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- Hacker News
- I hope the result of cases like this is a law or legal precedent which ensures that you waive any intellectual property rights on a model which was trained on somebody else's intellectual property.
There's a lot of waste associated with preventing distillation. It's a distraction that goes away if we just compel the makers of these trained-on-everything models to publish their weights publicly.
To preserve competition maybe we compromise and give them a three month grace period.
- Pulled datasets off libgen for a corpus once and it's overwhelmingly in-copyright textbooks, the public domain framing doesn't really hold up.by hn1rig3rak
- The title is editorialized but conveys a key point made by the OP: Many execs at OpenAI knew that using the work of every author on earth without permission would be perceived as unethical, so execs were worried about this information getting attention in forums like HN. My understanding is that HN has millions of visitors who never log in, many of whom are highly educated individuals in positions of influence.by cs702
- It's wild how much weight "they're destroying jobs" has.
I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.
by handoflixue - Actual title: "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"
Twitter is also mentioned:
"356. In July 2020, OpenAI employee Ryan Lowe assessed the risk of continuing to use LibGen for the book-summarization project. Lowe wrote that he thought “there’s a >80% chance that we have some exchange of the form: ‘where did you get the books data?’” and “‘we can’t say’[.]” Nelson Decl. Ex. 325 at -315. Lowe estimated “a further ~40% chance that that leads to a moderate-sized Twitter kerfuffle that negatively affects the external perception of our work.” Id. Lowe added: “if we’re fully okay with these potential outcomes, then I’m comfortable continuing using Libgen for the project.” Id."
https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2026/09/Class-Plaintiff...
- The Title should be: "Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"by Betelbuddy
- Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics - i.e. 'openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on HN would be unfortunate."
That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against OpenAI.
by papergirl - What I find interesting about this is the evidence that OpenAI believes that GPT-5 can replace genre writers (e.g. G.R.R. Martin and that this is why genre authors are mad at them.
The fact that they believed this is legally useful because of the definition of fair use, so I see why the Author’s Guild is emphasizing it, but the authors I know don’t talk about it. They’re very angry about their work having been used without compensation to create the model, but not because they think it can replace them.
Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.
by natbennett