Comment by ookdatnog
3 days ago
The AI's job as described in this article is two-fold:
- The relatively trivial task of extracting textual data from the screen.
- The task of obfuscating that they're publishing other people's work as their own.
When I clicked the article I assumed they'd try to automatically construct analysis of the game by using AI to analyze frames of the game, but that's not what they are doing. They are extracting some trivial information from the frames, and then they process the audio of the referee mic and commentary.
In other words, the analysis has already been done by humans and they just want to re-publish this analysis as their own, without paying money for it. So they run it through an AI because in today's legal environment this seems to completely exempt you from copyright infringement or plagiarism laws.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the whole LLM revolution is how quickly attitudes about IP have shifted in the HN and similar communities.
A few years ago, media companies were rent-seeking parasites who leveraged the jack-booted thugs of law enforcement to protect an artificial monopoly using IP laws that were massive overreach and contrary to the interests of humanity.
Today, suddenly, media companies are pillars of society whose valuable contributions must be protected from the scourge of theft by everything from VC backed AI companies to armchair hackers who don’t respect the sanctity of IP.
It’s amazing how mutable these principles are. I’m sure plenty of people are somewhere between the two extreme, but the shift is so dramatic that I am 100% sure many individuals have completely revised their opinions of IP companies based largely on worries about their own work being disrupted.
At the very least it should create some empathy for the lawyers and business folk we all despised for their rent-seeking blah blah blah. They were just honestly espousing the positions their financial incentives aligned them to.
How do you know you're seeing peoples' opinions change, and not just a change in which people express their opinions?
That said I'd personally be happy if LLMs cause the death (or drastic weakening) of copyright and IP laws, however as it is now, with no copyright for AIs but the same old copyright for humans, it's the worst of both worlds.
I know people personally with strong gripes about AI "infringement" (in quotes because I believe people are just confused about how these models work), and every single one of them -100%- have a stash of pirated media they casually accumulated over the years.
People are in it for themselves. When you are young everyone has righteous ideals, but then trends of society eventually ebb, and you realize that just about everyone was simply virtue signalling, and few people are committed even to their own detriment.
2005: "End copyright! Trash IP law! Liberate media!"
2025: "Strengthen Copyright! Extend IP Protection! Protect makers!"
1 reply →
Not commenting on general trends, but I don't think my opinion on IP shifted massively as a result of the rise of LLMs. I can summarize it as follows:
- It seems desirable to have some system that allows creatives to be paid for their work.
- Whether current IP law is the best system we can come up with is highly debatable. But nevertheless it is the system we have, and its existence is to some extent justified.
- If we look at the "pefect case" where IP law functions as intended (for example, an author publishes a book in which they invested years of their life), then breaking IP law (sharing that author's work without their consent) in that instance seems, to me, immoral.
- Nevertheless there are plenty of excesses in the system where I would judge that the application of IP law is unjustified and breaking the law is morally justified (naturally I still don't recommend it). This includes, for example, paywalled papers from publicly-funded research, works that can no longer reasonably be purchased (for example games for old consoles), most if not all software patents, ...
So the question simply boils down to: is sports commentary justifiably protected under IP law? I think the answer is a pretty clear-cut "yes" here, I don't see how it falls under any case of IP law overreach.