to paraphrase:
You wouldn't steal a handbag.
You wouldn't steal a television.
You wouldn't steal a DVD.
Downloading someone's content for AI training is stealing.
Stealing is a crime.
Hah, hilarious this is being unironically used, this was a lame ad old people they put out against piracy, and widely mocked by Millenials in the early 2000s.
We've have always known we should harvest the internet for absolutely everything. If we don't, it's fine, we can squabble about our IP and China will just ingest the entire Internet, make a model out of it, then release the Ghiblifier and we'll all download it or run it on Openrouter. You can already download Hunyuan Image 3.0 and it's just as good as OpenAI's image create, if not better. What's Japan going to do about that?
Also, for the record, I would absolutely download a handbag, or a television, or a DVD, or a car, if I could. I'd be pumping out Louis Vuittons and iPhones for my kids all day long, and driving a Lambo because why not?
Reefer Madness. Satan in vinyl. DnD panic. Downloading as piracy.
I was once accused of being a pirate back then because I was talking about downloading in a chatroom.
What was I downloading? Linux. Probably Debian. It's the same kind of nonsense as people going around accusing everyone whose process they don't understand of using AI. I'm surprised no one has come after me for making flame fractals.
Totally agree!
Probably not as much a generational thing ("old people", versus "Millennials" or really, Gen X at that time), as just a tone-deaf shaming attempt by our corporate overlords.
Why not go straight for the goal and just download the Lambo?
Copyright/Patent/Intellectual Property for more than 25 years is illogical in my personal weird opinion. I think it grinds innovation to a halt and only serves to generate money. In other news i would glady recieve a lot of money forever just because i invented some thing ages ago. I'm only a humble capitalist human. :)
OpenAI will just fork out a bunch of money and settle everything, because that is how money works.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/you-wouldnt-steal-a-...
The difference is: You're making copies of something:
Copying someone's IP can also impact you economically if your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something.Should we enforce the protection of people's right to have monopoly of distribution of intellectual property?
Or should we accept that in reality, copies are free and distribution monopolies only exist in inefficient markets?
It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property.
But information wants to be free.
It's a dilemma. Do we side what feels right, or what's real?
I don’t get it. Did you men that “It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property” follow from “your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something”?
Thanks for sharing the font story! That made me quite a bit happier than it should have.
This issue is not black and white.
It is accepted, within limits, for humans do transformative work, but it's not been yet established which the limits for AIs are, primarily (IMO): 1. whether the work is transformative or not 2. whether the scale of transformation/distribution changes the nature of the work.
Embedding other people's work in a vector space, then sampling from the distribution at a different point in the vector space, is not a central member of the "transformative" category. The justifications for allowing transformative uses do not apply to it.
That does seem to be the plurality opinion yes. But you are responding to someone saying that what counts as transformative hasn't been decided by saying that you have decided. We don't know how human brains do it. What if we found that humans actually do it in the same way? Would that alter the dialog, or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we?
> or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we?
Because of the scaling abilities of a human brain, you cannot plug more brains into a building to pump out massive amounts of transformative work, it requires a lot for humans to be able to do it which creates a natural limit to the scale it's possible.
Scale and degree matter even if the process is 100% analogous to how humans do it, the natural limitation for computers to do it is only compute, which requires some physical server space, and electricity, both of which can be minimised with further technological advances. This completely changes the foundation of the concept for "transformative work" which before required a human being.
This is a good observation, and motivates adjusting the legal definition of "transformative" even if the previous definition did include what generative AI systems can now do.
> What if we found that humans actually do it in the same way?
We know that humans don't – or, at least, aren't limited to this approach. A quick perusal of an Organization for Transformative Works project (e.g. AO3, Fanlore) will reveal a lot of ideas which are novel. See the current featured article on Fanlore (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Stormtrooper_Rebellion), or the (after heavy filtering) the Crack Treated Seriously tag on AO3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works?work_search[sort_column]=k...). You can't get stuff like this from a large language model.
People could be doing their own transformative works, and then posting them to tumblr or whatever with a “Ghibli style” tag or something.
Critiques like this dismissis AI as a bunch of multiplications, while in reality it is backed by extensive research, implementation, and data preparation. There's an enormous complexity behind, making it difficult to categorize as simply transformative or not.
The Pirate Bay is also backed by extensive research, implementation, and data preparation. I'm not dismissising [sic] anything as "a bunch of multiplications" – you'll note I talked about embedding in vector spaces, not matrix multiplication. (I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about: if you want to dismiss [sic] my criticism, please actually engage with it like the other commenters have.)
Any type of art is inspired by the art of others. Its the simplicity in which you now can generate "art" which is the issue. Stealing artists work while also making it harder than ever for them to make a living is a deeply ethical issue. AI "artists" and "art" disgust me. Its a skill you build over your whole life, taking the shortcut because you're unwilling to learn the craft is deeply insulting to real artists. Good thing traditional art is still somewhat safe from this. Thankfully, this is making it easier to leave highly addicting online platforms as I boycott AI content of any form.
> Its a skill you build over your whole life, taking the shortcut because
Doesn't this apply to the printing press?
For me the core issue is not that OpenAI can generate some copies if the art, the issue is that some artists can not earn an honest living and that people do not care about artists generally. I wonder how many of the people commenting here have bought themselves art from an artist.
I personally doubt that AI can do a movie similar to studio Ghibli (of which I seen a lot and I love and paid for) and I also wonder how much of the issue here is some corporate profit rather than some poor artists (do you know who owns studio Ghibli without looking?)
It's fine to boycott AI content, but you could also decide to boycott content produced by large corporations for profit.
This is an example of why analogies make for bad quality reasoning. The first 3 goods have marginal cost, so stealing them causes direct financial harm. Digital goods have zero marginal cost, so there is not any automatic harm. You may still wish for it to classified as stealing. The law may even agree with you that it is stealing. But it doesn't change the fact that this analogy is useless for the purposes of reasoning.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPEeaxI0OPU
Showing me ads is stealing too, by the way.
depends, they definitely didn't build "the streets" they plaster with ads but if it's their channel or their website, it's up us to pay for blockers, put effort into doing ourselves or using one of the tools build by generous contributors who crave user-defined spaces instead of 'enforced and conform' ("VC"-)demand-based spaces
No. bad analogy.
Stealing my time and attention. Much more bothered about advertising in my face than IP infringement.
In exchange for a service. It is the way you pay it. You can simply refuse to transact.
What service am I getting when I’ subjected to a billboard that says “get a smooth kitty” with a picture of a Sphinx cat, exactly? (It’s for laser hair removal and is clever but that makes it more annoying because my kids ask me what it means)
My bad, I thought you were talking only about advertising in media.
And mental health.
and my energy (CPU, etc)
Then why do companies claim I am stealing from them when I use an adblocker?
Because the implicit contract for you to consume their content is that you pay it either by subscribing or by seeing ads.
It is not that difficult to understand.
But if viewing ads is a payment method, then you must also understand that showing me ads (without giving me anything in return) is stealing.
> You wouldn't steal a baby
Also counts as "downloading someone's content" - at least partially
We will eventually need that policeman's helmet as a retaliation means /s