Comment by jiggawatts
11 days ago
Every AI company has flagrantly violated copyright, to begin with.
But that's not the point!
The point is that the laws are written by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs.
Laws are made to protect wealth and power, so of course the wealthy and powerful haven't "broken" them.
A flagrant violation requires clearly established jurisprudence. What is considered fair use has always been nebulous, and to the extent that there are standards on it, it's mainly through established precedence, of which there is none on AI training.
One can argue that the closest thing to an AI's training on a book is a person reading a book and remembering the details, which i'm sure you reject, but it's not prima facie unreasonable.
This is genuinely so funny to me.
Five years ago this site was ready to burn you at the stake if you defended copyright laws, which clearly were only written to protect the rich and powerful, like Disney!
Now those laws are obviously there to defend the little guy against the oligarchs, and we should ready our pitchforks to march on Silicon Valley for daring to violate our precious copyright laws!!
I think HN takes issue with the hypocrisy of the matter. Copyright law was used to punish regular people for consuming illegal media, but AI tech companies are forgiven for using the same illegal methods to run a business.
That’s completely understandable, but that’s not what I see from HN. If you were outraged when individuals were prosecuted for copyright and then you demand that OpenAI be prosecuted for it, you’re the hypocrite.
It’s remarkable to me the number of people on this site whose “heartfelt convictions” change with the direction of the political winds.