Comment by fwipsy
2 hours ago
From the article I guess Qontour reproduced the entire text verbatim.
> it also includes the entire text of the book, from its opening 800-word foreword to a complete archive of all 311 neologisms... all penned by Koenig.
So it doesn't seem likely to me that they asked AI to make a fan site and it spat out the book; instead they asked AI to make a fan site and then copy-pasted the text of the book into it.
Perhaps a just outcome would be for Koenig to gain the rights to the page. However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way.
Clause also said you should do your own research rather than repeating what Claude says.
> However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way.
I hate this so much. Not you or your post, just that it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking.
Claude’s also technically right but wrong where it matters. The author could easily offer to settle for control of the site instead of suing. If the author registered the copyright to the book, he doesn’t even need to prove damages to be awarded statutory damages. He potentially has a lot of leverage.
The “claude says” is the part this pisses me off about LLM use now. If I wanted a Claude answer I’d ask Claude. If I ask a human I want a human response not a “here’s what Claude said”.
I can't tell you how many times a week claude opus 4.8 high effort has to apologise for being wrong when I'm asking it about something narrow and specific that i want it to research but it blurts out broad context from its training material and incorrect conclusions/assumptions. This is happening all the time. Someone needs to create a repository of its apologies to remind us all of its limitations.
My company instituted a monthly "best use of AI" award to encourage people to share how they're using it. I suggested we should also have a "most wrong AI output" award to remind everyone they can't just trust it blindly but that hasn't happened yet for some reason ...
I’ve noticed the same thing at work with Opus 4.8.
ChatGPT on my personal plan does it too. Just yesterday I asked it to give some places fitting a specific criteria. The first was that they were within a 2 hour drive of my city. 75% of the locations it gave me were more than 2x that distance. It kept doing this across multiple difference searches. I tried high and pro with no difference.
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It's applied Cunningham's law:
> the best way to get correct answers on HN isn't to ask questions, but to post LLM's answers so people will eagerly fact check them to prove LLMs wrong.
I used to do this type of thing a lot. Boldly state something I knew to be wrong, so I'd get correct answers.
Dang asked me not to do it.
Now, when I boldly state wrong stuff (a not-infrequent occurrence), it's because I really am wrong.
> it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking
That would be an improvement over most people I know at this point, who casually repeat verbally or repost words they got from a chatbot without so much as a quotation mark.
I’ve noticed this too with things I’m quite familiar with.
I’d like to say it makes me more cautious about topics I’m prompting that I’m not familiar with…
But I’m also worried about the young people. What if you never had to learn something from ground up?