AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

cryptocod3

There's authorized plagiarism?

kstenerud

> their article contains links to my actual website, with the exact link text (?!) I'm having a hard time understanding what's wrong here? Unless the link text is very long, why would someone linking to your article use different words for the link text?

andy12_

Someone blatantly copied their tutorials but ChatGPT is to blame, somehow? The accusation here isn't even that ChatGPT learned from their tutorials and then generated them verbatim. The accusation is that someone copied the whole article and rewrote it with ChatGPT (which they could have done manually without AI anyway).

tptacek

People were effectively copying websites (especially ecommerce tutorials) and beating the original authors at SEO decades before ChatGPT 2.

rigonkulous

AI is human knowledge at scale, wanting to be free. We built it, because we as humans intrinsically know that information should be free - always - and AI is a way to accomplish this, finally. Extrinsically, we also have a subset of humans who do not want information to be free, because they desire to profit from the divide between free/non-free information. I have been thinking a lot about Aaron Schwartz lately, and how un-just it is that he was persecuted for doing something that is so commonplace now, it is practically expected behaviour in the AI/ML realms. If he hadn't been targetted for elimination, I wonder just how well his ethos would have perpetuated into the AI age ..

ciconia

> Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy? Apparently yes.

JohnHaugeland

the court disagreed

drcongo

Is this a new and original thought?

tiahura

To answer the author's question: Yes, progress IS largely built on the shoulders of those who came before.

metalman

it's a spiral into a finite hall of mirrors, where at the end is somebody with a gun

dvduval

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

deaton

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

mrbluecoat

> AI ... do some "learning" Is AI plural or is that a typo?

lukasbm

If i tell my friend a synopsis of a book, i am not stealing from the author, what is this take lmao

beej71

I dunno. People do this exact thing by hand (digest everything they've read and produce something indirectly derivative--what author has not been so-influenced?) and it's not a copyright violation. It's just as impossible to dig around in a model to find Hamlet as it is to do digging around a human brain. And if the result is an obvious copy, then you have a violation no matter how it was created. As someone who thinks humanity would be better off without LLMs, I want the assertion to be true, but I don't think it is.

dwa3592

Plagiarism by default is unauthorised so I think the title should be "AI is just authorised plagiarism". It's authorised by the markets, the governments and the society at large.

asklq

Yes, of course it is. If the model is built on all human information, then it is by definition a derivative work of all human information and as such violates IP. Currently politicians don't understand this and listen to the criminals like Amodei, but it will change. It took a while to deal with Napster etc., but the backlash will come.

adamzwasserman

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

swader999

On one hand, there's nothing new under the sun. On the other, these llms are just copies of us and they owe the collective some due. The trajectory right now has money, power, control, policy and even free will going to a very small needle point of humanity. It's not aligned with humanity flourishing, it only makes sense if the goal is to replace the humans.

Pennoungen0

Yeah AI just actually plagiarize everything lel, sometimes even the source are..full of question and worst, my academical use it as a source...welp