaves two possibilities: either another AI winter comes as people fail to capture long term value, or we get less swampy models that are much more useful and trained the correct way.

by sublinear

5/21/2026 at 2:25:30 PM

This site is strange. I'm pretty sure there's lots of AI shilling happening on it. I don't think the opinions here are authentic, they seem to be opinions that the AI company CEOs would hold, not the disenfranchised 99%. I used to trust HN, I'm not so sure I can now.

by booleandilemma

5/21/2026 at 2:45:18 PM

Completely agreed. It looks like there is a concerted effort to "massage" opinion away from any substantial questioning of the ethics, companies, and people behind the AI push. Some of this inevitabilism is organic of course, but there is too much for it all to be so.

HN is way too central for shared sentiment in the tech world for these companies not to do some amount of astroturfing. AI companies have shown at every single turn that they act out of self-interest and greed, not of moral principles. So it isn't surprising, even if it is still sad, to see those who are commanding the most capital in human history act with such callousness.

I think the appropriate course of response is to stop adding to public spaces on the internet. No doubt painful for those of us who have so benefitted from the freely shared thoughts of others. But if well-funded bullies are going come in, steal everything, ruin the commons, and then say "this is the new normal, deal with it", there isn't much the rest of us can do other than stop feeding them.

by recitedropper

5/21/2026 at 2:55:31 PM

Yeah. It's becoming unbelievable how different the prevailing opinions on this site are from those of real people I know and work with. That's always been true to some extent... but good lord, it's like reading the news in a parallel universe right now.

by jcalvinowens

5/21/2026 at 3:18:40 PM

Any examples? There are obviously a lot of programmers here who think AI is a great tool and don't feel disenfranchised by it.

by Kiro

5/21/2026 at 2:04:00 PM

Is this a new and original thought?

by drcongo

5/21/2026 at 4:44:29 PM

> I found out this because they ranked higher than me in Google search result, and then when I read their article, their article contains links to my actual website, with the exact link text (?!) , which means they didnt bother to check and remove, and thats how I found out.

So, funnily enough, Google's search index may actually have a preference for LLM-generated slop now. Louis Rossmann found this out this hard way: his human-authored, human-written, actually-in-his-own-words site for his business basically stopped ranking in Google until he went and replaced all his writing with LLM slop. He's not happy with this, but he's even less happy about being cut off from traffic his business needs to survive, so he stuck with the slop (and vocally complains about it on other channels every opportunity he gets).

by kmeisthax

5/21/2026 at 2:22:08 PM

language is just plagiarism

by analog8374

5/21/2026 at 2:25:10 PM

I’m going to steal that

by brookst

5/21/2026 at 2:08:10 PM

it's a spiral into a finite hall of mirrors, where at the end is somebody with a gun

by metalman

5/21/2026 at 2:19:44 PM

I'd rather have AI slop appear on the top of HN than regurgitated old low effort thoughts like this.

There's absolutely nothing new or interesting here that hasn't already been said better by a thousand different random HN commenters.

by kristofferR

5/21/2026 at 2:30:23 PM

[flagged]

by codepack

5/21/2026 at 3:14:53 PM

[flagged]

by paol_taja

5/21/2026 at 2:03:58 PM

[dead]

by mapcars

5/21/2026 at 3:09:32 PM

[dead]

by szundi

5/21/2026 at 2:05:08 PM

[flagged]

by Ecys

5/21/2026 at 2:08:55 PM

Rather: composes (or: re-sequences). Synthesis requires reason and essential capabilities, like an empirical a priori judgement. Without concepts, meaning or imagination, there's no synthesis.

by masswerk

5/21/2026 at 2:29:12 PM

The point is that the AI inferencing is equivalent to a person reading half a dozen separate papers, comprhending the basic concepts of each, relating them together into a mental model of the topic, and then writing an essay that summarizes the basic points. The person isn't plagiarizing anything here, but engaging in research, understanding, and synthesis of various sources of information.

The person absolutely does have the advantage of having empirical awareness and the ability to test their conclusions against external reality. But lots of people do engage in "research" and build mental models of various topics with little or no empirical context, and rely mainly on digesting calcified knowledge from other people.

by Gormo

5/21/2026 at 3:14:28 PM

I'm afraid, the essence is that is not. Re-sequencing content is not the same as synthesis and therefore not the same as a person processing information and communicating their own conception of this. There's a vital difference.

(We can even observe this in the resulting text: we immediately grasp the level of competence of the author, just by the way they take their path trough and at the matter. With LLMs, well, there's this even temperature, ready-made feeling, regulated by probability thresholds and RLHF sanctioned phrasing, also known as "slop" – even rhythmic intensifications, like "not this, not that, but…", which is actually a figure for a synthetic construct, don't help –, since the text isn't the trace or product of an actual organized thought – or, at least, an attempt at an organized thought.)

PS: "empirical a priori judgement" was meant as translation of synthetisches Urteil a priori (Kant). I.e., our ability to mentally prove concepts like congruency, which are not a priori, but can be inferred without regression to empirical knowledge. Typically, this requires both our inner sense (time, sequence, etc.) and outer senses (space, configuration, etc.)

by masswerk

5/21/2026 at 4:33:23 PM

> I'm afraid, the essence is that is not. Re-sequencing content is not the same as synthesis

Drawing different sources of information together into a single understanding is quite literally the definition of "synthesis" in this context. If that process is what you're referring to as "re-sequencing content", then it does fit the definition of "synthesis" in this discussion.

If you're using the phrase "re-sequencing content" as a way of indirectly suggesting that LLMs aren't relating together multiple sources of information and combining them into a single expression, then that itself is the point of contention that we are arguing about.

Perhaps you're trying to apply a philosophical concept of synthesis, e.g. that of Fichte or Hegel, but that definition applies to a specific type of philosophical analysis, and isn't quite the concept we're using in this discussion.

by Gormo

5/21/2026 at 5:09:20 PM

If we're talking about concepts and communication, in text, I don't know what meaning of synthesis to apply (as long as there is meaning), other than the meaning this has had for centuries. I think, aggregation, extraction and emulgating is something else.

The very purpose of text is to transfer meaning, concepts, observations and complex thoughts to human readers for them to process. And we have built a complex framework around this and for this. The fact that many feel that this framework is violated should hint at there being a problem, a conceptual discrepancy. (And be it just that there's a man-in-the middle, who hasn't authorship, standing in between me as an author and those receiving what remains of the text. In its essential lack of agency, it's less of a mediating recommendation and more of an appropriation. But, maybe, if we're talking about a slip into a new dogmatic slumber, manufactured via an unseen authority that hasn't any authority nor position as an author, the problem goes deeper than this. And, maybe, the masquerading of LLM output as human cummunication and phrasing is part of the problem.)

by masswerk

5/21/2026 at 5:34:39 PM

> I think, aggregation, extraction and emulgating is something else.

Aggregating information, extracting underlying concepts, and combining those concepts into a unified expression is indeed the vernacular meaning of "synthesis" applicable to this discussion.

"Emulgating" is not a conventional English word. Is it a misspelling of "emulating"? I ask because using the term "emulating" here would again represent an instance of question begging, i.e. implicitly asserting the position that what's being discussed is merely the paraphrasing of singularly sourced information, and not the unification of concepts expressed in multiple sources, which I again believe is the very thing we are debating.

> And we have built a complex framework around this and for this. The fact that many feel that this framework is violated should hint at there being a problem, a conceptual discrepancy.

I don't think there necessarily is a problem or conceptual discrepancy here, any more than there has been for all of the centuries that people have been debating epistemology. The problem here is the same as for humans, and reduces to a rationalism vs. empiricism debate. AI tools are pure rationalists, and are solely capable of reasoning. However, many people behave this way as well, and exhibit a rationalist epistomology, even having emotional entanglements with their axioms to the point that they'll bend over backwards to reject evidence that falsifies empirical conclusions drawn from those axioms.

My biggest fear from AI is not that it isn't capable of inductive reasoning -- that's all it's capable of, as I see it -- but rather that the fact that its reasoning has no empirical anchor will lead people who are mired in rationalist epistemology to accept its conclusions uncritically.

In other words, the danger doesn't come from the fact that AI has no semantic awareness, but that people using it aren't seeking semantic validation in the first place, which is a problem already pervasive in our society.

by Gormo

5/21/2026 at 6:05:33 PM

*) "emulgate", maybe better emulsify, but this is a bit lateral to this? The point being, a homogenous preparation, which is more a superficial operation than an essential one, as the establishing ingredients remain the untouched.

> AI tools are pure rationalists, and are solely capable of reasoning.

Mind that the world isn't in the language, nor our connection with the world. (We know this for about 120 years, since we expelled the referens from linguistics.) Which brings us back to the synthetic judgement a priori… You may emulate this, as a superficial trait drawn from other traces of communication, but it's not what this is all about. E.g., I wouldn't expect true "lateral thinking" from an LLM output.

> My biggest fear from AI…

I'd add to this, it's not just empirical vs rationalist epistemology, it's also about empathy, anything referring to the conditio humana, which is really what any text is about, even a scientific one (why is it that we do want to know, what are the motivations, the regulating circumstances, etc.?).

by masswerk

5/21/2026 at 2:24:42 PM

I guess it's most appropriate so say "LOSSY COMPRESS".

by vb-8448

5/21/2026 at 2:18:17 PM

I just want to call out that this is a weirdly hostile and aggressive comment for a place like HN. HN is mostly used by working professionals it would be nice if people treated each other better here.

by austinthetaco

5/21/2026 at 2:09:03 PM

Except that LMMs don't work on individual words.

by zabzonk

5/21/2026 at 2:20:12 PM

What is "Cope." supposed to mean here?

by guelo

5/21/2026 at 2:50:35 PM

It is the imperative of "to cope". As in "cope and seethe", used as a dismissal.

by bigstrat2003

5/21/2026 at 2:13:55 PM

Yeah AI just actually plagiarize everything lel, sometimes even the source are..full of question and worst, my academical use it as a source...welp

by Pennoungen0

5/21/2026 at 1:58:52 PM

> Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy?

Apparently yes.

by ciconia

5/21/2026 at 2:05:08 PM

AI has nothing to do with laziness or greediness. It makes things more efficient - and given that our time is limited strive for efficiency is a good thing.

by mapcars

5/21/2026 at 2:24:30 PM

If you can't see greed in the LLM sphere you are not looking very hard.

by xgulfie

5/21/2026 at 2:29:08 PM

Did I say that there is no greed in LLM sphere? English is not my first language, still I'm pretty sure I didn't say that.

by mapcars

5/21/2026 at 2:39:46 PM

> AI has nothing to do with laziness or greediness.

by xgulfie

5/21/2026 at 3:01:51 PM

All innovation is theft. It builds directly on top of what came before.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

It's always been true. AI just makes it available to more people faster.

by codexb

5/21/2026 at 2:10:47 PM

I dunno. People do this exact thing by hand (digest everything they've read and produce something indirectly derivative--what author has not been so-influenced?) and it's not a copyright violation. It's just as impossible to dig around in a model to find Hamlet as it is to do digging around a human brain. And if the result is an obvious copy, then you have a violation no matter how it was created.

As someone who thinks humanity would be better off without LLMs, I want the assertion to be true, but I don't think it is.

by beej71

5/21/2026 at 2:12:12 PM

The author acknowledges this by saying “at a bigger scale”, implying there are smaller scale methods such as what you have said.

by cheschire

5/21/2026 at 6:44:27 PM

But now we're going to have to draw a line at some scale, and that's going to get quite tricky.

by beej71

5/21/2026 at 3:22:58 PM

How any content came into existence? Learning, Experience, connection, etc right? If AI is doing that then what's the problem? Printing Press was also disturbing status-quo of its time. Any frontier technologies at their time did that. Be it Fire, Wheel, Horse, Horse Saddle, Gun, Printing Press, Nuclear war heads, Computers, Internet, AI, etc.

Don't make it ethical question but understand its new frontier for humans.

by gagan2020

5/21/2026 at 2:13:13 PM

On one hand, there's nothing new under the sun. On the other, these llms are just copies of us and they owe the collective some due. The trajectory right now has money, power, control, policy and even free will going to a very small needle point of humanity. It's not aligned with humanity flourishing, it only makes sense if the goal is to replace the humans.

by swader999

5/21/2026 at 2:38:45 PM

Years ago i published slides on Slideshare that were viewed almost two million times. And helped me build a business.

There were people that learned knowledge from myself, and then made their own tutorials and promote these. It hadn't crossed my mind to complain about that. AI changes very little here.

What really changes things is not people republishing my materials, but people using agents to read my materials, and to get knowledge reformatted into something that they like.

If my slides were published today, they would probably be read verbatim by a handful of humans. The rest would be agents, but I'm ok with that. The business case is the same -- I want whatever reads the slide to be encouraged to use my tool. What kind of entity, I don't really care (again: from purely business perspective)

by kolinko

5/21/2026 at 1:57:48 PM

AI is human knowledge at scale, wanting to be free.

We built it, because we as humans intrinsically know that information should be free - always - and AI is a way to accomplish this, finally.

Extrinsically, we also have a subset of humans who do not want information to be free, because they desire to profit from the divide between free/non-free information.

I have been thinking a lot about Aaron Schwartz lately, and how un-just it is that he was persecuted for doing something that is so commonplace now, it is practically expected behaviour in the AI/ML realms. If he hadn't been targetted for elimination, I wonder just how well his ethos would have perpetuated into the AI age ..

by rigonkulous

5/21/2026 at 2:27:21 PM

> We built it, because we as humans intrinsically know that information should be free

I don't know if this statement is more stupid or naive ..

by vb-8448

5/21/2026 at 2:32:04 PM

I could say the same of your position, honestly. Stupid, naive - or maybe just plain ignorant.

If humans didn't want information to be free, there wouldn't be so much free information.

Or did you not notice?

by rigonkulous

5/21/2026 at 3:12:08 PM

You are confusing "slop" with "information", there is so much slop because it costs nearly 0 to be produced, but there's far less "information" than you are thinking.

by vb-8448

5/21/2026 at 2:59:51 PM

[dead]

by lubujackson

5/21/2026 at 2:20:20 PM

Current crop of AI is not free in the slightest. Open weight models are not free as in liberty and neither is the training data.

by throwatdem12311

5/21/2026 at 2:05:49 PM

s/free/owned by a billion dollar megacorp/

(AI output is very much not free in the resource consumption sense!)

by pjc50

5/21/2026 at 2:18:25 PM

Most resources are free until some company comes along and puts its brand on them.

(Disclaimer: I only use free AI and will never pay for it. I think there is a growing segment of folks who agree with this sentiment, also ..)

by rigonkulous

5/21/2026 at 2:05:10 PM

I agree with this sentiment. But as a community, this is hated because it impacts people's wages.

It's the negative short term outlook of something that may be positive long term

by thedevilslawyer

5/21/2026 at 2:21:56 PM

Sure, it could be positive in some distant future utopia.

But the short-term impacts here and now are really, really bad. People are getting hurt (through water consumption, vibe-coded security disasters, IP theft, data center pollution, loss of job security and therefore healthcare in the US, LLM psychosis, inability to find reliable information, etc.) We're not actually obligated to sacrifice these people on the altar of "progress". We can slow down! When our society is capable of even somewhat protecting us from these harms, then maybe I'll stop being an LLM hater.

by konmok

5/21/2026 at 2:35:16 PM

We absolutely have negative cases - but these do not outweigh the positive cases. There is no distant utopia - right now, people are becoming extremely capable because of their personal use of AI - there is also a position on the other side of the curve, where people are becoming more incompetent because of AI.

But guess what, it has always been so with technology - and we are only here and now because the positive use of it overshadows the negative use of it, whether that 'it' is the wheel, or AI.

I choose not to be an LLM hater, but to also not be an LLM customer - simply because I do not want to reward other humans who are thwarting the freedom of information. I'd much rather live in a society where everyone can study anything than one which requires permission to do anything even remotely interesting from the perspective of applied information. I suspect most would too, or at least that's the hope - because, otherwise, the distant utopia you dream of isn't of any consequence...

by rigonkulous

5/21/2026 at 2:55:01 PM

[dead]

by throwaway613746

5/21/2026 at 2:09:23 PM

It's not hated because it impacts people's wages, although that perhaps factors into the hate. It's hated because AI is not a public good. The LLMS today are owned by megacorporations who harvested a public good for private gain.

This is not some altruistic entity striving for the betterment of humankind. Practically nothing that comes out of the techbro culture is. This is pure and simple greed and the chances that AI can be a vehicle of altruism when it is owned by megacorps is basically zero.

by short_sells_poo

5/21/2026 at 3:56:08 PM

Oh please! If everyone could keep their older jobs as is + allowed to use LLMs, everyone would be gushing about how beneficial it is, and how they are now free to pursue other things.

All the other reasons are rationalizations. The fact that it's hitting wages is what's causing the doomerism (and boosterism).

by thedevilslawyer

5/21/2026 at 2:19:09 PM

[dead]

by vee-kay

5/21/2026 at 2:35:01 PM

What a naive and simplistic view.

People want to be recognised for their contributions to society. People want to be treated fairly. Most scientific articles, as well as all text on the free web is already free information. It used to be difficult to search, categorise and summarise that information. There exist AI tools for that — and that is the good AI.

What also exists now are automated plagiarism and mash-up tools: that can take someone's article, change the words and churn out a new article that people can put their name on. There are scumbags that sell services for exactly that. And there are big tech firms that are operating in a very grey area.

Aaron Schwartz had broken a paywall. He did not anonymise the article authors.

You, and AI-bros like you remind me of one the people behind Pirate Bay when I argued with him back in the '90s, who used that same "information wants to be free" to justify software piracy.

by Findecanor

5/21/2026 at 2:37:59 PM

There is far more free information than non-free information, and it has always been so - or else we wouldn't be here in the first place.

>Aaron Schwartz had broken a paywall. He did not anonymise the article authors.

AI bro's are doing this now, every second of the day.

And, without software piracy, we simply wouldn't have the technology we have today. Knowledge-gatekeeping profit-seekers would very much like for most of us to ignore this fact: there is far more free information in the world than non-free information, and it must be so, well into the future, if we are to survive as a species.

It doesn't matter what authority believes they have the right to gatekeep information. It will always escape their grip. Some of us are ideologically aligned with this mechanism, promote it, and ensure it happens. Thank FNORD.

by rigonkulous

5/21/2026 at 3:04:08 PM

At this point, I think google, openai, anthropic, etc already realise this and are just trying to pretend this isn't true. I even think some C-suite who are not in AI companies but are boosters know this too. This has been true since 2022 but they're hoping (likely correctly) that governments won't move fast enough to protect the IP of the actual productive class.

I think the long term reality is that the models still need training data so they fundamentally do need new writing/code/art to train on, and even then the usual issues like hallucination will still be with us. It's just the moment that actually hurts the (already questionable) profitability of the model peddlers, they will have gotten their IPOs and they can safely jump ship and the ultimate mess can be passed to the softbanks, the temaseks, and the governments of the world to clean up for them. What the future holds after the crash I'm not sure as the models won't disappear (especially now that the stolen data is already crystalised in open source models) but in the near term the mass theft that constitutes llms will become more and more understood even amongst the PMC and that in order to remain viable, you need the productive to keep producing, and unlike LLMs, you can't force them to do it without payment.

by noobermin