How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Only to be topped by the massive amount of IP that Copilot is possibly secretly harvesting at present. We already believe OpenAI/Anthropic are doing it, what’s to stop Microsoft from attempting to improve their competitive advantage by surreptitiously using their role as a MiTM between end user Corporations and Model servers.
I wrote something original in a language learning grammar online. I coined a term to describe something about how a certain language with negative language functions.
I tried talking to an LLM about it and sure and enough, it had scraped it and learned to use that terminology and explanation that I made up. I asked the LLM, "Where did that concept/term come from, who made it up?" It did a bunch of searching and tried to site a whole bunch of other sources which did NOT contain the terms of the explanation I had written. It simply would not cite or mention my source. It kept parroting my material semi-correctly and hiding the source. By any other actor that would be an egregious act of sloppiness, dishonesty, and plagiarism.
Generative AI is speed-running a widespread corruption of truth. I do not believe any of the gains are worth this.
Your text may well have been in the training corpus, but not searchable with whatever terms and search engine that LLM used after you prompted it. It doesn’t have recall of sources of documents comprising its training corpus, unless the source is widely cited in other of its training documents. Sourcing and provenance aren’t currently an intentional part of LLM training.
That may already have been obvious, and central to the complaint, but I was just knee-jerking to the anthropomorphic language.
France, 1658 <-> World, 2026. AI can also do the reverse : for example very few in the world know that the term midwit was originally coined in french by Blaise Pascal (« demi habiles ») centuries ago.
Yes, that bell curve meme, he wrote about it. It’s not explained anywhere because of the language and culture separation between
french and english. But if you ask enough questions to AI, the AI will eventually find about Blaise Pascal and tell you about this unknown link. It’s magic.
Well done Confucius, you've invented a new creditpocalypse. Its when llms hallucinate new authors for new words. It almost makes it worth starting a blogsurection!
I ran into this with a term I coined in a README. The model can't tell you where it learned something. The "sources" it cites are just search results it bolts on afterward, so they rarely match. A better test: turn search off, paste the first half of a distinctive sentence from your page, and see if it finishes it verbatim. That's much closer to proof.
Somebody should throw molotov cocktails at the contributors of CommonCrawl[1], for they have "stolen" from "the people". /s obv.
It never ceases to amaze me how people affirm the concept of intellectual property, enforced by states, while maintaining "exceptions" that are fundamentally incompatible with the very concept of what they are upholding.
Disney (big corp!) copies a small artist's work? The law shall strike them down!
A small artists uses some symbol of Disney, which claims copyright infringement? So mean! They are abusing the law!
Maybe the discontent people feel with AI companies is a more fundamental one: Corporations compete to cut costs and increase profits. You cannot outperform other corporations on the long-term by sourcing cheaper materials; the cost-cutting is mainly targeted towards the human labour; the commodity of human labour bears a cost, but you can also command them to perform more work, increasing the "performance"; so companies naturally want high-output employees that cost as little as possible, to compete and exist on the market.
AI companies now claim to be developing a product which can replace cognitive human labour on a massive scale; companies find the advent of hiring less humans that perform more work very advantageous, skyrocketing the expected returns of said AI companies. Capital flows en masse into these companies because they may be integrated into the value chain of virtually all companies.
This calculation is the ruling concept of the entire "free world". To exist in said world you must prove some utility to this societal process of turning money into more money, in some way or the other.
Many people that managed to score a "good" job, cognitive work, now feel threatened by the AI companies that are poised to develop models that enables their employers to fire them/reduce their salary.
Your material life (housing, food) depend on jobs, which only exist as a cost factor in the profit calculation of your employer. All research and development serves this principle, to recoup the spent funds.
When Andreessen claimed that "software will eat the world", he said that software companies will replace many/most other industries like manufacturing, real estate, taxi drivers.
Many HN'ers bought into the hype, loved "Big Data", millions started university degrees in something with "Data". They may have dreamed of that FAANG salary, six figures, live in SF, home office etc.
The entire promise of that silicon valley hype cycle was that they will be putting millions of people out of work, casting their daily work into inherently superior software applications, and gaining a advantage over all other competitors by "harnessing data". That did not work too well, see Zillow, now the tech industry eat's itself: The transformer will think for you, and therefore you must hire fewer thinkers.
If you refuse to criticize or even acknowledge that your job, that many people cling to, is only a product of competition that inherently produces winners and losers.
If you don't find that bad in any way shape or form, if you only complain about ending up with the losers (the permanent undercaste), I'll say: "No crying in the casino."
if he “had been made aware that OpenAI has scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” the company would have required OpenAI “to retrain its models.”
And slavery is probably what inspires the perm under class fantasy AI people have. That’s said, if they work hard enough, AI being bigger than slavery is still possible.
An executive at this level is not going to risk their personal political capital to make such statements unless its part of plan and thought through. They might be right but in capitalistic system no company would given them a opportunity after such statements.
Whether religious or not, the verse applies to anyone and everyone making such statements from the position of companies like Microsoft. I'll quite the KJV version 'cause that one lends itself well to situations like these. Read it with a booming thunder-loaded voice:
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
It's a memo taken out of context from Jan 2023, literally 1 month after the ChatGPT public release. All the article cites:
> The brief cited an internal memo dated January 2023 by Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, where he allegedly said, “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and also called it “the largest theft of labor in human history.”
No need to add religion into this. Let MS employees write their emails. If anything, what he said a month after ChatGPT's release was prophetic.
For all human history, the subject only complains if they do it, its never wrong when others do it, never when they do it.
Take the Hebrew return to the promise land, its strange how the non believers are always rich and their gold, cattle and virgin numbers are listed as gifts for doing gods will.
This is probably the best way to read it: Do not presume to correct another person while remaining blind to your own faults. Examine and correct yourself first; only then are you in a position to help your brother with his.
It literally is meant as a beam, a bit of exaggeration for emphasis.
So we are meant to assess and help others but first must correct our own selves.
It is a translation of "dokós", a plank of wood that would serve as a joist or rafter. An ancient palestinian Phineas Gage stuck through with a classical age 2x10, if you will.
By stealing text from the Bible rather than using your own words, you've just committed labor theft!
Of course that accusation sounds outrageous as it should. All human knowledge and progress has come by building on the works of those who came before us, as it should. Turning this on its head and calling it "theft of labor" is insane, as is asking others not to build on today's knowledge.
Or to steal some more human labor: "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
When we sing, draw, speak, play, we are not attacking the soul of someone else!
Culture has always had a kind of violence to it, but not FROM the THIEF: you HAVE to speak the language that was already made; you have to understand and participate in their song-structures, their plot devices, their ways of attesting.
That's closer to what copyright is for, as far as I understand it. It's less a wage system than a consent regime: the author decides who copies and adapts the work, and on what terms. Whether training counts as a covered use is still being sorted out in court, but the agency argument is stronger than the "labor" one.
Either way, a change did happen, financial impact aside this change is definitely going to disrupt the ecosystem as a whole which is a much bigger unknown at this point.
> A huge chunk of the content that was scraped was most likely provided voluntarily rather than being waged labour.
People committing work get rewards in different ways, waged labour could be one, attributions, acknowledgements, future job opportunities and more. Stripping those from the rightful owners can hardly be justified in the name of progress.
Nit: the labor and the future value aren't separate things. Copyright exists so the labor gets paid over time, through royalties, ad revenue, whatever. IIRC a lot of writers got nothing upfront at all. Slavery's obviously worse, though, I'll give you that.
What gets me is the asymmetry. When we scraped a competitor's public pricing pages for a side project years ago, we got a cease-and-desist within two weeks and killed it. Meanwhile the big labs scrape everything, then sign licensing deals only with whoever can afford lawyers.
