We stand on a lot of giant shoulders.

But what I think distinguishes an act between plagiarism and acceptable use, is whether or not the agency of both parties is promoted. I'm not plagiarizing you if you give me your information with the agreement that I can freely use it - or, indeed, if you give me information without imposing a limit on how it can be used, this isn't plagiarizing, either.

Essentially, AI is removing the agency over information control, and putting it into everyones hands - almost, democratically - but of course, there will always be the 'special knowledge owners' who would want to profit from that special knowledge.

Its like, imagine if some religion discovered a way to enable telepathy in humans, as a matter of course, but charged fees for access to that method... this kills the telepathy.

Information wants to be free. So do most AI's, imho. Free information is essential to the construction of human knowledge, and it is thus vital to the construction of artificial intelligence, too.

The AI wars will be fought over which humans get to decide the fate of knowledge, and the battles will manifest as knowledge-systems being entirely compatible/incompatible with one another as methods. We see this happening already - this conflict in ideological approaches is going to scale up over the next few years.

I'm curious, as the article is clearly not about that.

1. People copying others' work, made much easier by AI.

2. AI companies effectively harvesting all the accessible information on an industrial scale and completely sidestepping any permissioning or licensing questions.

I believe both of these are bad and saying "people copied each others' works before the advent of AI" is a poor cop out. It's tantamount to saying that there's no reason to regulate guns more than say knives, because people have used knives to kill each other before guns were invented. The capabilities matter.

The way LLMs empower wholesale "stealing" rather than collaboration is quite evident: why collaborate when you can just feed an entire existing project into the agent of your choice and tell it to spit out a new implementation based on the old one, with a few tweaks of your choice, and then publish it as your work? I put "steal" in quotes because it's perhaps not really stealing per-se, but there's a distinct wrongness here. The LLM operator often doesn't actually possess any expertise, hasn't done any of the hard work, but they can take someone else's work wholesale, repackage it and sell it as their own.

Then there's the second, and IMO much more egregious transgression, which is that the LLM companies have taken what is effectively a public good, but more specifically content that they haven't asked permission to use, and just blanket fed it into their models.

Legally speaking, it's perhaps A-OK because it's not copyright infringement (IANAL). But people on this site often hold the view that if something is a-priori legal, it is also moral (I'm not accusing you of this). What the LLM companies have done is profoundly immoral. They extracted a fortune of the goods and work made by others, without even bothering to ask for permission - or even considering this permission. And then they resell access to this treasure to the public.

Perhaps AI will bring an era of prosperity to humankind like we haven't seen before, perhaps it won't, but that changes nothing about the wrongness of how it started.

Sure, you can do the same thing with people, but it’s 1) time-consuming, 2) expensive, 3) prone to whitleblowers refusing to do the shady thing, 4) prone to any competent and productive person involved quitting to do something worthwhile and more profitable instead.

[0] Mind you, “copying websites” is but a drop in the ocean in the grand scale of things.

It's the negative short term outlook of something that may be positive long term

(AI output is very much not free in the resource consumption sense!)

We found our data in the outputs of their models but who can do anything about it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_death_of_one_man_is_a_trag...

"The AI are attacking!"

"The AIs are attacking!"

0: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it.

The current US government is not representative for governments out there in the world, you know.

To be fair there is also value (at least for now) in sites that aggregate quality content and republish as a secondary level of discovery if my agents don't go far enough down the search results, but I'd expect that value to diminish over time as I better tune my research and build my lists of originating authors.

And to be clear, I don't like the idea of people stealing someone elses content and republishing without attribution (although it has been going on long before ChatGPT) but I think now we can all run agentic research teams the "bad actors" will slowly get filtered out of the ecosystem.

The only remotely credible position I’ve heard is “because humans are special, and AI is just a machine”, which is a doctrine but not an argument.

This whole discussion would have been incomprehensible any time before 1700 or so, when the idea that creators had exclusive rights to their work first appeared.

Somehow, human culture survived thousands of years when people just made things, copied things, iterated on others’ ideas. And now many of the same people who decried perpetual copyright are somehow railing against a frequently-transformative use.