Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics - i.e. 'openai uses
copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on HN would be unfortunate."
Dario, if you’re reading this, I want you to know that Claude sucks now. Its output isn’t even English anymore, it’s just claudeslop.
You’ve actually ruined it so much that it has now polluted the Chinese models which are copying your work. So now all the models output claudeslop.
You’ve polluted all of the training data in the world. Now we’re never going to be able to train proper models, because everything has slop in it and all the sites have locked down their data to prevent future startups training.
> Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics (...)"
As a side-note, most orgs already cover the need to STFU in their training material for new hires, particularly how personal comments should not and cannot represent the company. I'm sure this lawsuit will be explicitly mentioned in upcoming versions of this sort training material in multiple orgs.
Legal incentives against better internal communication/coordination create so much inefficiency. The legal system should focus on outcomes more than internal comms.
i am of the belief that papering over a fundamental lack of integrity and ethics will usually fail to conceal it. it is ineffective.
we do of course have an economy where lack of ethics and integrity is intended.
you can't change the economy as an individual but i like this quote: "Do the right thing for the right reasons, at the right time with the right people, and you'll have no regrets for the rest of your lives."
That's not interesting, it's just dumb. OAI (among others) plundered the whole internet to steal their training data, what difference does a single website, however "sketchy" or not, make?
What other proof do we need to know that these people are doing what they’re doing because fundamentally they have an absolute disdain for humans, humanity, and humanities?
They believe in their own inevitabilism, and they’re the largest internal threat to democratic societies we’ve probably ever seen, besides actual military coups.
In a sane society, they’d already be in jail.
Gosh, even in a not so sane society such as China they would have already been stopped and locked up.
This is a lobby organisation using only the pieces and bits they like to push their own agenda.
"sketchy russian website", how about using some more clear description like: A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public. Only some of the material is copyrighted by authors. However, some of their work is so old that it is not reprinted anyway.
But of course such an explanation would not click.
I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless. Imagine if every robotic or automation company advertised like this: Yeah, you'll buy tons of expensive robots and still rely on expensive labor from real people without any efficiency gains.
What are you on about? “Sketchy Russian website” is part of a quote by Sam McCandlish (who worked at OpenAI), not the Author’s Guild characterisation.
Also, come on. Defending it on the basis that some books on libgen are public domain is an hilariously poor excuse, to the same level as people claiming they used The Pirate Bay to “download Linux ISOs”. Even if some of that is true, we all know that use case is not the popular one.
For someone who’s accusing others of being a lobby pushing an agenda, your bias is showing quite a lot.
It can be a bit confusing due to the terrible style of the article (ironic given the source) but it seems the "sketchy russian website" part is a direct quote by Anthropic's Sam McCandlish. And apparently Dario Amodei referred to it as sketchy as well.
I find the brazenness of saying this while running what's arguably the largest copyright theft operation in human history astonishing. If libgen is "sketchy", then what is OpenAI?
The comment you're replying to is citing almost verbatim [1] Microsoft’s director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, who called OpenAI's data collection practices "the largest theft of labor in human history" in an internal memo.
> They were just worried that the commentariat on HN will frame it in a dumb, manipulative way like that.
You’re chastising others for a tone you are yourself employing, and are making monumental assumptions based on a few choice quotes. From the quotes alone you can’t tell if OpenAI thought libgen was sketchy or not.
Also, contrary to what you’re claiming, they were wrong. HN in general seems to approve on libgen when used for its purpose of downloading some books on an individual level. The complaint you’re replying to is about what OpenAI did with the data, it has nothing to do with the website they got it from.
There's no actual argument here, just name-calling. Meta literally pirated 80TB of books off of Anna's Archive, and there's little reason to believe OpenAI and others didn't as well since their agents are knowledgeable about these books. You could be prosecuted for doing the same thing, because its illegal. Piracy is illegal, this shouldn't be a hard concept.
“Sketchy Russian website” is part of a quote by Sam McCandlish (who worked at OpenAI), not the Author’s Guild characterisation.
Also, defending it on the basis that some books on libgen are public domain is a poor excuse, like claiming people use The Pirate Bay to download Linux ISOs. Even if some of that is true, we all know that use case is not the popular one.
> I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless
I do see a problem with a company loudly announcing that they are going to make people's lives miserable purely for profit. Leaving aside that it goes against OpenAI's stated mission ("to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity"), the disdain for the lives they are intentionally trying to ruin makes it a problem.
And even if you believe that the transition is inevitable, as it is the case with phasing out combustion engines in cars, anyone reasonable would see that the transition is gradual to give people time to adapt. Instead of doing that, OpenAI is burning cash at astonishing rates, polluting the environment, and killing personal computing with the only aim of being the only ones left atop the ruins. I do see a problem with that.
I have read the article. I called out that they are putting so much emphasis on this term, which is one line, one opinion and build 1/2 of their argument: AI-Company - bad! on it.
> A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public
This is some incredible mental gymnastics here, wow. Some books should be public domain (even if they actually aren't), and this magically justifies stealing from an 80TB library of a large fraction of every book ever published including millions of books that have no public funding.
They have perhaps attempted to lock the model, but so far I don't think we've seen any rulings that distillation or using the models to train other models is any less fair use than the original model training the companies have engaged in. Of course, the Authors Guild and other lawsuits against the model makers are arguing that it shouldn't be fair use. But if the AI companies prevail, there's no real argument to be made that training on their outputs isn't itself also fair use.
Further, I'm not sure how they've "captured the commons". By definition the "commons" belongs to us all. Nothing prevents someone else from doing the same thing. That is, unless the Authors Guild succeeds in splitting the courts over the fair use of AI training and the resolution of that split finds that training isn't fair use. Then the commons can only be used by companies or people with pockets deep enough to license the material in perpetuity.
Robot companies don't appropriate the work of other people. That's the fundamental point of contention here: that LLMs cannot be trained without the human labor of the authors; yet, they directly compete with them in the marketplace. I haven't yet seen an LLM trained only on public domain material, but its capabilities are likely to be very limited.
That's also the key political compromise underlying the notion of copyright: that someone is entitled to the fruits of their labor, and should not be economically hindered by a product that could not have existed without said work. That's the basis on which the "derivative work" copyright doctrine emerged: a work sufficiently original that it does not displace the work on which it is based. LLMs fail to abide by that political compromise by a country mile.
> Robot companies don't appropriate the work of other people.
I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that every single robot is built on the labor, creative and technical knowledge and advancements of the workers that robot replaced. Robots after all, much more than LLMs, are incapable of creative output. Some human (probably a laborer) figured out how to stamp the steel in just the right ways, or how to cut the patterns in just the right ways so that the product could be manufactured. Then a robot company came in and stole that creative output, or more likely was sold that creative output by the company owners who stole/bought (depending on your point of view about labor and the ownership of labor's creative outputs in the current US legal system) to produce a robot that then displaced the laborer who created the process in the first place.
As a long time user (most professional mathematicians have been) of the now mostly defunct Library Genesis, it is certainly more accurate to describe it as a "sketchy Russian website" than as "a library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public". In my country we use it precisely because public universities (paid for by the public) cannot afford to buy math and physics books.
Can we fix the title? This is clickbait for HN, the actual article's title is "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"
It's wild how much weight "they're destroying jobs" has.
I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.
I wouldn't put AI on the same level as the inventions of the industrial revolution. Automation replaced specific tasks. AI is replacing humans themselves. What are humans supposed to do in a world where everything a human can do, a machine can do too?
If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
It's interesting that this argument wasn't popular decades ago, when the internet basically made publishers and other copyright rent seekers redundant. Instead the response was harsher enforcement and more laws to protect the rent seekers.
Amplification of commentary and opinion is much easier now. It’s also a lot easier to play into people’s fears.
There’s a wide range of political motivations for this sort of thing too. Not just AI taking jobs, but convincing people to vote against their best interests, or even supporting radical religious groups whose values would persecute you. This sort of rhetoric feels noisier than it ever did decades ago.
The issue is the breadth of scale. At the time of the industrial revolution those who we would consider knowledge workers were a much smaller percentage of the population. Today, they are a significant part of the workforce, and it is them who are being displaced first, and in increasing numbers.
The second issue is one of migration between skill sets. By the numbers, today is likely harder as non Ai-affected skilled professions take longer to train into in a general sense.
The third is the synthesis of AI and robotics. Humanoid help is good. As the Venn diagram overlap of capabilities between humans and humanoid robots increases, many professions defined by complex vision and environmental manipulation that are currently safe will not be.
There are, of course, upsides. But the world is right to wonder what the future looks like, and where people fit within that future in terms of earning an income if whatever path they choose seems to be able to be replaced by a machine within their lifetime. How do they achieve personal stability and safety if, even when thinking about their multitude of career options, the machines are so good that they can do almost anything.
So, how will you ensure that you have some influence over the world or power, if all human labour ends?
That scenario is precarious. Dangerous as fuck. I have a short story, basically a horror Isekai, portal goes straight into a place like Sarek or similar pretty northern fell landscapes, only full of bears and savages. I think my protagonists are safer in that, than the average human in your scenario.
Once the rich no longer need the serfs, they won’t suddenly decide to let you have things. They know they are superior to you, both genetically and socially because they inherited wealth and you didn’t. Their trust fund paid for private schools and you don’t even have a trust fund. They’re just better. It’s an objective fact. The world specifically chose to make them better than you, because it’s true.
The only fair system is for them to have an army of robots and then quietly clean up the population, so that you aren’t a risk to them. It’s just science.
When you’re dealing with people who think like this, who will soon have an army of terminators, what hope do we have?
This could go the star trek or dystopian route, and which way depends on who controls the models.
There is going to be a very shitty in between time where we still need blue collar, but no white collar labor. The amount of conflicts out of that will be insane. And who controls the news?
We will never end in the star trek branch until energy and resources in general are abundantly cheap and uncontested. Even in Star Trek, the canon is still that next to whole modern part of society, even on earth, there still exists classes. It’s just that the TV series depict the upper class: everyone working for the federation and star fleet.
I’m pretty sure they are using Star Trek as “generic human spacefaring utopian future”. As i said above, you could insert “luxury gay space communism” in there and still have the same meaning.
I dream of the end of paid or forced human labor. People should do whatever they want. I bet no one wants to commute to the crowded office for another teams call.
Indeed. People can paint, write, have hobbies, or whatever else for fun, but why be forced to for any reason? Or expect that there should always be a market for your work, under pain of law?
The value of human labor is what gives ordinary people power. This also applies to unions and countries, which derive their power from the value of the ordinary people they represent.
Once sufficiently smart AI and autonomous weapons systems take that value way, we become little more than pets, living at whim of those who control the AIs. Which could be a small elite of humans, or the AI itself.
Assuming you are referring to the USA, are you claiming people have not been able to campaign for political positions and vote for their candidates for decades? Because that is the definition of "democratic elections" (except for the electoral college nonsense in the US and 2000 presidential elections).
Otherwise, your complaint is more about voters either being too stupid, too disinterested, or not having enough time participate in the democracy. Which is a problem, but real life comes with constraints and it isn't really easy to solve all of these by snapping one's fingers.
Claiming that there has been widespread election fraud when elections have been, by and large, free and fair, is anti democratic. Obviously, there have been issues with disenfranchising certain people's votes, making it harder for them, blah blah, but it had been trending better and better and access to information had been getting better and better.
It also might just be possible that people are too tribal and simply can't comprehend all the complexities of the world to make good voting decisions.
The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.
However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.
Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases. With all of the above, it doesn't need to be.
>Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking
This is just a mathematical fact of first past the post elections.
I also don’t buy the captured media claim. Broadband cellular internet has allowed everyone instant access to basically all available information. If people choose to consume nonsense, that is an inherent problem with the people. Good information is literally a click or tap away, but people prefer the tribal stuff.
Yes, and while I do believe foreign and domestic bad actors are ever present online, a whole lot of misinformation is enabled by people who blindly accept anything posted on the internet as fact (my mother has ranted to me about a distant relation who continually posts the most outlandish things on Facebook; personally I don’t use any of Meta’s social networks to avoid that sort of thing, and, bar Marketplace, the last time I looked at Facebook proper was to do a data export during COVID lol). Though don’t get me wrong, social media companies have done terrible things, but supposedly “open” platforms have also tended towards misinformation and extremism (yes that one, and that one too, and the many others like it, none are blameless).
The power of a government depends on the country's economic and military strength. Currently that strength depends on having a population that's sufficiently large and skilled. If individuals become powerless, their governments power will wane as well. The power from AI will likely be more concentrated, either in a few super powers, or outside the control of governments. And the government of those super powers will likely care even less about their people.
What other leverage, apart from labor, do masses have against the large capital owners? You imagine they'll give us basic income, just so we can buy products from them? That makes no sense at all.
Haven't we been told the Earth is overpopulated for years? Seems a fair bet that the future will involve a whole lot of war and famine.
We're already slowly walking away from globalism. Nationalism is being fawned. It's taking a lot of time, but I'd say by the end of the 2030s we'll be having WWIII at the latest.
And at that time LLMs will be better decision makers than humans, I'd wager. So for now I'm expecting AI stuff to get funded at the expense of everything else.
What's the medium term plan though? Before we achieve singularity or UBI or whatever rapture analog this new religion is promising. Being employed is the primary way (and for most people is the only way) of getting housing, food, and other necessities meet.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things.
It feels like that but the argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Practically every advance in technology leads to more jobs, usually to apply that technology in new areas, or to bring the benefit to more people. There are pockets of people who are negatively impacted, but the overall change to society has been positive for pretty much every advance humans have ever made (maybe saving for weapons.)
I can't speak for the OP, but I'd personally prefer we spent a lot more energy figuring out how to help people whose livelihoods are disrupted by technological change than trying to hold back technological change (or argue about its merits) because it affects people's livelihoods. I mean, "computer" used to be a job title before it meant "machine that replaced people's livelihoods" and yet computers have ultimately created whole new categories of jobs while simultaneously destroying countless other jobs.
There's no real reason to think that AI is unique among all the livelihood destroying technologies that have come before in that it will destroy jobs without opening new ones in their place. It seems to me fighting the march of technology is akin to fighting the tides. Yes, you can build sea walls, and in the modern age, we literally can hold back the tides. But at the cost of ever increasing expenditures of time, resources and/or money. We could spend our resources trying to preserve livelihoods whose time has come and gone, but why specifically these jobs and not say, coal miners, farriers, lamp lighters, whalers, operators, computers, thread spinners or any of the multitudes of other jobs that technology is obsoleted? If we think on all the jobs that have been lost to technology over the decades, how many of those jobs do we think would have left the world in a net better place had we eliminated the technology that obsoleted the job and kept all the people employed in those positions where they were. Are people scared for their livelihoods because the technology will destroy the job, or because societies tend to spend all their energy trying to fight the technology instead of helping people find new jobs and livelihoods and the technology always eventually wins?
- “help people whose livelihoods are disrupted by technological change”
vs.
- relentless pursuit of AGI/ASI/etc. in break neck speed, destroying environment and promised to imminently capture all white collar and soon after, blue collar work in a short amount of time.
Real world, we’re talking about real world with actual people in it. Only one of the above scenarios is happening.
> Real world, we’re talking about real world with actual people in it.
In the real world, never once has the march of technology been successfully stopped, no matter how many jobs it crushed. Even the luddites who are enjoying a historical "re-evaluation" today still lost. And we've been through society spanning destruction of livelihoods before too and didn't stop it then either, just look at how much of the population used to be employed in farming and agriculture and compare it to now. Automation came and destroyed all of those livelihoods too.
In the real world, we can't even stop countries from pursuing, developing and improving nuclear weaponry despite the fact that we know it is an existential threat, and nuclear weaponry has no uses at all outside of nuclear annihilation. If we can't stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, what makes you think we have even a snowball's chance in hell of stopping AI development when AI actually has non-world ending uses and benefits to people?
I'm happy to talk about the "real world" and in the real world, we're repeating the same mistakes of the past thinking "surely this time will be different" instead of learning from those mistakes and trying something new.
Do you have an actual response to my point and the scale of what’s supposed to be happening, or is it just the same words, rinse and repeat, like the leaf node of a dialogue tree?
I would ask you the same thing. Do you have a proposal to address your concerns and the "scale of what's supposed to be happening" that is't support for the same type of failed attempts to stop the march of technology that have failed time and time again all throughout history? Do you at least have a theory for why this time it would turn out differently if we tried it again? Or do you just prefer to throw out insults and vague accusations that I'm an AI/bot?
Funny enough, that never occurred to me. Nowadays an LLM probably would’ve addressed my point about speed, scale, etc. instead of this hastily condensed script of farriers and lamplighters layered with some good history revisionism where the consequences and effects of those transitions are somehow memory holed, just to falsely equivocate what we’re doing with inevitable forces of nature while hiding behind the empty rhetorical shield of “we should help people instead”. Typical hard techno determinism. Regurgitated dime a dozen in social media.
Walk me through that a bit. I’ve used codex to solve dozens of niggling annoyances around the house and in my life. That gave me more control and increased my ability to express my creativity.
At work, it enabled me to develop two apps, one complete (as much as they ever are), one nearing the end of technical PoC phase, and a handful of others where I could quickly answer a tech feasibility question.
The completed app is an interactive web app that I literally could not have completed to that level of polish (and from a pacing perspective probably couldn’t have completed at all). All of that increased my control and most increased my ability to express creativity.
The upcoming technical PoC will involve considering using Clojure in a load-bearing app, something that I’ve considered and consistently rejected for a decade now. If that happens, control and creativity will spike as well.
Is there some aspect of this removal that I’m not seeing? It changes the activities of the tasks, for sure, but very far from that all being for me he worse; a lot of it is way better.
In the narrow view of your technical world this is correct.
But we are a tiny fraction of all possibilities. And for the rest of the folk, dredging LLM generated material and being forced to produce it does not make them happy. Particularly where it’s seen as a gain by the managers who read the marketing and a loss for those beneath them, while being told to adopt or be replaced.
And even worse they shape destinations and introduce frustration when things can’t be done which were initially intended. We’ve trashed our ROI because it’s easy to build the thing the LLM can do but it’s hard to build what the customer needs. And those things are disparate.
It's not. You be performatively hostile and people be hostile to you. That's all.
Car brands don't pitch cars as horse replacements. They put names and icons of horses on cars and horse riders love them. No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.
AI startups pitched AI like it's a coagulation of malice and hostility against humanity on tap. People aren't liking it. Of course they won't. No intelligence would, natural or artificial. It's wild that they don't get that.
> No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.
Search for something like “newspaper complaints about cars early 1900s” and read the contemporaneous complaints.
The fact that that complaining happened then and not now is evidence that motor cars are now widely seen as better than horse-drawn personal transport, not that they were eagerly welcomed from the first day of production.
"Destroying jobs" is entirely the wrong framing and a distraction from the real issue.
If AI truly replaces human labor, the lack of jobs isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of leverage for most of humanity.
Jobs aren't just a source of income. They're a source of leverage over the ownership class - if labor goes on strike, production stops and capital cannot self-reproduce. This leverage is what gave us a living wage, sick leave and basically all concessions that make life livable for anyone that isn't lucky enough to be born as part of the elite.
If AI makes this leverage go away, our problem is bigger than just job loss. The owners of the AI industry will use this now-untethered productive force to completely monopolize resources and set up a system where they are unquestionable god kings.
The rest of us will have more to worry about than just employment. We will be reduced to depending on the charity of people who's record has shown are not exactly the most selfless and kindhearted.
This is the real problem with AI productivity. Jobs are a distraction. Control over production is the real issue. The only way this doesn't end in dystopia is if the public controls AI, one way or another.
If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
Previous times the people were wanted elsewhere, even when US and Europe de-industrialized in favour of Asia. This time around we're already in a situation where educated people struggle to find jobs, and there are not many jobs created by some parallel process.
Imagine if say 200 companies created fully automated factories producing everything in the world. Let's say they employ one million scientists, engineers and guards. What fate would await the other 8 billion?
Writers disagree on what effect word processing will have on the quality of our written language.
Some writers are concerned that computer assistance may promote dry bland writing.
I think that that the "they're destroying jobs" or even then "they're stealing intellectual property" argument overshadows or distracts from the more important issues. What really concerns me is the an large scale erosion of truth and reliability. Codebases and the internet at large are being flooded with less and less accurate information, with more bloat, and with more errors that will exponentially increase as more and more is built on them.
Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.
Yes, while I personally believe this is a problem to solve, not an insurmountable obstacle, I cannot ignore this kind of harm. I do think this will be outweighed by all the instances where they improve decision making, dig up
obscure information, correct errors, etc. I can’t see any fundamental reason a near future AI system has to hallucinate anything, and when we also have people complaining in thread that LLMs are dumping out song lyrics verbatim…well, it’s an amusing contrast to say the least.
Yes it’s all hype to cash in the ipo before the bubble bursts. The labs are spreading spooky things about AI so that people think these models are very capable. It is a coordinated effort amongst all labs. The reality is that these models can’t do basic mathematics.
If this doesn’t put anyone in prison then we might as well declare copyright dead. They knew they broke the law and then they deliberately covered it up. How much more evidence is required here?
I don't think it's about becoming copyright zealot. What angers me in there is the blatant inequality.
People are in jail or got heavy fines for opening torrent or steaming sites. But "Open"AI and others got a free pass because they're big corps.
How did they get a free pass? From the court decisions I have read they were held liable for downloading pirate copies and paid large fines for it. That might have been Meta, not OAI, though, but the point is the same.
I didn't know about the fines and can't find a lot of details online. It seems meta got fined for something else, but it was about 1B, which is less than 1% of their revenue.
I think the smaller companies or individual which did stuff like that got their life ruined. The pirate bay admin got fined multiple millions of dollars.
So if I agree it's not a "free pass", it's still a cheap pass many others didn't get.
Makes me realize how, as mentioned by other comments, copyright laws are a tool for the powerful to oppress others rather than an actual universal right.
A fine is a slap on and wrist. Imagine you individually copied and sold libgen. Not only that, you’d say you did it for profit, you knew it was illegal, and conspired with others to cover it up. I don’t understand why no criminal charges are filed? Why isn’t anyone going to prison for a crime committed?
Your claim "Imagine you individually copied and sold libgen" doesn't hold up because there are two parts, copying and selling. Copyright law considers the copying part to be a small civil offense punishable by a fine. It's the selling part that is much more highly illegal and can result in criminal punishment. OpenAI only did the copying part.
That’s not true. I can ask ChatGPT for a verbatim copy of a licensed book. It’s been documented numerous times. I fail to see how, in the real world, a verbatim slightly changed version is different than a copy. But they’re selling ChatGPT, so effectively they’re selling access to libgen. So long as they can’t guarantee your unlicensed copyright won’t be reproduced verbatim, it is essentially reselling copyrighted material.
Honestly I don’t give a damn about copyright. I’m baffled by the double standards. Aaron Swartz was put away for so, so so much less than the massive amount of criminal activity we’re seeing here. They’re conspiring to break the law, openly, even jokingly. They’re hacking people, they’re stealing from people, openly. If no one is going to put a stop to it we might as well declare the legal system failed in its entirety.
Swartz was put away by aggressive over prosecution and it was a complete disservice of justice. We should be upset at the double standard, to the extent that we should be angry the people who prosecuted him haven't been punished for their miscarriage of justice. We should not be annoyed that we're now treating the "crime" of copyright infringement the way it should have been treated then.
Can some explain why would a billionaire like Altman care about the opinions expressed on HN?
Given the political power they have, particularly now with the Trump administration, whatever "optics" exist on this forum seems completely insignificant
You forget how many influential tech professionals are present here (especially those in Silicon Valley) and that Altman was president of Y Combinator for several years.
Elon Musk seems to care a great deal about a lot of stuff that frankly isn't any of his concern, not really. Trump care immensely about shallow stuff that's really below what the president of the United States of America should spend time on.
Altman has some reason to worry, because developers and the users of HN are then ones he needs to promote/hype his products. OpenAI still needs customers and they need to sell tokens and a large number of users on HN are not only not buying, but are becoming increasingly hostile towards the product Altman is selling. My guess would be that he'd assume that the users on HN are in some sense his peers, and they are currently extremely divided in the question about the value and dangers of LLMs, and are increasingly critical of the business practises of OpenAI (and other AI companies).
That makes sense, but at the same time Altman was famously called a "sociopath" by Aaron Swartz and a rapist by her own sister and yet he kept his position after the revolt a couple of years ago.
It's hard to imagine anything worse than bombing an elementary school and yet people are still using Anthropic products as if nothing has happened.
How many people are aware of those accusations? It’s takes a very long time for things like that to permeate a culture to the point where there is actual consequences. Look at Elon, people who have followed his work have known for a very long time the guy is a pathological liar, sociopathic white nationalist. He’s still praised by many in the tech industry
I was worried that OpenAI, a 1.2 trillion dollar company, would be the only party to this lawsuit that was 'bad'.
Thankfully, thanks to your detective work, we have ourselves a lawyer that is also 'bad', a rare thing indeed.
Readers may be wondering if 'authors' are also bad. That's silly, they don't matter at all. This is what makes stealing from them legal (for a small fine) and profitable.
Thank God, a response which addresses none of the content of the parent post which is now flagged for pointing out current facts of the case, along with anything else in the thread which doesn't align with "AI BAD".
'Fallen far' is so so rich, when you are the misinfo peddler here.
The article you linked is irrelevant because it is about a DIFFERENT CASE.
_Authors Guild v. OpenAI_
is NOT
_The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp. et al._
The gall of you to act indignant about 'facts of the case'.
Even if you weren't lazy or illiterate; Mike isn't a neutral party either.
> "Of course, my biases are known: I’m quite convinced that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use, and I find the argument that slop books “dilute” non-slop books to be beyond nonsensical."
Even if you agree with Mike, OpenAI thought they could replace/dilute authors, and workers generally, as disclosed by their internal discussions.
Even if you agree with Mike that training, generally, is fair use, they did not pay for the torrented works they trained their models on, which is still illegal! This is why they shifted to buying and shredding books after they lost other lawsuits.
> 'AI bad'
Bay Area self-styled demi-gods bad, actually. Their products, like always, are incidental to their rapaciousness and their impunity from laws.
They did not fabricate research or get caught burying their involvement in fabrication. That's not what your link says.
They are alleged to have funded research which one of their expert witnesses relied on. They may have other expert witnesses and their expert witness may rely on other research. And their funding of such research can also be above-board, after all it is not completely and totally different from paying an expert witness for his/her testimony. He may have many sources of funding apart from them as well.
Also all this behavior is alleged. It has not been proven and the judge hasn't ruled on this motion from OAI et. al. The judge may deny the motion still, making the accusations inconsequential
It was certainly illegal and morally questionable.
So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work, but the internet, social media and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop, which is its own form of deep cultural damage.
No long form writing I’ve seen is anything approaching even a genre potboiler standard. It’s still aimless, filled with contradiction and cliche and in that peculiar breathless teenager style that LLMs affect.
This - "So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work"
is a contradiction to this - "but the internet and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop."
I'm not sure there there are labor statistics to look at but it seems impossible that the coming-into-existance of a tool that generates mass amounts of cheap product, with zero skill required, in a field wouldn't displace skilled workers in that field.
Why would it be impossible? You're discounting the most probable case, which is that the AI writing is not a substitute for a skilled writer.
Edit: Turns out both Judge Alsup and Judge Chhabria agree that this is not obvious and would need to be defended. Here's Chhabria's statement on the evidence for market dilution:
> As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.
When the plaintiffs don't even attempt to argue the point, that's pretty telling.
Every good writer was at one point a not good writer, writing badly written stuff, gaining the experience and skill to eventually become a good writer.
Because this is what happens when new tools are introduced? The cheap digital camera displaced tons of photographers, the computer displaces typists, etc. so yes, it seems impossible that a tool that makes producing written content cheaply won't displace writers.
It certainly makes it harder to discover human authors, because stores are flooded with plausible but terrible books from morons using LLMs to generate text modelled on other books that are doing well. I don't think that displacing human authors though?
I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce.
You think LLMs will put authors out of work? I certainly hope not, given the quality of product they currently produce. If they produced genuinely creative and interesting work it'd be more likely, but there's no sign of that so far.
Only a moron in a hurry would think that the output of LLMs currently can replace human authors spending a few years writing a book.
what? there is _definitely_ evidence that writers are being put out of work. writing is extremely competitive, and very very very few authors are able to make a living writing and publishing novel creative works. many make their living by applying their writing skills towards journalism, marketing, corporate copy etc, all of which are under significant pressure from AI _already_. the writers that i know firsthand all report that their work lives have been turned upside down in the past couple of years.
if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
We've switched from authors (novels and non-fiction books) to writers here. That's a very different question.
Sure if you include writers writing for business, translators etc who were never very valued by business, there has been a huge impact already, because business is willing to accept shoddy results if they are good enough and put up with mistakes and poor style. That low end of generating content has definitely been impacted, for example in social media as I mentioned LLMs have replaced a lot of 'writers' who generated filler text for content advertising.
> if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
If it's so obvious, it shouldn't be so hard to articulate specifics. Maybe you can name just one author?
Being a writer was always a terrible profession for making money and having stable work. In my observations, AI is incapable of writing in the way a skilled author can -- what AI will replace is jobs working on small blurbs, promotional posters, and summaries. But those aren't really authors; I'm not sure if we care that the person employed to summarize novels at readers digest is now being replaced by an AI.
And that's why specifics matter. So much of the discourse is emotionally charged, and people imagine details that are not there. What I'd like to do is bring the details into the light.
So, does anybody reading this anywhere on this site have any information on any author that made money as a full-time writer that is now unemployed because their work has been replaced by AI? I'm not talking about the industry being upended. I'm a software engineer and my industry has been upended, but that has not resulted in job loss as much as it has changing what the profession does. Are authors in a different position than software engineers in this regard? Or are they truly just losing their jobs as they're mass replaced by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of the latter, which is why I'm asking.
At this point I think we're less concerned about the piracy and more about how they've been acting as cybercriminals, staging a major attack every few days. Other countries might have to start considering it state sponsored cyberterrorism if they continue to operate with complete impunity.
"Our model did an oopsy woopsie for the 35th time" does not seem like a valid legal defense.
I remember when the concern was gpt2 could create fake news text. Now they can straight up create fake photo realistic images and are actively hacking government services yet we still haven’t pulled the plug.
As far as I can tell the only remedy for this is holding CEOs responsible for the actions of models operated by their company. If there are no consequences then they will have no concern for these crimes.
Ehh? The specifics of the claim above are that this is what is what the article is titled and what it discusses. Don’t sealion people who are only pointing out an inaccurate title.
I'm pointing out that the original title of the actual article is inaccurate and it would be helped by actual specifics. The actual plaintiffs in the lawsuit do not appear to have been put out of work.
The Authors Guild CEO was an experienced IP attorney. The guild's leadership and policy teams, while they are cognizant of optics, think like lawyers, not like PR pros or journalists looking to maximize clicks.
Cute that they were concerned, but they need not have worried - as you can clearly see from any HN comments section on these kinds of articles, everyone long ago wrote down their conclusion (“OpenAI/Anthropic/LLMs are good/bad”) at the bottom of the page, and now all we are doing is shuffling facts, quotes, and arguments around the page above it.
We are very clever to make it look like the conclusion below follows from the arguments above; but we are also careful to never smudge our bottom line, so it will never change.
To all the top comments making analogies about destroying jobs; horses, buggies, calculators... what?! You are awful people. We're not talking about shit jobs, these are peoples creative passions, livelihoods, and life long careers. It looks like OpenAI had nothing to fear. Fuck you.
What if I was a genius and managed to provide enough supply for the entire Earth at 1% of what other people charge, how would that be different? All those creatives, lawyers, engineers will also lose their jobs. Why are they entitled to a job in the first place? Why I can’t do it for cheaper?
So, what are you arguing? If a group of people like their jobs, society should disallow disruption to that group? Why? It seems to me that we may reach a point where machines can replace humans for most tasks, and I don’t think we should try to make that state of things illegal. We should instead try to solve the economics of it in a way that benefits all.
Where is the line for a job that needs to be preserved at all costs because its someone's livelihood and a job that is ok to be destroyed by the advancement of technology. The "computers" your computer replaced were presumably quite proud of their talents and their livelihoods. Coal miners have been fighting for the livelihoods for decades now, but we happily applaud the advancements of technology that make coal mining obsolete. 2D animation artists were devastated by modern CGI and the advancements brought on by computer animation. "The Little Mermaid" employed well over 300 people in the animation related aspects of that movie[1]. Encanto employed over 500 in its CGI work[2]. Should we have banned CGI and prevented 500 jobs to preserve 300 because they were there first? We can absolutely acknowledge that peoples livelihoods can and will be affected by the advancement of technology. But the appropriate response to that isn't trying to stop the advancement of technology or artificially propping up dying jobs. It's finding way to help people make livelihood changes where they can, and helping them continue to afford living where they can't make those changes.
Doesn't this fulfil the criterium of an illegal organisation, aka a mafia?
They knew the damage they would cause - and went on regardless. The USA need
to fix their court system. Right now it is just OligarchBros running the show.
The small thief stealing a wallet gets put in jail for years. If you are rich
enough, you pay some peanuts and that's the end of it.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] threadYou’ve actually ruined it so much that it has now polluted the Chinese models which are copying your work. So now all the models output claudeslop.
You’ve polluted all of the training data in the world. Now we’re never going to be able to train proper models, because everything has slop in it and all the sites have locked down their data to prevent future startups training.
As a side-note, most orgs already cover the need to STFU in their training material for new hires, particularly how personal comments should not and cannot represent the company. I'm sure this lawsuit will be explicitly mentioned in upcoming versions of this sort training material in multiple orgs.
we do of course have an economy where lack of ethics and integrity is intended.
you can't change the economy as an individual but i like this quote: "Do the right thing for the right reasons, at the right time with the right people, and you'll have no regrets for the rest of your lives."
"sketchy russian website", how about using some more clear description like: A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public. Only some of the material is copyrighted by authors. However, some of their work is so old that it is not reprinted anyway.
But of course such an explanation would not click.
I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless. Imagine if every robotic or automation company advertised like this: Yeah, you'll buy tons of expensive robots and still rely on expensive labor from real people without any efficiency gains.
Also, come on. Defending it on the basis that some books on libgen are public domain is an hilariously poor excuse, to the same level as people claiming they used The Pirate Bay to “download Linux ISOs”. Even if some of that is true, we all know that use case is not the popular one.
For someone who’s accusing others of being a lobby pushing an agenda, your bias is showing quite a lot.
I find the brazenness of saying this while running what's arguably the largest copyright theft operation in human history astonishing. If libgen is "sketchy", then what is OpenAI?
Judging by how AI threads look like for the past year, they were absolutely right to be worried.
> largest copyright theft operation in human history
In fact, you're doing exactly that right here.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...
You’re chastising others for a tone you are yourself employing, and are making monumental assumptions based on a few choice quotes. From the quotes alone you can’t tell if OpenAI thought libgen was sketchy or not.
Also, contrary to what you’re claiming, they were wrong. HN in general seems to approve on libgen when used for its purpose of downloading some books on an individual level. The complaint you’re replying to is about what OpenAI did with the data, it has nothing to do with the website they got it from.
Also, defending it on the basis that some books on libgen are public domain is a poor excuse, like claiming people use The Pirate Bay to download Linux ISOs. Even if some of that is true, we all know that use case is not the popular one.
I do see a problem with a company loudly announcing that they are going to make people's lives miserable purely for profit. Leaving aside that it goes against OpenAI's stated mission ("to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity"), the disdain for the lives they are intentionally trying to ruin makes it a problem.
And even if you believe that the transition is inevitable, as it is the case with phasing out combustion engines in cars, anyone reasonable would see that the transition is gradual to give people time to adapt. Instead of doing that, OpenAI is burning cash at astonishing rates, polluting the environment, and killing personal computing with the only aim of being the only ones left atop the ruins. I do see a problem with that.
Plus you somehow didn't even read the article properly, given that "sketchy russian website" is part of a direct quote.
This is some incredible mental gymnastics here, wow. Some books should be public domain (even if they actually aren't), and this magically justifies stealing from an 80TB library of a large fraction of every book ever published including millions of books that have no public funding.
you should not enclose the commons.
that is what openai and anthropic have done; capture the commons, lock the model, restrict the outputs.
Further, I'm not sure how they've "captured the commons". By definition the "commons" belongs to us all. Nothing prevents someone else from doing the same thing. That is, unless the Authors Guild succeeds in splitting the courts over the fair use of AI training and the resolution of that split finds that training isn't fair use. Then the commons can only be used by companies or people with pockets deep enough to license the material in perpetuity.
That's also the key political compromise underlying the notion of copyright: that someone is entitled to the fruits of their labor, and should not be economically hindered by a product that could not have existed without said work. That's the basis on which the "derivative work" copyright doctrine emerged: a work sufficiently original that it does not displace the work on which it is based. LLMs fail to abide by that political compromise by a country mile.
I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that every single robot is built on the labor, creative and technical knowledge and advancements of the workers that robot replaced. Robots after all, much more than LLMs, are incapable of creative output. Some human (probably a laborer) figured out how to stamp the steel in just the right ways, or how to cut the patterns in just the right ways so that the product could be manufactured. Then a robot company came in and stole that creative output, or more likely was sold that creative output by the company owners who stole/bought (depending on your point of view about labor and the ownership of labor's creative outputs in the current US legal system) to produce a robot that then displaced the laborer who created the process in the first place.
I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.
There’s a wide range of political motivations for this sort of thing too. Not just AI taking jobs, but convincing people to vote against their best interests, or even supporting radical religious groups whose values would persecute you. This sort of rhetoric feels noisier than it ever did decades ago.
Everybody gets a platform now, even the bots.
The second issue is one of migration between skill sets. By the numbers, today is likely harder as non Ai-affected skilled professions take longer to train into in a general sense.
The third is the synthesis of AI and robotics. Humanoid help is good. As the Venn diagram overlap of capabilities between humans and humanoid robots increases, many professions defined by complex vision and environmental manipulation that are currently safe will not be.
There are, of course, upsides. But the world is right to wonder what the future looks like, and where people fit within that future in terms of earning an income if whatever path they choose seems to be able to be replaced by a machine within their lifetime. How do they achieve personal stability and safety if, even when thinking about their multitude of career options, the machines are so good that they can do almost anything.
That scenario is precarious. Dangerous as fuck. I have a short story, basically a horror Isekai, portal goes straight into a place like Sarek or similar pretty northern fell landscapes, only full of bears and savages. I think my protagonists are safer in that, than the average human in your scenario.
Once the rich no longer need the serfs, they won’t suddenly decide to let you have things. They know they are superior to you, both genetically and socially because they inherited wealth and you didn’t. Their trust fund paid for private schools and you don’t even have a trust fund. They’re just better. It’s an objective fact. The world specifically chose to make them better than you, because it’s true.
The only fair system is for them to have an army of robots and then quietly clean up the population, so that you aren’t a risk to them. It’s just science.
When you’re dealing with people who think like this, who will soon have an army of terminators, what hope do we have?
I'm amazed by the ignorance some people carry around.
But now that they actually still need us, they can’t even provide healthcare.
There is going to be a very shitty in between time where we still need blue collar, but no white collar labor. The amount of conflicts out of that will be insane. And who controls the news?
Or if it's even possible to control the models.
Once sufficiently smart AI and autonomous weapons systems take that value way, we become little more than pets, living at whim of those who control the AIs. Which could be a small elite of humans, or the AI itself.
Only when they aren't totally co-opted by capital interests and everything they own, including media/social media.
We haven't had democratic elections for decades. Just illusion of choice in a race to the bottom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
Otherwise, your complaint is more about voters either being too stupid, too disinterested, or not having enough time participate in the democracy. Which is a problem, but real life comes with constraints and it isn't really easy to solve all of these by snapping one's fingers.
Claiming that there has been widespread election fraud when elections have been, by and large, free and fair, is anti democratic. Obviously, there have been issues with disenfranchising certain people's votes, making it harder for them, blah blah, but it had been trending better and better and access to information had been getting better and better.
It also might just be possible that people are too tribal and simply can't comprehend all the complexities of the world to make good voting decisions.
The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.
However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.
Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases. With all of the above, it doesn't need to be.
This is just a mathematical fact of first past the post elections.
I also don’t buy the captured media claim. Broadband cellular internet has allowed everyone instant access to basically all available information. If people choose to consume nonsense, that is an inherent problem with the people. Good information is literally a click or tap away, but people prefer the tribal stuff.
Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.
Good! End human labor.
He's not putting that in your mouth, that is just the reality of what you need leverage for.
We're already slowly walking away from globalism. Nationalism is being fawned. It's taking a lot of time, but I'd say by the end of the 2030s we'll be having WWIII at the latest.
And at that time LLMs will be better decision makers than humans, I'd wager. So for now I'm expecting AI stuff to get funded at the expense of everything else.
It feels like that but the argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Practically every advance in technology leads to more jobs, usually to apply that technology in new areas, or to bring the benefit to more people. There are pockets of people who are negatively impacted, but the overall change to society has been positive for pretty much every advance humans have ever made (maybe saving for weapons.)
It’s wild how much people are scared for their livelihood. What a sad thing to read here.
There's no real reason to think that AI is unique among all the livelihood destroying technologies that have come before in that it will destroy jobs without opening new ones in their place. It seems to me fighting the march of technology is akin to fighting the tides. Yes, you can build sea walls, and in the modern age, we literally can hold back the tides. But at the cost of ever increasing expenditures of time, resources and/or money. We could spend our resources trying to preserve livelihoods whose time has come and gone, but why specifically these jobs and not say, coal miners, farriers, lamp lighters, whalers, operators, computers, thread spinners or any of the multitudes of other jobs that technology is obsoleted? If we think on all the jobs that have been lost to technology over the decades, how many of those jobs do we think would have left the world in a net better place had we eliminated the technology that obsoleted the job and kept all the people employed in those positions where they were. Are people scared for their livelihoods because the technology will destroy the job, or because societies tend to spend all their energy trying to fight the technology instead of helping people find new jobs and livelihoods and the technology always eventually wins?
- “help people whose livelihoods are disrupted by technological change”
vs.
- relentless pursuit of AGI/ASI/etc. in break neck speed, destroying environment and promised to imminently capture all white collar and soon after, blue collar work in a short amount of time.
Real world, we’re talking about real world with actual people in it. Only one of the above scenarios is happening.
In the real world, never once has the march of technology been successfully stopped, no matter how many jobs it crushed. Even the luddites who are enjoying a historical "re-evaluation" today still lost. And we've been through society spanning destruction of livelihoods before too and didn't stop it then either, just look at how much of the population used to be employed in farming and agriculture and compare it to now. Automation came and destroyed all of those livelihoods too.
In the real world, we can't even stop countries from pursuing, developing and improving nuclear weaponry despite the fact that we know it is an existential threat, and nuclear weaponry has no uses at all outside of nuclear annihilation. If we can't stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, what makes you think we have even a snowball's chance in hell of stopping AI development when AI actually has non-world ending uses and benefits to people?
I'm happy to talk about the "real world" and in the real world, we're repeating the same mistakes of the past thinking "surely this time will be different" instead of learning from those mistakes and trying something new.
Funny enough, that never occurred to me. Nowadays an LLM probably would’ve addressed my point about speed, scale, etc. instead of this hastily condensed script of farriers and lamplighters layered with some good history revisionism where the consequences and effects of those transitions are somehow memory holed, just to falsely equivocate what we’re doing with inevitable forces of nature while hiding behind the empty rhetorical shield of “we should help people instead”. Typical hard techno determinism. Regurgitated dime a dozen in social media.
At work, it enabled me to develop two apps, one complete (as much as they ever are), one nearing the end of technical PoC phase, and a handful of others where I could quickly answer a tech feasibility question.
The completed app is an interactive web app that I literally could not have completed to that level of polish (and from a pacing perspective probably couldn’t have completed at all). All of that increased my control and most increased my ability to express creativity.
The upcoming technical PoC will involve considering using Clojure in a load-bearing app, something that I’ve considered and consistently rejected for a decade now. If that happens, control and creativity will spike as well.
Is there some aspect of this removal that I’m not seeing? It changes the activities of the tasks, for sure, but very far from that all being for me he worse; a lot of it is way better.
But we are a tiny fraction of all possibilities. And for the rest of the folk, dredging LLM generated material and being forced to produce it does not make them happy. Particularly where it’s seen as a gain by the managers who read the marketing and a loss for those beneath them, while being told to adopt or be replaced.
And even worse they shape destinations and introduce frustration when things can’t be done which were initially intended. We’ve trashed our ROI because it’s easy to build the thing the LLM can do but it’s hard to build what the customer needs. And those things are disparate.
And one of the chief complaints about AI is that it is fundamentally an interpolation engine, which is to say uncreative.
At this time we still need to steer it, which is what the discussion about "taste" is about.
Though I suppose we'll need better terms for various kinds of "taste" soon enough if it's to become economically trackable.
Car brands don't pitch cars as horse replacements. They put names and icons of horses on cars and horse riders love them. No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.
AI startups pitched AI like it's a coagulation of malice and hostility against humanity on tap. People aren't liking it. Of course they won't. No intelligence would, natural or artificial. It's wild that they don't get that.
Search for something like “newspaper complaints about cars early 1900s” and read the contemporaneous complaints.
The fact that that complaining happened then and not now is evidence that motor cars are now widely seen as better than horse-drawn personal transport, not that they were eagerly welcomed from the first day of production.
They have no will but to fill the world with hate and drivel
If AI truly replaces human labor, the lack of jobs isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of leverage for most of humanity.
Jobs aren't just a source of income. They're a source of leverage over the ownership class - if labor goes on strike, production stops and capital cannot self-reproduce. This leverage is what gave us a living wage, sick leave and basically all concessions that make life livable for anyone that isn't lucky enough to be born as part of the elite.
If AI makes this leverage go away, our problem is bigger than just job loss. The owners of the AI industry will use this now-untethered productive force to completely monopolize resources and set up a system where they are unquestionable god kings.
The rest of us will have more to worry about than just employment. We will be reduced to depending on the charity of people who's record has shown are not exactly the most selfless and kindhearted.
This is the real problem with AI productivity. Jobs are a distraction. Control over production is the real issue. The only way this doesn't end in dystopia is if the public controls AI, one way or another.
There is probably no industry to date with a smaller ratio of labor:capital in terms of the money being allocated
The auto industry led to a net increase in employment, including "unskilled" and lower class labor. The same cannot be said of LLMs
Imagine if say 200 companies created fully automated factories producing everything in the world. Let's say they employ one million scientists, engineers and guards. What fate would await the other 8 billion?
Embrace the AI, it will lower your carbon emissions!
Check out this show about word processors from 1983: https://youtu.be/Jt0OoXluC8g
at 4:08:
Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.
Are you confusing mathematicians and accountants with the people that companies used to hire to do arithmetic?
Yet they solved a Millennium Prize problem, you people are delusional at this point.
copyright sucks. it stifles individual creativity and serves to enrich big corporations
I think the smaller companies or individual which did stuff like that got their life ruined. The pirate bay admin got fined multiple millions of dollars.
So if I agree it's not a "free pass", it's still a cheap pass many others didn't get. Makes me realize how, as mentioned by other comments, copyright laws are a tool for the powerful to oppress others rather than an actual universal right.
> AI agent accidentally publishes OpenAI’s unreleased model weights
The optics are bad. The submission marks a turning page in human history.
Given the political power they have, particularly now with the Trump administration, whatever "optics" exist on this forum seems completely insignificant
Altman has some reason to worry, because developers and the users of HN are then ones he needs to promote/hype his products. OpenAI still needs customers and they need to sell tokens and a large number of users on HN are not only not buying, but are becoming increasingly hostile towards the product Altman is selling. My guess would be that he'd assume that the users on HN are in some sense his peers, and they are currently extremely divided in the question about the value and dangers of LLMs, and are increasingly critical of the business practises of OpenAI (and other AI companies).
It's hard to imagine anything worse than bombing an elementary school and yet people are still using Anthropic products as if nothing has happened.
Optics don't seem to matter much?
It's easier to take over a resigned population. And stating "resistance is futile" is cheap and it might weaken opposition.
the economics of those companies will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs across the board.
Whistle-blower found dead after exposing industrial scale Copyright violation bleeding into model output. =3
Neither side is coming out smelling like roses here.
I was worried that OpenAI, a 1.2 trillion dollar company, would be the only party to this lawsuit that was 'bad'. Thankfully, thanks to your detective work, we have ourselves a lawyer that is also 'bad', a rare thing indeed.
Readers may be wondering if 'authors' are also bad. That's silly, they don't matter at all. This is what makes stealing from them legal (for a small fine) and profitable.
HN has fallen far.
The article you linked is irrelevant because it is about a DIFFERENT CASE.
_Authors Guild v. OpenAI_ is NOT _The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp. et al._
The gall of you to act indignant about 'facts of the case'.
Even if you weren't lazy or illiterate; Mike isn't a neutral party either.
> "Of course, my biases are known: I’m quite convinced that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use, and I find the argument that slop books “dilute” non-slop books to be beyond nonsensical."
Even if you agree with Mike, OpenAI thought they could replace/dilute authors, and workers generally, as disclosed by their internal discussions.
Even if you agree with Mike that training, generally, is fair use, they did not pay for the torrented works they trained their models on, which is still illegal! This is why they shifted to buying and shredding books after they lost other lawsuits.
> 'AI bad'
Bay Area self-styled demi-gods bad, actually. Their products, like always, are incidental to their rapaciousness and their impunity from laws.
They are alleged to have funded research which one of their expert witnesses relied on. They may have other expert witnesses and their expert witness may rely on other research. And their funding of such research can also be above-board, after all it is not completely and totally different from paying an expert witness for his/her testimony. He may have many sources of funding apart from them as well.
Also all this behavior is alleged. It has not been proven and the judge hasn't ruled on this motion from OAI et. al. The judge may deny the motion still, making the accusations inconsequential
Sadly, like keeping track of "attempted burglaries"[0], it's impossible to know the extent.
[0] how do you count attempts where the burglar was unsuccessful/left no trace and nobody was home to notice the attempt?
So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work, but the internet, social media and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop, which is its own form of deep cultural damage.
No long form writing I’ve seen is anything approaching even a genre potboiler standard. It’s still aimless, filled with contradiction and cliche and in that peculiar breathless teenager style that LLMs affect.
is a contradiction to this - "but the internet and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop."
I'm not sure there there are labor statistics to look at but it seems impossible that the coming-into-existance of a tool that generates mass amounts of cheap product, with zero skill required, in a field wouldn't displace skilled workers in that field.
- https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/24/dont-let-ai-kil... - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/ai-authors-im... - https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/ai-slop-books-amazon-marketpl...
Edit: Turns out both Judge Alsup and Judge Chhabria agree that this is not obvious and would need to be defended. Here's Chhabria's statement on the evidence for market dilution:
> As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.
When the plaintiffs don't even attempt to argue the point, that's pretty telling.
Because this is what happens when new tools are introduced? The cheap digital camera displaced tons of photographers, the computer displaces typists, etc. so yes, it seems impossible that a tool that makes producing written content cheaply won't displace writers.
I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce.
Things don't happen overnight. The first time an automobile was rolled off a factory floor drovers and horses weren't all put out of work.
Only a moron in a hurry would think that the output of LLMs currently can replace human authors spending a few years writing a book.
if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
Sure if you include writers writing for business, translators etc who were never very valued by business, there has been a huge impact already, because business is willing to accept shoddy results if they are good enough and put up with mistakes and poor style. That low end of generating content has definitely been impacted, for example in social media as I mentioned LLMs have replaced a lot of 'writers' who generated filler text for content advertising.
If it's so obvious, it shouldn't be so hard to articulate specifics. Maybe you can name just one author?
Being a writer was always a terrible profession for making money and having stable work. In my observations, AI is incapable of writing in the way a skilled author can -- what AI will replace is jobs working on small blurbs, promotional posters, and summaries. But those aren't really authors; I'm not sure if we care that the person employed to summarize novels at readers digest is now being replaced by an AI.
And that's why specifics matter. So much of the discourse is emotionally charged, and people imagine details that are not there. What I'd like to do is bring the details into the light.
So, does anybody reading this anywhere on this site have any information on any author that made money as a full-time writer that is now unemployed because their work has been replaced by AI? I'm not talking about the industry being upended. I'm a software engineer and my industry has been upended, but that has not resulted in job loss as much as it has changing what the profession does. Are authors in a different position than software engineers in this regard? Or are they truly just losing their jobs as they're mass replaced by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of the latter, which is why I'm asking.
"Our model did an oopsy woopsie for the 35th time" does not seem like a valid legal defense.
Specifics would help the credibility of this claim quite a bit.
Top AI Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work
We are very clever to make it look like the conclusion below follows from the arguments above; but we are also careful to never smudge our bottom line, so it will never change.
[1]: https://walt-disney-animation-studios.fandom.com/wiki/The_Li...
[2]: https://jhmoviecollection.fandom.com/wiki/Encanto_(film)/Cre...
They knew the damage they would cause - and went on regardless. The USA need to fix their court system. Right now it is just OligarchBros running the show. The small thief stealing a wallet gets put in jail for years. If you are rich enough, you pay some peanuts and that's the end of it.