Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine
41 comments
·May 19, 2025Pulcinella
steveBK123
Millenials might be the generation that both got threatened with jail for music copyright infringement violations as youth AND gets to have their job threatened by automated mass corporate copyright infringement in adulthood!
hnthrow90348765
"Haha, yeah, those scrappy Millennials - who knows where their breaking point is but I'm sure there's a fintech app for making that bet"
rrauenza
I had this argument presented to me and I wasn't sure what to do with it.
> Humans are allowed to "absorb" art around them into their brains and generate derivative art. People may copy Miyazaki's style... why shouldn't an AI farm be allowed to?
Let's put aside for a moment that AI may have "consumed" some art without a license (e.g., "google books" - did google purchase every book?).
davidclark
The same legal rule applies to both for determining whether something is a derivative work.
No one is stopping you from using similar proportions or colors as Miyazaki to draw a character. You are also allowed to draw your own interpretation of an electric mouse-like monster.
Copyright infringement occurs if that character looks exactly like say Totoro or Pikachu. That is not “in the style of”, that is copying.
A problem with LLMs is that since their corpus is so large, it is difficult to identify when any given output is crossing that line because a single observer’s knowledge of the works influencing the output is limited. You might feed it a picture of your grandfather and it returns an almost exact copy of a grandfather character from a Miyazaki film you haven’t seen. If you don’t share the output with others, it might never be noticed that the infringement occurred.
The given argument conflates the slightest influence with direct copying. It is a reductive take that, personally, I’ve found emblematic of pro-LLM arguments.
rrauenza
Thanks for helping pick apart the argument presented to me.
I don't like the idea that photos I've published on, say, flickr have been pulled into these. Especially stuff I've published with creative commons non-commercial use.
NooneAtAll3
except lawyers keep saying "fanart is actually technically illegal" and resinging/changing lyrics in songs isn't enough to be protected by "fair use" stuff
if anything, I'd campaign for "we should limit copyright because it already doesn't work for Ai"
rrauenza
I wasn't intending to include fan art.
Copying Miyazaki's style ... or copying Monet's style... those aren't fan art.
mcphage
> People may copy Miyazaki's style... why shouldn't an AI farm be allowed to?
People may take a penny from the tray at the 7-11, so why can't an AI farm take pennies from all the trays? Or take them from a much bigger tray and do it a couple of million times?
gojomo
There is no de jure legal requirement that the RIAA, Disney, Nintendo, or the government be "pleased to hear" about new technology.
And, while copyright prohibits some sorts of reproduction of copyrighted materials, it doesn't give rightsholders veto power over all downstream uses of legal copies.
SilasX
Learning from copyrighted works to create new ones has never been protected by copyright[1], and has never needed separate licensing rights. Until 2022, no one even suggested it, to a rounding error. If anything, people would have been horrified at the idea of being dinged because your novel clearly drew inspiration from another work.
That narrative only got picked up because people needed a reason to demonize evil corps that they already hated for unrelated reasons.
[1] Yes, if you create "new" works from your learning that are basically copies, that has always been infringement. I'm talking about the general case.
caseyy
> Learning from copyrighted works to create new ones has never been protected by copyright
The term "learning" (I presume from "machine learning") shoulders a lot of weight. If we describe the situation more precisely, it involves commercially exploiting literature and other text media to produce a statistical corpus of texts, which is then commercially exploited. It's okay if that is licensed, but none of the AI companies bothered to license said original texts. Some (allegedly) just downloaded torrents of books, which is clear as day piracy. It has little to do with "learning" as used in common English — a person naturally retaining some knowledge of what they've consumed. Plain English "learning" doesn't describe the whole of what's happening with LLMs at all! It's a borrowed term, so let's not pretend it isn't.
What's happening is closer to buying some music cassettes, ripping parts of songs off them into various mixtapes, and selling them. The fact that the new cassettes "learned" the contents of the old ones, or that the songs are now jumbled up, doesn't change that the mixtape maker never had a license to copy the bits of music for commercial exploitation in the first place. After the infringement is done, the rest is smoke and mirrors...
SilasX
>The term "learning" (I presume from "machine learning") shoulders a lot of weight. If we describe the situation more precisely, it involves commercially exploiting literature and other text media to produce a statistical corpus of texts, which is then commercially exploited.
It's "commercially exploiting literature" in the same sense that an author would if they read a bunch of novels and then wrote their own based on what the learned from the pre-existing text. The whole point in dispute is whether that turns into infringement when an AI does it.
By labeling only one of them as "commercially exploiting literature" but not the other, you're failing to distinguish them in any meaningful way, and basically arguing from name-calling.
>It has little to do with "learning" as used in common English — a person naturally retaining some knowledge of what they've consumed. Plain English "learning" doesn't describe the whole of what's happening with LLMs at all! It's a borrowed term, so let's not pretend it isn't.
That's fair, that you can't just call them both "learning" and call it a day. But then the burden's on you to show how machine learning breaks from the time-honored tradition of license-free learning/"updating what you write based on having viewed other works". What's different? What is it about machine learning that makes it infringement in a way that it isn't when humans update their weights from having seen copyrighted works?
>What's happening is closer to buying some music cassettes, ripping parts of songs off them into various mixtapes, and selling them. The fact that the new cassettes "learned" the contents of the old ones, or that the songs are now jumbled up, doesn't change that the mixtape maker never had a license to copy the bits of music for commercial exploitation in the first place.
Okay, but (as above) to make that case, you'd need to identify where "acceptable" learning/"updating what you write based on having viewed other works" crosses over into the infringing mixtape example, and I have yet to see anyone try beyond "they're evil corps, it must be bad somehow".
satyanash
> narrative only got picked up because people needed a reason to demonize evil corps
Either they aren't evil in which case they're being demonized, or they're already evil in which case demonization is redundant.
Keeping aside the motives of people, what is clear is that scale effects of AI cannot be ignored. An AI "learning" millions of pieces of content in a short span is not the same as humans spending time, effort and energy to replicate someone's style. You can argue that its 'neural nets' in both cases, but the massive scale is what separates the two.
A village is not a large family, a city is not a large village, ... and all that.
SilasX
>Either they aren't evil in which case they're being demonized, or they're already evil in which case demonization is redundant.
If you were trying to be charitable rather than clever, you would have read "evil corps" as "corps that the critic regards as evil".
>Keeping aside the motives of people, what is clear is that scale effects of AI cannot be ignored.
Okay, so just give some kind of standard -- any clear, articulable standard -- for how and why the scale matters. It's a cop-out to just rest your case on a hand-wavy "it changes at scale".
dragonwriter
> Learning
Human learning doesn't involve making a copy (or any other use of an exclusive rights) as defined in copyright law (the human brain not being a fixed medium), AI training does, because digital storage is.
AI training may fall into the Fair Use exception in the US, but it absolutely does not fall through the same gap that makes human learning not even eequire fair use analysis since it doesn't meet the definitions ser out for a violation in the first place.
SilasX
>Human learning doesn't involve making a copy (or any other use of an exclusive rights) as defined in copyright law (the human brain not being a fixed medium), AI training does, because digital storage is.
That's just false -- AI models themselves only store parameter weights, which represent a high-level, aggregated understanding across all data that was learned on, i.e. what human brains do. This is clear from all the examples where you have to painstakingly trick them into producing exact text.
And even if they did store something that's "effectively a copy", that's no more copyright infringement than when Google caches a site in order to handle search queries. It's not copyright infringement until they start redistributing [non-fair-use] content from the sites.
username135
Its hard not to demonize large corps that often enjoy the governments legal largess when there are many examples of individuals with ruined lives for the same behavior.
Pulcinella
"It's not piracy! I'm learning from all this media I didn't pay for!"
fblp
I wish this wasn't flagged, I find some of these satirical pieces on hn most thought provoking.
rrauenza
How could the author not have called it the Giant Plagiarism Tool or Giant Plagiarism Technology ...
nashashmi
Might be a trademark problem?
nh23423fefe
People who live in the past use bad metaphors like this.
codr7
I can see it's not being well received by the AI apologizing squad.
Let's just flag anything that gets in the way of profit and peace of mind.
Truth will find you.
null
readthenotes1
Disappointed. I thought this was going to be about Harvard.
minimaxir
[edit: retracted kneejerk take]
JonChesterfield
Linkedin has stuff like this on it and I'm pretty sure it's sincere.
Also Google wouldn't give me an antonym for "satire", only the output of a LLM which thinks synonym is the same thing as antonym.
gotoeleven
sincerence ? earnestence? Of course using those words will make whatever you're writing sound like satire.
leephillips
Nouns do not have antonyms.
Edit: I should have said not all nouns have antonyms.
Centigonal
Not true. Some concrete nouns don't have antonyms, but "good," "black," "heat," "invisibility," and many more abstract nouns have clear antonyms.
monster_truck
What? Yes they do. ridge/groove, heaven/hell, war/peace, north/south, predator/prey etc etc
Even "plagiarism" is putting way to positive a spin on it. "Rampant copyright infringement" is more accurate.
I'm sure we all have our own feelings about IP law, but remember what happens to regular people who try stuff like this. I don't think the RIAA, Disney, or Nintendo (or the government) are going to be pleased to hear "it's not piracy! It's a transformative experience protected by fair use!"