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Comment by __loam | Hacker News Reader

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With the way Copyright now lasts roughly forever and covers roughly everything then it can't expect to be respected. Copyright owners have used their power to tilt the bargain entirely in their favour. They have only themselves to blame if people increasing don't want to obey their rules.

Yeah you're right, it's totally justified to steal the work of still living artists without their permission to build massive for profit systems to automate their jobs away because some corporations have abused copyright.

Not sure while they are complaining. Even if have a AI read their work is "stealing" they'll still be making money from their copyright for the next 100 years at least.

The "artists" seem to be as happy to abuse copyright as the corporations.

> A lot of people, especially on hacker news, believe something being on the internet is a license to do whatever the fuck they want with that data.

A license to do whatever the fuck they want? No. To do things other than make copies? Sure. Copyright is the right to copy, no more than that. Learning from something is not copying it. If you want to complain about memorisation, that’s fair. But learning from something is not something copyright was intended to restrict, so no, plenty of people absolutely will not care about copyright when it comes to this kind of thing, and rightly so.

I think you're reading too much into AI specific stuff, I would happily violate copyright for no reason at all.

ChatGPT told me it doesn't have the text of the US Declaration of Independence due to copyright. It does not have the English Magna Carta within its accessible text. That seems unexpected. It does have the US Constitution.

Large language models don’t know what they know. Asking them what they know is often going to give you an incorrect answer.

  $ llm -m 4 "Quote the declaration of independence:"

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

(Note: The full text of the Declaration of Independence is quite lengthy, so I have included the most well-known portion here. The full text, including a list of grievances against King George III and the signatures of the signers, can be found elsewhere.)

It made that answer up.

https://youtu.be/GM-e46xdcUo?si=D8Zmikk8TKsLoHwx

Perhaps there's part of the prompt that tells GPT not to tell users details about written words to avoid embarrassing copyrighted text leaking out, but the prompt is slightly too strict and lets GPT also not talk about 'open' texts? Pure speculation.

I don't think that's the case, although there was an interesting bug a while back where it would freeze after each word when asked to quote the opening to, e.g., Moby Dick.

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