134 comments

  • Insimwytim 2 hours ago

    The problem is not that ChatGPT is doing that, the problem is that it's not being sued into oblivion after.

    • gruez an hour ago

      >it's not being sued into oblivion after.

      Article said

      >she wrote she had simply asked ChatGPT to make “a New Yorker-style cartoon.”

      A "style" can't be copyrighted, at least in US law. They might have a stronger case of trademark/likeness infringement, but the fact that the person knew it was AI generated would make that difficult. Of course they knew it wasn't made by Brendan Loper. Of course, if they then published it, the other people viewing it might not know this, but who published it?

      • LocalH an hour ago

        The signature can certainly be copyright protected, I would think?

        • gruez an hour ago

          Wikipedia doesn't think so, citing the US copyright office

          https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_P...

          • kevin_thibedeau 18 minutes ago

            Visual artists have a right of attribution via the Visual Artists Rights Act (17 U.S.C. § 106A). This includes protection against misattribution.

          • jdiff an hour ago

            This is true, it'd be a trademark issue if anything, not a copyright one. From this page:

            > it may be reproduced, as long as the reproduction cannot be mistaken for an authentic signature.

            • gruez 29 minutes ago

              >as long as the reproduction cannot be mistaken for an authentic signature.

              Which seems applicable in this case, because the image is clearly generated by AI (at least to the guy who prompted it).

        • colechristensen an hour ago

          There's a difference between reproducing a signature in an encyclopedia or in some way that makes it clear that you are recording the thing as it is.

          Putting a signature on a work is forgery and in most jurisdictions charged as fraud.

          If you produce an artwork in the style of someone and then clone the signature of someone who produces art in that style, there is a reasonable case for fraud.

          • noncoml 37 minutes ago

            When you are no-one, it’s fraud. “When you're famous they let you do it”

    • dumbfounder 26 minutes ago

      Why would ChatGPT be sued exactly? They didn’t publish the picture, they did what the user asked. The user is responsible because they directed the creation and publishing. The user is the entity who should be sued. Or dmca’d. Or whatever.

      Think if the user commissioned the art from an outsourced creative shop nobody has heard of. Then they published it. They wouldn’t go after the creative shop, they would go after the publisher.

      (I am just addressing publishing here, training on the artist’s works is a different, well discussed issue)

      • jackvalentine 17 minutes ago

        Seems to me like producing an artist's stylised signature would be a trademark infringement.

        OpenAI give lip service to the idea of not producing others' intellectual property - go ask it to explicitly make a picture of the genie from Aladdin.

  • MarkusQ 2 hours ago

    Plagiarism as a Service.

    We can all try really hard to pretend that's not the business model, but that's totally the business model.

    • rossy 2 minutes ago

      There are three things that have become very clear to me after the rise of generative AI:

      1. The sheer amount of material on the internet that is "free to view but not free to use for any purpose" is the greatest resource of our time, and despite it being easy for individuals to take advantage of it (no one will take you to court for printing out a newspaper comic and pinning it to your corkboard,) it's historically been difficult for corporations to exploit it (their best idea pre-AI is to encourage people to post it on social media walled-gardens where they can surround it with ads.)

      2. The reason behind the impressive results of generative AI is because it exploits the above "free" resource, which is the greatest resource of our time. The reason behind the industry-wide push for AI and the insane amount of investment in it, is that they know it's their first real chance to exploit the greatest resource of our time. This is the gold rush.

      3. Anthropomorphism is the wool that AI labs are pulling over legislators eyes. If you see training and inference as a black box, a process that consumes a copyrighted work (among others) and produces something very similar to the original work that also competes directly with it, is clearly something that's against the spirit of copyright. But if you (afraid of being judged a luddite) see AI as a little man inside the computer who is "learning" and "creating," how could you deny him? Especially if it would deny your jurisdiction access to the above gold rush.

    • GolfPopper 2 hours ago

      What Microsoft's Director of Applied Science called the, "largest theft of labor in human history".[1]

      1. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...

      • Gigachad 2 hours ago

        All of these people need to go to jail after what happened to Aaron Swartz

        • aeon_ai an hour ago

          If you think Aaron Schwartz would not have fought for exactly the freedom of information that would enable AI training, you misunderstand Schwartz and the nature of information freedom.

          I continue to find that people strongly advocate for justice on exactly opposing sides, depending on who they have been told to think the “bad guy” is.

          • arwineap an hour ago

            I think you misunderstood what parent was saying

            The same orgs that harassed and antagonized Aaron Schwartz are not going after AI for the same thing at a much much larger scale.

            What's different? The size of their bank accounts.

            • JumpCrisscross 37 minutes ago

              > What's different?

              One, time went on. The prosecution of Schwartz was seen as an overreach, as demonstrated by Ortiz’s failed political career thereafter.

              Two, Schwartz’s charges were only ever charged. No jury or judge signed off on them.

              Three, context changed. Schwartz wasn’t 5% of GDP. For better or for worse, that matters to voters.

              • porkshoe 32 minutes ago

                Voters might feel differently once they wake up and realize that it's 5% of GDP because of the anticipation that so many voters will be thrown out of work.

                • JumpCrisscross 18 minutes ago

                  > once they wake up and realize that it's 5% of GDP because of the anticipation that so many voters will be thrown out of work

                  But it's not. The only layer anyone has a handle on is consumers and companies paying AI ridiculous sums for AI. Some of those users are probably justifying it with labour replacement. But a lot may not be. So far, we haven't seen the employment effect outside recent college graduates at enterprise companies.

                  > as implemented in the United States it's a malignant tumor, a theft of labor by capital, and it must be (minimally) adddressed with confiscatory taxes applied to all those involved with it's creation and operation

                  It's also a godsend of economic growth. Growth other countries who are trying to balance their books would kill for. Without AI, we'd be in a failure state. Maybe we are, if this is all a bubble. But as it stands, there is paper wealth that can and has–limitedly–been taxed. That gives everyone options.

                  > If a single AI billionaire exists in the year 2030, then the US is a failed state

                  This is silly and projecting a narrow view of the world onto a larger voting population. Voters don't care so much that there are billionaires as that living standards haven't kept up with the rate at which they're being minted. Double tax brackets, add more on top, raise the minimum wage, raise Social Security taxes and benefits, expand Medicare, beef up antitrust, establish a progressive property tax on wealth that starts at 1,000x the median American's wage (about $65mm) and billionaires are fine.

        • georgemcbay an hour ago

          > All of these people need to go to jail after what happened to Aaron Swartz

          Their wealth has exceeded an escape velocity beyond which they won't be put in prison (or if they are they would quickly be pay-for-play pardoned) unless they are seen as a threat to even wealthier people.

          See, for example: Devon Archer, Jason Galanis, Benjamin Delo, Arthur Hayes, Samuel Reed, Trevor Milton, Carlos Watson, Paul Walczak, Todd and Julie Chrisley, Lawrence Duran, Marian Morgan, Imaad Zuberi, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Joseph Schwartz, et al.

          Some of these people are broke bitches compared to the group of people you're talking about now, and yet still hit the threshold of being above the law as long as they play the corruption game.

    • drivebyhooting 2 hours ago

      Nobody seems to care about AI automating coders out of a job.

      If anyone can just prompt all their basic “information needs” however how sloppy, then what remains of the economy? Health care, child care, handyman?

      Most people won’t even pay for ad free YouTube. I don’t think any software business can survive AI as a substitute good even if it’s inferior (and it might not be).

      • marssaxman 4 minutes ago

        I've been automating myself out of a job as long as I've been a coder, which has become a considerable span of time; that is my job.

      • King-Aaron 2 hours ago

        > Nobody seems to care about AI automating coders out of a job.

        Have people ever really broadly cared about the IT professionals behind their devices?

        • AuthAuth 2 hours ago

          IT professionals have been automating people out of jobs for years. Why would anyone worry about them?

          • Muromec an hour ago

            Wait, were we the bad guys all this time by making things objectively better?

            • boothby 43 minutes ago

              After decades of enshitification, I have trouble reading this as "objectively better for those made wealthy by working in or investing in tech."

            • api an hour ago

              Meanwhile housing, health care, food, energy, and things like college all get more expensive while wages are stagnant (and falling when inflation adjusted). Now on top of that we toss a new jobs disrupting technology into the mix.

              You’re making a lot of things objectively better, but none of them are the essentials that people need.

              I’m not saying it’s bad to make AI bots or video games or network apps. I’m saying that the blanket statement “we make things better” is oblivious to a lot of realities.

            • jakeydus an hour ago

              This attitude is why society has turned on the tech bros.

            • bdangubic 29 minutes ago

              AI is making things objectively better too :)

        • fennecbutt 27 minutes ago

          Nope, because there's always been an executive to shaft said engineers out of success. But they went to business school, so I guess what's yours is theirs. I think that's biz 101.

    • fennecbutt 28 minutes ago

      Only if it's intentional, which it's clearly not. So chill.

    • walrus01 an hour ago

      This is one of the reasons I'm extremely unimpressed by complaints from openai and anthropic that other labs are "distilling" their models based on them... Basically: "You're training your model by running it again our own model which is itself a gargantuan copyright and content violation of a scale never seen before by humankind, HOW DARE YOU"

      • Muromec an hour ago

        Whatever is necessary for the functioning of the (democratic) society. That would be legal.

      • NamlchakKhandro 41 minutes ago

        btw, why isn't Greta Thunberg standing up in front of the UN delivering a "How dare you" speach about AI ?

    • jrflo 2 hours ago

      You may not like AI but their business model is a silly twitter-worthy dunk. This is obviously not their business model. I didn't know I could've plagiarized all this code myself the entire time!

  • zahlman 8 minutes ago

    Of course it does this. The training data is full of examples that associate e.g. "New Yorker-style cartoon" with Loper's signature in the corner, because Loper's signature is in the corner of a lot of them. There's nothing to make it treat the signature as anything special by default; that would have to be trained in explicitly.

    One would hope that the person prompting ChatGPT would notice this sort of thing and do something about it before sharing it publicly, out of a genuine desire not to cause confusion etc. But I guess that's way more personal responsibility than we can expect average people to take on nowadays.

    • i4k 4 minutes ago

      So it's the user's fault in your opinion?

      • zahlman a minute ago

        I'm not trying to assign blame. I'm only saying that the result is completely expected.

        In practical terms, the legal system probably isn't built to withstand blaming the user. I'd like to advocate that everyone who can do something should try to do their part, though.

  • MiroslavPokorny 25 minutes ago

    We live in confusing times.

    Steal one mp3 and you might get fined thousands, steal a book from your local shoppe and the police would come visit you. Forge a signature and you would also be in trouble. Hack a government website and you will have to answer some questions.

    Steal all the books in the world, forge millions and this story begins to tell and nothing happens.

    • artur_makly 3 minutes ago

      [delayed]

    • spudlyo 22 minutes ago

      After all that has been said and written on this topic, people still manage to conflate theft with intellectual property violation, real or imagined.

  • Isamu 41 minutes ago

    The part of the AI generating the mashup doesn’t really understand what the signature means, or how it may be interpreted, it’s just a visual part of a New Yorker cartoon. Elsewhere in ChatGPT there is plenty of information about signatures and what they mean, and what plagiarism is.

    It’s not organized like a human brain, it shouldn’t be surprising that unusual results occur. They are approximating human intelligence from a different angle. It’s interesting to see the improvements in areas like this that require introspection that isn’t fully wired up yet.

    [edit] I should add that a human making a New Yorker cartoon is extremely iterative and introspective. Current generative AI is meant to push it out, and you can do the iteration and introspection yourself.

    • zahlman 5 minutes ago

      > It’s not organized like a human brain, it shouldn’t be surprising that unusual results occur. They are approximating human intelligence from a different angle. It’s interesting to see the improvements in areas like this that require introspection that isn’t fully wired up yet.

      AI boosters take note: this sort of thing is exactly what skeptics have in mind when they insist that you are nowhere near "AGI" and have not meaningfully passed Turing tests and your claims of goalpost-shifting are fake. You have been aiming at straw goalposts.

    • cactusplant7374 19 minutes ago

      I have used a simple feedback loop to generate AI art: 1) the initial prompt 2) ask for criticism of the generated image 3) apply those changes and generate another image 4) repeat the criticism / fix cycle again

      Isn't that somewhat introspective?

  • jameson an hour ago

    I'm certain if I drew a cartoon and used the signature that looks just like a real cartoonists', I would get sued and liable for the damage.

    The same should apply to LLM vendors.

    • gruez an hour ago

      >I'm certain if I drew a cartoon and used the signature that looks just like a real cartoonists', I would get sued and liable for the damage.

      Would you? Always? Suppose I hate Obama drone striking people, so I made a satirical cartoon of him signing an executive order to "bomb brown people" or whatever, affixing his signature[1] to that image. Would that get me in trouble, even if the image was clearly satirical? What if someone takes that, then passes it as non-satire, either intentionally or unintentionally?

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Barack_Obama_signature.sv...

      • useruser125524 6 minutes ago

        Weird irrelevant hypothetical

      • zarmin 17 minutes ago

        wow. what an incredible way to miss the point. bravo.

      • kyleee 36 minutes ago

        That sounds like satire, as you suggested. Are you really unsure?

        • gruez 29 minutes ago

          No, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49973037

          There's nothing illegal unless someone seriously thinks Obama signed it. The easiest example would be his signature on his wikipedia page. Clearly he didn't sign that page, nor (probably) did he authorize it.

          • jkubicek 22 minutes ago

            I don't understand your argument. Wikipedia and a satirical cartoon are both things clearly not made by Obama, nobody in their right mind would be "fooled" by the presence of his signature.

            These cartoons are intentionally drawn in the style of a cartoonist and feature their signature. The goal is forgery. The whole point of these AI-generated images is to look like the real thing.

    • phoghed 34 minutes ago

      Why are you certain? All your time in the courtroom arguing copyright and trademark cases?

    • Pxtl an hour ago

      Laws are for poor people

  • gwern 2 hours ago

    This has been a perennial problem with my own generated comics with both Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT (all generations). I often have to put in an extra edit to erase the false signature. It is annoying and I'm unsurprised most users don't bother.

    • zahlman 2 minutes ago

      > I often have to put in an extra edit to erase the false signature.

      Given that they can reliably do this, I'd think it should be trivial for the harness to automatically insert a "review the image for anything that looks like an artist's signature or other blatant indicator of plagiarism, and fix it" pass.

    • bulder 2 hours ago

      Despite what all the clickwrap warnings and "AI can make mistakes" subtitles might lead you to believe, the service offering of AI is explicitly designed to be as "one and done" as possible. The inherent nature of these tools is to service laziness, and disincentivize too much scrutiny.

    • ishouldstayaway an hour ago

      > my own generated comics

      For certain values of "my own".

    • sodapopcan 9 minutes ago

      The fix is easy: stop generating AI comics. JFC.

    • johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

      >I'm unsurprised most users don't bother.

      And then people wonder why the default mood of AI is so pessimistic. It's just revealing all of society's broken windows and adding a few more in the process.

  • WD-42 2 hours ago

    Engineering manager at my company put a comic at the end of our sprint demo that was signed bloper. Except it wasn’t funny at all, and kind of weird. I asked him, sure enough it was ChatGPT and he didn’t notice the signature.

    • SchemaLoad 2 hours ago

      Artists should be able to personally sue OpenAI for libel every time they forge an artists signature.

  • dormento 3 hours ago

    The copyright washing machine strikes again.

    • drdaeman an hour ago

      That’s not a copyright issue, it’s a trademark issue.

  • cmiles8 6 minutes ago

    The entire company is based on stealing everyone else’s creative content and then passing it off as their own. So this isn’t a surprise.

  • serf 44 minutes ago

    this is trivial to reproduce ever since early stable diffusion models, it's not really an oai exclusive issue.

    for example if you ask any of these models (just about any image-gen) to produce Japanese ukiyo-e art they will almost always produce it with a hanko[0] that has been seen a lot in historical art pieces, usually having nothing to do with the era or style of the replica but seen so often in 'Japanese artwork' that it's just permanently tokenized into it as a defining characteristic.

    [0]: https://theartofzen.org/the-hanko-in-japanese-art-and-ukiyo-...

  • ThrowawayR2 2 hours ago

    Nice. This demolishes the "LLMs can reason" (but not enough to avoid this sort of basic error) and "humans make mistakes too" (not like this) talking points from the LLM promoters.

    • __MatrixMan__ 24 minutes ago

      There's a lot of space between:

      - LLM's can reason

      - everything an LLM does is the result of reasoning

      This demolishes only the latter point, which as far as I know has no supporters.

    • antonvs 2 hours ago

      > This demolishes the "LLMs can reason"

      This is completely silly. If you don’t think LLMs can reason, you’ve either never used them to do tasks that require reasoning, or you don’t understand enough to recognize what’s involved in the responses you get.

      In this case it’s clearly the latter, because you’re confusing image generation models with LLMs. There are very big differences between the two. No-one is claiming that image generation models are capable of reasoning.

    • dyauspitr an hour ago

      LLMs can very much reason and they do it very well.

      • bunderbunder an hour ago

        I remain unconvinced.

        The thing about a generative language model that’s trained from a massive but unknown corpus is, it’s practically (if not theoretically) impossible to evaluate the extent to which data leakage contributes to any particular output.

        But I would argue that, as things currently stand, “sophisticated engine for approximately querying a pastiche of the results of human reasoning that comprise its training corpus” remains a more parsimonious explanation than “it’s doing actual reasoning” for how this neural network architecture produces the phenomena we’ve been observing.

        • Muromec an hour ago

          >sophisticated engine for approximately querying a pastiche of the results of human reasoning that comprise its training corpus

          Well if the thing can find and fix bugs in something that is using non-mainstream stuff that is surely not in it's training dataset, that's better than a rubber duck already. Whether it has soul is a different question of course.

          • bunderbunder 39 minutes ago

            “A soul”?

            As popular as I know the rhetorical tactic is on both sides of these discussions about LLMs, I’d still thank you not to strawman me.

          • phoghed 28 minutes ago

            Don’t even bother. These people almost always have some goofy ass, non standard, fluid definition of “thinking” or “reasoning” that cannot ever be met.

  • anygivnthursday an hour ago

    This reminds me my early attempts to use GitHub Copilot when it just straight added some guy's name in a javadoc copyright note in the code it generated.

  • pollefeys 2 hours ago

    signatures in, signatures out

  • baubino 2 hours ago

    > “It’s like somebody attributed a quote to me that I didn’t say.”

    > Katzenstein considers the reproduction of his signature by ChatGPT to be more than just a violation of intellectual property; to him, it’s closer to false impersonation. “[ChatGPT] is attaching my name to work that I do not endorse or like. It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me.”

    > “I’ve had people hack my credit card,” said Joe Dator, a New Yorker contributor for the past 20 years. “That feels like less of a violation than this. When they hacked my credit card, they didn’t dress up like me.”

    So this has morphed from plagiarism and copyright infringement (bad) to impersonation (also bad, arguably worse, and maybe more provable in court). It’s chilling to think of the implications of having one’s signature attached to a document or to words that are not one’s own.

    • AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago

      This is lawsuit material.

      And I think maybe it's time for that. People need to learn that there's real, expensive legal liability for doing stuff like this. And AI companies the same.

      I am very much not an advocate of "sue everybody for everything". This is major enough that it clears my threshold.

  • nyorai 2 hours ago

    It seems like all the criticisms of Gen AI and LLM seems to concentrate on OpenAI and their products over products from anthropic and others. I am pretty sure that this faking of signature can be done by Gemini, claude as easily as chatgpt.

    • heartbreak 2 hours ago

      Claude doesn’t do image generation?

      • phoghed 2 hours ago

        No image Gen, trying to get the pope to make Claude a real boy, selling users out to the police, Anthropic looking more shit every day

  • cm2012 2 hours ago

    Not putting signatures in art unless otherwise requested should become a default in AI instances.

  • skybrian 3 hours ago

    Whatever the original intention, this is clearly a bug and should be fixed. But should ChatGPT sign its cartoons with its own name or leave them unsigned?

    • kzsh 2 hours ago

      I think what you're seeing is the probability of a particular signature or style of signature appearing on a particular style of cartoon, not an intent to sign.

      • dotancohen an hour ago

        I do many voice transcriptions. Many times I've had empty silence at the end of recordings transcribed as "Thank you" or even "Like and subscribe".

      • ctippett 2 hours ago

        This. It's also while you'll sometimes get a mangled Getty Images watermark on some image generations, or a logo in the bottom left corner. If it's a prominent feature in the training dataset it'll show up, exactly how these models are supposed to work.

        The 'bug' here is whatever post-processing step or system prompt is in place to steer the model away from doing this.

      • Muromec 2 hours ago

        Yes, but that's just the pixel generation layer. The harness or whatever infrastructure around could nudge it towards common sense.

    • DonsDiscountGas 2 hours ago

      SynthID watermark but no visible signature

    • saalweachter 2 hours ago

      I mean, the bug is, "it generated the most likely cluster of pixels in the corner of a New Yorker cartoon".

    • Forgeties79 3 hours ago

      No one should be allowed to claim they drew something when they didn’t draw any part of it and LLM’s are not people/can’t work without a person. We don’t credit pens and paintbrushes after all.

      One could argue nobody should be allowed to claim it. It just exists.

      • _carbyau_ an hour ago

        But it didn't just blink into existence.

        Even if the person can't claim the copyright of the image produced they ARE responsible for the use of their tools and what they do with the output.

        In this case, they released an image with someone else's signature on it. That is wrong, the person should take the blame for that.

        The person releasing the image may take it up with the AI service that their tooling led them into making such a mistake. But good luck with that in court...

        • Forgeties79 an hour ago

          i’m not saying it’s airtight, this is a pretty unbaked idea. But I think it pretty clearly has some legs to stand on. Can’t be any worse of an argument than somebody prompting an AI for a (facsimile of a) photograph and going “I made a photo.” And mind you I’ve heard people argue that that absolutely constitutes taking a photograph (which I wholly disagree with) here on HN.

          Somebody “made something.” But just because you do something doesn’t mean you get to claim whole ownership of it and get to sign it with your name. Plenty of examples in life.

    • johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

      We call it a "watermark" when a machine "signs" its work. And I wouldn't be surprised if its required as a part of AI disclosure in the coming years.

    • dorkwood 2 hours ago

      Why is it a bug? If other parts of the generated illustration are similarly taken from an artist, why not the signature as well? Why is a signature crossing the line but the rest of the image isn't?

      • DonsDiscountGas 2 hours ago

        For the same reason I'm allowed to draw, paint, or write things very similar to what others have drawn, painted, or written but I have to sign my own name not theirs.

        • pessimizer 2 hours ago

          You are a person, LLMs are not. You know this, which is why you know that if you signed someone else's name it would be forgery, but when you see the machine do it you call it a bug.

          If the machine is like you, the machine is a forger. The machine is not like you, it is simply blending the work of others to order. Adding someone else's signature is simply part of that statistical process.

      • Maken 2 hours ago

        Because it removes plausible deniability, duh

  • dyauspitr 2 hours ago

    Makes sense. Pretty much every example it is trained on has a signature.

  • userbinator an hour ago

    I've seen photorealistic generations add (distorted but still somewhat recognisable) watermarks too, because that's what the training data had.

    Everything is a derivative work, and always has been. AI is just making that salient fact so much more visible, and now everyone who believes in the delusion of Imaginary Property is scared at that truth revealing itself.

    Incidentally, this is also what young humans learning to draw will do. They start by copying what they've seen.

  • Pxtl an hour ago

    Hey anybody remember what happened to Aaron Swartz?

  • sergiotapia an hour ago

    This is why I laugh when the companies cry about model distillation "attacks".

    • Pxtl an hour ago

      "you're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen"

  • moralestapia an hour ago

    Let's see the prompts, without that this discussion is meaningless.

  • Uptrenda 13 minutes ago

    Man, forget the debate about AI being dangerous. The real reason all these companies need to be shut down is copy right infringement. None of this is "fair use." Does fair use imply doing things that actively harm the creators of works? Because training models to be able to replicate works only makes their skills less valuable...

    Honestly, you all kind of mind fuck me that you're not more pissed off about AI basically replicating a large portion of your skills. This effects so many professions now and it's only going to get worse. I would expect a far greater outcry from software engineers trying to organise to ban this shit. But its like none of you even care?

  • zzzeek 2 hours ago

    I follow anti-LLM discourse quite a lot, and across the main bulletpoints: energy/carbon emissions, content worker harm, job displacement, deskilling, mental health effects, and copyright/plagiarism, the plagiarism one seems to have the most attention, and it's also the most solvable, if there were only more serious effort on ethically sourced models that can actually do the real science / math / code work that is what LLMs are best at. The whole world of LLMs to create videos/books/art/literature is where most of the offense is (the video/imagery side of it is where most of the energy/carbon emissions problems are too. and content worker harm).

    I really wish there'd be a split among these disciplines (science/math/code vs. videos/art/literature) - one is vastly more problematic than the other.

    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2 hours ago

      Yep. I’d probably be a lot less chastised in some circles for using Claude Code at work if it wasn’t misconstrued as being in support of, I don’t know, encroaching on the hypothetical commissions of a chronically online instagram furry artist or something.

      It is very tiring to say “I don’t necessarily disagree with you about AI ‘art’, but in my field—which you do not understand, and in which the underlying build process is often not the creative output—AI presents very real productivity gains” for the umpteenth time.

      I am skeptical of there being sufficient data to build “ethical” training datasets, and I’m confident that much of the same contingent will (somewhat rightfully) argue that ‘second-generation’ copyrighted AI material has already irreversibly made its way into every modern dataset.

      • __MatrixMan__ 12 minutes ago

        A reasonable next move, if the US was interested in acting like a democracy, would be legislation forcing this decision:

        - prove that you had the rights for all of your training data

        - open source the model

        Give the labs a 3 month grace period in which to comply, so competition can persist even with dubiously sourced data, but the people can't be locked away from derivatives of their contributions for any significant amount of time.

      • latexr 2 hours ago

        > It is very tiring to say “I don’t necessarily disagree with you about AI ‘art’, but in my field—which you do not understand, and in which the underlying build process is often not the creative output—AI presents very real productivity gains” for the umpteenth time.

        That’s not a justification. If a company were poisoning the water to your home as a byproduct, would you be satisfied if they told you “we don’t necessarily disagree with you about polluting the water, but in our field—which you do not understand, and in which the underlying build process is often not the water pollution—what we’re doing presents very real productivity gains”?

        > I am skeptical of there being sufficient data to build “ethical” training datasets

        Then you don’t build any. What fucked up world we live in where people think it’s OK to be unethical because they want something and can’t think of any other way to do it. What monumentally selfish rotten babies.

      • sublinear 2 hours ago

        > has already irreversibly made its way into every modern dataset

        The "gray goo" scenario finally happens... for AI. That's actually the good ending for humanity. I love it! Poetic and believable. Data doesn't "heal" like nature. :D

      • zzzeek 2 hours ago

        I think you can train on math /science using synthetic generation to a significant extent. Training for coding requires more of the "scraping github / stackoverflow" angle but IMO that's a shallower hill to climb than scraping copyrighted art and literature.

        There are actual models trained on ethical datasets but they are obviously not very high powered. If companies with the resources of an anthropic or openai were doing it (ha) it would be more feasible

      • johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

        >“I don’t necessarily disagree with you about AI ‘art’, but in my field—which you do not understand, and in which the underlying build process is often not the creative output—AI presents very real productivity gains”

        Being able to prove such gains in better products would be a start. And an emphasis on how it assists existing engineers/mathmaticians/researchers, not that any accomplishment made with AI assistance is "AI solves problem".

        I don't know whatever happened to "words are cheap". I guess it literally made money to say words, so that adage is false for the time being.

        >I am skeptical of there being sufficient data to build “ethical” training datasets

        Well if all those scam job ads paying 100/hr to create AI training content was not a scam and instead the approach from the start, there may have been a chance to bridge that gap ethically. The industry chose to break things and is trying to act mad that people are mad at all the broken stuff.

        These results are entirely a consequences of the actions chosen. And I don't believe there was ever an honest consideration of there being ethical training datasets. They just thought they could brute force society with fearmongering and bribes. The BOTD was already low in the beginning but completely gone now.

      • forthegains 2 hours ago

        Yeah and it only took stealing all the intellectual output of everyone ever made.

        But sure, there's um, an ethical way of doing that?

        • johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

          In theory, sure.

          1. Only use open source/CC compliant assets.

          2. Acquire rights/licenses to any datasets that do not fit #1. e.g. the Google deal with Reddit for 60m/yr.

          3. Offer programs to have creatives willingly submit their data, with some sort of residual output based on the number of times their assets are sampled.

          4. If all that is still not enough, hire creatives to create assets for you. This is something Spotify did recently with "ghost artists"[0]. The intentions here are suspect, but a non-consumer facing artist providing work for an LLM wouldn't have the same ethical dilemmas

          5. Lastly, if all that still isn't enough: governmental programs to either provide grants, subsidies, or more outreach to get the ball rolling.

          Would this cost tens, hundreds of billions of dollars? Yes. But clearly, that was not a barrier to entry for the industry anyway. So we can chalk this down to the personality of leadership or the wider culture of modern big tech

          [0]: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

    • altermetax 2 hours ago

      I don't really see the difference, code is protected by copyright (or copyleft) as much as art is, and yet the LLM scrapers use it without scruples. Same goes for math and science publications.

    • CapsAdmin 2 hours ago

      In my experience, the science/math/code crowd don't care about copyright/plagiarism as much as the video/art/literature crowd, so the first crowd turns a blind eye to most of the latter crowd talks about.

      Code can be art, and copyright/plagiarism is real. It sort of boils down to how much it bothers us.

    • harimau777 an hour ago

      I don't think it is likely that they could get enough data without stealing. It would be incredibly costly to have to pay artists to church out art just to train an AI.

    • hardbass an hour ago

      I hope thats possible but I am not sure if proper knowledge of science can be had without also learning other literature (and vice versa).

    • vouaobrasil 2 hours ago

      > I really wish there'd be a split among these disciplines (science/math/code vs. videos/art/literature) - one is vastly more problematic than the other.

      I disagree that they can be separated. Practically, I think they can't. Because the mere invention of new tools inspires even more AI advancement and that in turn will cause the other side (artistic side) to degenerate even more.

      I'm anti-LLM all the way, 100%, no exceptions. Zero tolerance.

      • karahime 37 minutes ago

        So you recognize that discovery cannot be cut off from other discovery, that it's never just one or the other, and your solution is to say shut down all discovery?

    • asa123 2 hours ago

      i think math is close to art (just to be a contrarian, but kind of really)

      its somewhat funny that math people are in a conundrum as to support or not support but this might partially be because some wish to believe that math itself is and can be useful and therefore accelerating is good

      but the art people have no such delusions so they’re just strictly against

      imo proof writing is more akin to art than coding/tech but…

    • PunchyHamster 2 hours ago

      They can't be ethically sourced and good at the same time.

      The current models intelligence depends on massive training dataset of essentially stolen data

      • mehrzad 2 hours ago

        While that is true, theoretically a regulation could be enacted that output tokens must focus on STEM research and other practical tasks and the LLM must refuse tasks outside of those areas, just as Claude disallowed cybersecurity tasks. Obviously this would never happen, but the theft of the training data wouldn’t matter as much if the usecases were less sinister.

      • zzzeek 2 hours ago

        openai and anthropic trained on actually stolen data since it was pirated datasets.

        google OTOH already had a lot of this dataset in their possession (e.g. Google Books etc), still questionably licensed for how they used it, but not quite as bad. They did apparently break through NYT paywalls and stuff like that though, still theft.

    • singpolyma3 2 hours ago

      Models aren't in school so plagiarism doesn't really apply

      • Loughla 2 hours ago

        I can't tell if you're serious or not.

  • parineum 2 hours ago

    This is a pretty solid argument against people who argue that LLMs are more than just (very massive) next token predictors.

    If there was any thought or underlying thought going on here not putting a signature (at least a real one) would be the right move, despite it being less likely. It would realize, while generating the pixels that eventually became a signature, that it shouldn't do that.

    • antonvs 2 hours ago

      > This is a pretty solid argument against people who argue that LLMs are more than just (very massive) next token predictors.

      This quote is a pretty solid argument that you need to understand the technology you’re trying to criticize better. This issue has nothing to do with LLMs. LLMs are not image generation models.

      • parineum an hour ago

        A LLM, at least, prompted and served this image. LLMs can ingest images. They actually can generate them as well but that probably wasn't done here.

        In the course of the conversation a with chatgpt, this image was generated and served by an LLM. It clearly shouldn't have been by any sort of reasoning.

      • johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

        >LLMs are not image generation models.

        If you do not want to be called a duck, it would help if you stopped quacking like one. Maybe you aren't a duck, but you aren't helping your case with stories like this about how AI generates images.

        • duskwuff 25 minutes ago

          Quiz: What does the second "L" in "LLM" stand for?

          Hint: it isn't "image".

          • johnnyanmac 6 minutes ago

            Are we simply trying go back to 2019 and pretend these are fancy Markov chain generators? I think even the most anti-AI folk have moved beyond that.

  • sreejithr an hour ago

    meh... who cares