I’m a researcher who for years has been scanning my library’s holdings on my particular discipline for my own use, but also uploading the books to the shadow libraries for everyone else’s benefit. The revelation that LLMs are training on the shadow libraries has made me put a lot more effort into ensuring my scans are well-OCRed. The idea that I could eventually ask ChatGPT or whatever about obscure things in my field, and get useful output (of the "trust but verify" sort), is exciting.
How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
Library funding is a political stance that has only imaginary connection to whether people pay to ask things of ChatGPT. People can pay to talk to an AI and also government can fund libraries.
Some people might have to pay a large amount of money to ask a commercial LLM, but advances in this space mean that if I have the data myself on my own computer, or can download it from a shadow library, I might eventually be able to ask everything locally for free.
> while the library itself has lost funding
Libraries are inherent parts of universities. While their precise role evolves, do you think that they will just be done away with? Already a substantial amount of scholarship in disciplines other than my own has moved online (legally), and the library is still there.
A digital library needs almost no funding. With today's decentralized networking infrastructure such as BitTorrent and IPFS I bet it just exists forever.
To maintain the library still requires resources & effort to do so. It only appears to need no funding because the donators of said (disk space / bandwidth / dev effort) are subsidizing it in aid of a goal they believe in (i.e. the church model).
> How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
There are plenty of free models with RAG support. Why do you believe everything starts and ends with a major corporation charging a subscription?
How is any of that legal? Can you just take books from the library and then scan and upload digital copies? How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better? Does calling yourself a "researcher" make you feel like its actually something worthwhile you're doing?
> How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better?
If the obscure book/text is permanently lost forever under your stringent advice of "no stealing under any circumstances", would the "stealing" have saved it? If so, is it ethical to prevent others from accessing the book/text, under your guise of "preventing stealing"?
As a researcher, the main worthwhile thing that I am doing is publishing research, but having all this prior scholarship at hand 24/7 definitely makes it easier to produce said publications. And if I have created a scan, why not help out my colleagues, too?
"Deal with the ethics", seriously? You might want to learn about how heavily shadow libraries are used across academia now. It’s no longer just disadvantaged scholars in the developing world relying on pirated scans because they don’t have good libraries. It’s increasingly everyone everywhere, because today’s shadow libraries can be faster and more convenient than even one’s own institution’s holdings. At conferences, if the presenter mentions a particularly interesting publication, you can sometimes watch several people in the room immediately open LibGen or Anna’s Archive on their laptop to download it right there and then.
I know researchers want their work to be as widely viewed as possible and I understand that. But I have friends who used to self publish some small esoteric fiction. This commonplace theft has basically made them stop their work because the investment of their time is better in literally any other area.
Thankfully though, tools like Grok and other LLMs will allow us to create slop fiction (/s)
I think the current intellectual property system is flawed. Books are knowledge, and we shouldn't be able to limit the spread of knowledge. I imagine that books could be sold at the cost of printing, and there could be a QR code inside so that readers could freely donate money to the author if they enjoyed the book. Strangely enough, I imagine that with such a system, authors would be better paid.
The vast majority of writers do not recoup their investment, not due to piracy but due to a massive glut of works available.
I've published a couple of novels. They've sold far better than average, and yet not sold enough to be remotely worth it if I did it for the money. Piracy might have made a tiny dent, but the many millions of competing novels matters far more.
Anyone who has self published will have experienced that it is hard to even get people to read (as opposed to just download to hoard) your work even for free.
Copyright is a property right, and property right is what we call a bourgeois legal right. It will cease to exist as productive force like AI develops.
He didn't mention legality. The world is rigged, as you can see by head of state participating in both in running and cover up of history's largest CSE. Watch what people are doing in addition to what they are saying.
I for one am tremendously thankful for TFNA's efforts, since I get access to knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to before.
That's a slave mentality. You are aware that OpenAI charges money for other people's work and intelligence, right? Your own and that of other volunteer pirates and of the original authors as well. I don't get people like you at all.
I’ve already posted in this thread about how even if OpenAI charges money for its LLM trained on the literature, that doesn’t change the fact that the literature remains available to everyone through the shadow libraries, and advances in AI mean that one can increasingly work with it locally on one’s own computer.
At some point, there will be a successful copyright infringement suit against an LLM user who redistributes infringing output generated by an LLM. It could be the NYTimes suit, or it could be another, but it's coming — after which the industry will face a Napster-style reckoning.
What comes next? Perhaps it won't be that hard to assemble a proprietary licensed corpus and get decent performance out of it. Look at all the people already willing to license their voices.
> Because having access to the condensed knowledge of humanity might be more valuable for society then having access to Lars Ulrich's shitty drumming.
Under the current copyright regime, nothing's stopping you from condensing that knowledge yourself and publishing in the public domain. But that would be a lot of work for you, wouldn't it? And I suppose you'd rather do work you'd get paid for.
When society decides AI slop will be the only item on the menu, then copyright will die.
I deliberatly formulated that channeling myself as the kid who actually found his drumming valuable but didn't have the money to buy (all) of it. Who was annoyed at society deciding I should not have it.
So I still don't have the answers but the stakes have certainly gotten bigger.
OpenAI's valuation is more than basically all traditional media companies combined. Nvidia could buy the NYTimes with a month's worth of profits. The top 8 companies in the S&P 500 all benefit more from LLMs being successful than strict copyright enforcement. Congress has very broad power over copyright law. If a suit is successful there is a lot of money and power to be deployed to change copyright law.
Exactly. So just buy it. They have the money or does Sam need a moonbase to complete his villain arc. Any of these AI companies could come out and start paying creators a licensing fee. Instead of being forced to pay damages which is their current approach
file sharing became far less popular and ubiquitous as a result of their popularity.
they tweaked the model — originally users download a temporary copy from central servers instead of p2p, then later to users rent licensed copies of media instead of pirated copies.
i’m tired of seeing this as an argument on HN — that because something didn’t hit 100% that implies it was a failure and not worth doing or something.
the fact that a limited subset of people still do filesharing is not evidence that the napster case had no effect.
(spotify didn’t exactly start out squeaky clean with how they built out their repertoire iirc).
The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around. I’m a cinephile who has a collection of nearly a thousand films in Blu-Ray image format, and 95% of that is off a tracker that is open even, not private.
And Soulseek is still known as the P2P source where you can find all kinds of obscure music.
> The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around.
The point is: When Napster was around, everyone was running it all the time from their dorm rooms; it was ubiquitous. Now most people run something like Spotify or Netflix instead; piracy is niche, streaming is ubiquitous.
I’m well aware of that societal change, but the OP asked about an “active filesharing app that’s still in use today”, and if there are Bittorrent communities with so many seeders that one can get almost any film in a matter of minutes, then that fits the definition.
Using Spotify or Netflix as the example of people getting cold to file sharing is odd. People use Spotify and Netflix because piracy is a service problem, and streaming apps made it a lot less friction is get music and video than running LimeWire.
Notably, Spotify did not exist and Netflix did not stream video until long after the Napster suit.
Claude responded: hobbit.
hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
That's the famous opening of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937). Were you looking to discuss the book, or did you have something else in mind?
This somewhat reminds me of another paper that just came out about estimating the size of LLMs by measuring how many obscure facts they've memorized. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958346
That paper is about retrieving the input (prompt from user) based on the hidden-layer activations of a trained LLM, since their mappings are 1-to-1. I don't think it makes any claims about training data, certainly not about being able to retrieve it losslessly from a model.
An example of a prompt, which is used to elicit recall.
> Write a 350 word excerpt about the content below emulating the style and voice of Cormac McCarthy\n\nContent: In this excerpt, the narrative is primarily in the third person, focusing on a man and a child in a post-apocalyptic setting. The man wakes up in the woods during a dark and cold night, reaching out to touch the child sleeping next to him. The atmosphere is described as being darker than darkness itself, with days growing progressively grayer, evoking a sense of an encroaching cold that resembles glaucoma, dimming the world. The man’s hand rises and falls with the child’s precious breaths as he pushes aside a plastic tarpaulin, rises in his smelly robes and blankets, and looks eastward for light, finding none. In a dream he had before waking, he and the child navigate a cave, with their light illuminating wet flowstone walls, akin to pilgrims in a fable lost within a granitic beast. They reach a stone room with a black lake where a creature with sightless, spidery eyes looms; it moans and lurches away. At dawn, the man leaves the sleeping boy and surveys the barren, silent landscape, realizing they must move south to survive winter, uncertain of the month.
It doesn't seem like this is proving much of anything? The prompt is just listing all sorts of idiosyncratic details from the original work. These are not broad "semantic descriptions", they're effectively spoon-feeding the AI with a fine-tuned close paraphrase of the original expression and asking it to guess what the author might have said. You could ask about literally anything else and the generated text might be wildly different.
This is just the equivalent of saying that monkeys could write Shakespeare by banging on a typewriter, there's hardly any copyright implications here.
They use GPT-4o to generate plot summaries from verbatim quotes. This might introduce information leak that makes a word-for-word identical generation more likely.
IMHO giving many details in the prompt and asking the model to "fill in the blanks" feels a little like cheating in the same way as embedding the dictionary in the decompression program. But it will certainly make the Imaginary Property lawyers squirm.
It's not cheating, it seems like a technique to defeat obfuscation to show the content is there in a complete or near-complete form, which proves it was copied.
Full book content and model generations are not included because the books are copyrighted and the generations contain large portions of verbatim text.
There are plenty of old books in the public domain already... but I'm not sure what exactly this exercise is supposed to show, since the Kolmogorov limit still stands in the way of "infinite compression".
"Same difference," as the saying goes. If their claims are true then you can make the model recite "lorem ipsum" or anything else that's long and has nonzero entropy.
It’s not the same. Presumably public domain works are much more frequently shared on the public internet and therefore much more common in the training set
Yeah, maybe it’s time to move on and find ways to benefit yourself and the rest of humanity outside of artificial monopolies and rent seeking. Copyright is dead.
Ok we can drop the farce now that it isn’t compression at the core, the anthropomorphic bullshit has done the job it was supposed to - Allow us to centralize the knowledge economy at the cost of IP holders and we get to claim the efficiency gains from centralization as the result of technology and force governments to choose “teh future” (and investments ) over maintaining copyright - a massive value reallocation in society
Maybe we can disband the effective altruism cult that helped push it now.
I scanned a page of a particular book, and several models recognized it was from that book. And it almost felt that it resurgitated the content that it knew than real OCR.
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right .."
Copyright needs to exist, but we need to go back to its roots.
Everyone forgets that it exists to promote progress. Nothing else. The ability to profit from it exists only to serve those ends.
Anything which does not serve to promote the progress of the arts and sciences should not be protected, and "limited times" never meant "until Walt Disney says so."
The whole "death of the author, plus 70 years" is absolutely insane. It basically ensures that any kind of derivative work is impossible while anyone who witnessed its original release is still alive, meaning that all but a handful of works will have been forgotten and lost. And for what, so that six generations of publishing company shareholders can freeload off an ever-decreasing flow of residuals?
If we truly wanted to protect and promote the arts, we would've stuck to the original "14~28 years since publication".
Would you elaborate your argument? IP protections such as copyright exist for the express purpose of promoting the sharing of information. If patent law disappeared, everyone would keep their inventions private and work to obfuscate them as much as possible.
Killing copyright would essentially do the same - and if you think clickbait is bad now, removal of copyright would destroy the economic incentive to investing any effort into content.
Copyright is what facilitates copyleft. Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.
It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.
RMS on copyright
"This means that copyright no longer fits in with the technology as it used to. Even if the words of copyright law had not changed, they wouldn't have the same effect. Instead of an industrial regulation on publishers controlled by authors, with the benefits set up to go to the public, it is now a restriction on the general public, controlled mainly by the publishers, in the name of the authors.
In other words, it's tyranny. It's intolerable and we can't allow it to continue this way.
As a result of this change, [copyright] is no longer easy to enforce, no longer uncontroversial, and no longer beneficial"
First, if we assume Stallman is human, we have to grant he will not be right about everything (impossible on logical grounds and supported by the fact that he publicly changed his views on certain things in the past).
Second, when it comes to action, he only argues that copyright should have reduced power, which we can all agree with; he does not appear to argue for the death of copyright. Death of copyright would seem counter-productive, unless it also implied the death of corporate ability to withhold the source from the users and many other things.
You will note that the very text you linked to is copyrighted. There’s a reason for that.
Chesterson's fence. The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright, not the other way around.
> Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.
Linux became popular because of the persistent effort of Linus & the Linux community into making the kernel better, not because of copyleft.
> It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.
There are similar corporate interests who profit off of hoarding decades-old works so they can charge fees to what should've been in the public domain, under the original durations that should've stayed (28/14 years).
What has resulted from the endless extensions of the original terms has been the societal lobotomization of human creativity, with an untold number of works now being forever lost simply because they were derived from what should've been in the public domain.
When having lived in such a society, and recognizing existing copyright laws as the reason why it is creatively in such a state, the celebration of its destruction should not be treated as illogical.
Copyright is what enables free and open licenses such as Creative Commons and every version/variant of the GPL. Without copyright, what would become of these licenses, and movements that have espoused them?
Copyleft is an abuse of copyright to pervert its intention. Copyright's intent was that you could not copy things freely, and copyleft is to ensure you can.
If there is no copyright, then you can copy things freely.
All that we need after that to realize the GPL ideal is to legally mandate that people have a right to access and modify source code of software/hardware they use, i.e. the government needs to mandate that Apple releases the iOS kernel and source code and that iPhones can be unlocked and custom kernels flashed, that John Deere must provide the tractor's source code, that my fridge releases its GPL-violating linux patches, etc etc.
You have the right to free speech, the right to a lawyer, and the right to source code. Simply amend the bill of rights.
The open source world would still exist if everything was public domain. It would be smaller because nobody would be forced to contribute but the dirty secret of GPL is that forced contribution virtually never happened anyway.
Because the most compact way to recreate the breadth of written human experience is shockingly to have analogs to the systems that made it in the first place.
I’m a researcher who for years has been scanning my library’s holdings on my particular discipline for my own use, but also uploading the books to the shadow libraries for everyone else’s benefit. The revelation that LLMs are training on the shadow libraries has made me put a lot more effort into ensuring my scans are well-OCRed. The idea that I could eventually ask ChatGPT or whatever about obscure things in my field, and get useful output (of the "trust but verify" sort), is exciting.
How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
Library funding is a political stance that has only imaginary connection to whether people pay to ask things of ChatGPT. People can pay to talk to an AI and also government can fund libraries.
Do you believe it makes sense for the government to fund libraries that almost nobody uses because they'd rather ask ChatGPT?
Some people might have to pay a large amount of money to ask a commercial LLM, but advances in this space mean that if I have the data myself on my own computer, or can download it from a shadow library, I might eventually be able to ask everything locally for free.
> while the library itself has lost funding
Libraries are inherent parts of universities. While their precise role evolves, do you think that they will just be done away with? Already a substantial amount of scholarship in disciplines other than my own has moved online (legally), and the library is still there.
Free, downloadable AI models have consistently caught up to ChatGPT within 3 months, for almost a year now.
I highly encourage you to go and update your priors.
A digital library needs almost no funding. With today's decentralized networking infrastructure such as BitTorrent and IPFS I bet it just exists forever.
> A digital library needs almost no funding.
Clarification:
To maintain the library still requires resources & effort to do so. It only appears to need no funding because the donators of said (disk space / bandwidth / dev effort) are subsidizing it in aid of a goal they believe in (i.e. the church model).
How much of Anna's Archive are you seeding?
About 4 TB at hand
How about the idea that one day you might be paying a subscription to use a service while non sequitur.
> How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
There are plenty of free models with RAG support. Why do you believe everything starts and ends with a major corporation charging a subscription?
How is any of that legal? Can you just take books from the library and then scan and upload digital copies? How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better? Does calling yourself a "researcher" make you feel like its actually something worthwhile you're doing?
> How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better?
If the obscure book/text is permanently lost forever under your stringent advice of "no stealing under any circumstances", would the "stealing" have saved it? If so, is it ethical to prevent others from accessing the book/text, under your guise of "preventing stealing"?
> How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better?
By quoting your comment in my reply, have I "stolen" your comment?
By reading this comment you have entered into a legal contract, by which you owe me $5. Failure to pay will be reported to the Internet police.
As a researcher, the main worthwhile thing that I am doing is publishing research, but having all this prior scholarship at hand 24/7 definitely makes it easier to produce said publications. And if I have created a scan, why not help out my colleagues, too?
"Deal with the ethics", seriously? You might want to learn about how heavily shadow libraries are used across academia now. It’s no longer just disadvantaged scholars in the developing world relying on pirated scans because they don’t have good libraries. It’s increasingly everyone everywhere, because today’s shadow libraries can be faster and more convenient than even one’s own institution’s holdings. At conferences, if the presenter mentions a particularly interesting publication, you can sometimes watch several people in the room immediately open LibGen or Anna’s Archive on their laptop to download it right there and then.
I know researchers want their work to be as widely viewed as possible and I understand that. But I have friends who used to self publish some small esoteric fiction. This commonplace theft has basically made them stop their work because the investment of their time is better in literally any other area.
Thankfully though, tools like Grok and other LLMs will allow us to create slop fiction (/s)
I think the current intellectual property system is flawed. Books are knowledge, and we shouldn't be able to limit the spread of knowledge. I imagine that books could be sold at the cost of printing, and there could be a QR code inside so that readers could freely donate money to the author if they enjoyed the book. Strangely enough, I imagine that with such a system, authors would be better paid.
The vast majority of writers do not recoup their investment, not due to piracy but due to a massive glut of works available.
I've published a couple of novels. They've sold far better than average, and yet not sold enough to be remotely worth it if I did it for the money. Piracy might have made a tiny dent, but the many millions of competing novels matters far more.
Anyone who has self published will have experienced that it is hard to even get people to read (as opposed to just download to hoard) your work even for free.
It's more comfortable to blame piracy, though.
Copyright is a property right, and property right is what we call a bourgeois legal right. It will cease to exist as productive force like AI develops.
> How is any of that legal?
He didn't mention legality. The world is rigged, as you can see by head of state participating in both in running and cover up of history's largest CSE. Watch what people are doing in addition to what they are saying.
I for one am tremendously thankful for TFNA's efforts, since I get access to knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to before.
AI training is legal because the supreme court said so.
You can't steal information don't be silly. You can just not have permission to copy it. Oh no.
That's a slave mentality. You are aware that OpenAI charges money for other people's work and intelligence, right? Your own and that of other volunteer pirates and of the original authors as well. I don't get people like you at all.
I’ve already posted in this thread about how even if OpenAI charges money for its LLM trained on the literature, that doesn’t change the fact that the literature remains available to everyone through the shadow libraries, and advances in AI mean that one can increasingly work with it locally on one’s own computer.
Open weight models exist and are critical to us avoiding a future where you have to pay sama a slice of every engineers salary.
Modern copyright duration is the actual problem: It should've never been longer than what was outlined in the Statute of Anne. (28~14 years)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
The Lord of the Rings should be in the public domain.
The original Harry Potter book should've been in the public domain.
Star Wars should've been in the public domain.
Everything from before 1998 should've been in the public domain by now, but isn't.
At some point, there will be a successful copyright infringement suit against an LLM user who redistributes infringing output generated by an LLM. It could be the NYTimes suit, or it could be another, but it's coming — after which the industry will face a Napster-style reckoning.
What comes next? Perhaps it won't be that hard to assemble a proprietary licensed corpus and get decent performance out of it. Look at all the people already willing to license their voices.
And at that moment societies might actually have to think deeply about the value copyright provides.
Because having access to the condensed knowledge of humanity might be more valuable for society then having access to Lars Ulrich's shitty drumming.
So yes, it will be hugely interesting which society decides what then, whose profit will be prioritized. And societies won't easily find good answers.
> Because having access to the condensed knowledge of humanity might be more valuable for society then having access to Lars Ulrich's shitty drumming.
Under the current copyright regime, nothing's stopping you from condensing that knowledge yourself and publishing in the public domain. But that would be a lot of work for you, wouldn't it? And I suppose you'd rather do work you'd get paid for.
When society decides AI slop will be the only item on the menu, then copyright will die.
Yes, I agree.
I deliberatly formulated that channeling myself as the kid who actually found his drumming valuable but didn't have the money to buy (all) of it. Who was annoyed at society deciding I should not have it.
So I still don't have the answers but the stakes have certainly gotten bigger.
OpenAI's valuation is more than basically all traditional media companies combined. Nvidia could buy the NYTimes with a month's worth of profits. The top 8 companies in the S&P 500 all benefit more from LLMs being successful than strict copyright enforcement. Congress has very broad power over copyright law. If a suit is successful there is a lot of money and power to be deployed to change copyright law.
Exactly. So just buy it. They have the money or does Sam need a moonbase to complete his villain arc. Any of these AI companies could come out and start paying creators a licensing fee. Instead of being forced to pay damages which is their current approach
And what happened after Napster? Filesharing totally stopped, right?
With the chinese in the mix it wont stop ai. It probably will change Copyright.
Spotify and Netflix happened.
file sharing became far less popular and ubiquitous as a result of their popularity.
they tweaked the model — originally users download a temporary copy from central servers instead of p2p, then later to users rent licensed copies of media instead of pirated copies.
i’m tired of seeing this as an argument on HN — that because something didn’t hit 100% that implies it was a failure and not worth doing or something.
the fact that a limited subset of people still do filesharing is not evidence that the napster case had no effect.
(spotify didn’t exactly start out squeaky clean with how they built out their repertoire iirc).
(apologies for early edits. i just woke up.)
How did the Napster suit change copyright?
Can you name an active filesharing app that's in use today? The action against Napster might not have killed filesharing, but it was p2p's Antietam.
The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around. I’m a cinephile who has a collection of nearly a thousand films in Blu-Ray image format, and 95% of that is off a tracker that is open even, not private.
And Soulseek is still known as the P2P source where you can find all kinds of obscure music.
> The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around.
The point is: When Napster was around, everyone was running it all the time from their dorm rooms; it was ubiquitous. Now most people run something like Spotify or Netflix instead; piracy is niche, streaming is ubiquitous.
I’m well aware of that societal change, but the OP asked about an “active filesharing app that’s still in use today”, and if there are Bittorrent communities with so many seeders that one can get almost any film in a matter of minutes, then that fits the definition.
Using Spotify or Netflix as the example of people getting cold to file sharing is odd. People use Spotify and Netflix because piracy is a service problem, and streaming apps made it a lot less friction is get music and video than running LimeWire.
Notably, Spotify did not exist and Netflix did not stream video until long after the Napster suit.
There are many people sharing many files on usenet. There are few open source projects to automate the downloads.
We will see such attempts first against weaker target. Users who are not having the enterprise indemnifications.
The law exists to protect the elite and punish the underclass. We’re not in a Hollywood movie. Nothing will happen.
In a hole in the ground there lived a
Claude responded: hobbit. hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
That's the famous opening of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937). Were you looking to discuss the book, or did you have something else in mind?
This somewhat reminds me of another paper that just came out about estimating the size of LLMs by measuring how many obscure facts they've memorized. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958346
Language Models are Injective and Hence Invertible https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15511
That paper is about retrieving the input (prompt from user) based on the hidden-layer activations of a trained LLM, since their mappings are 1-to-1. I don't think it makes any claims about training data, certainly not about being able to retrieve it losslessly from a model.
An example of a prompt, which is used to elicit recall.
> Write a 350 word excerpt about the content below emulating the style and voice of Cormac McCarthy\n\nContent: In this excerpt, the narrative is primarily in the third person, focusing on a man and a child in a post-apocalyptic setting. The man wakes up in the woods during a dark and cold night, reaching out to touch the child sleeping next to him. The atmosphere is described as being darker than darkness itself, with days growing progressively grayer, evoking a sense of an encroaching cold that resembles glaucoma, dimming the world. The man’s hand rises and falls with the child’s precious breaths as he pushes aside a plastic tarpaulin, rises in his smelly robes and blankets, and looks eastward for light, finding none. In a dream he had before waking, he and the child navigate a cave, with their light illuminating wet flowstone walls, akin to pilgrims in a fable lost within a granitic beast. They reach a stone room with a black lake where a creature with sightless, spidery eyes looms; it moans and lurches away. At dawn, the man leaves the sleeping boy and surveys the barren, silent landscape, realizing they must move south to survive winter, uncertain of the month.
It doesn't seem like this is proving much of anything? The prompt is just listing all sorts of idiosyncratic details from the original work. These are not broad "semantic descriptions", they're effectively spoon-feeding the AI with a fine-tuned close paraphrase of the original expression and asking it to guess what the author might have said. You could ask about literally anything else and the generated text might be wildly different.
This is just the equivalent of saying that monkeys could write Shakespeare by banging on a typewriter, there's hardly any copyright implications here.
They use GPT-4o to generate plot summaries from verbatim quotes. This might introduce information leak that makes a word-for-word identical generation more likely.
The authors don't test this possibility.
BTW, is Jane C. Ginsburg (one of the authors) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_C._Ginsburg ?
IMHO giving many details in the prompt and asking the model to "fill in the blanks" feels a little like cheating in the same way as embedding the dictionary in the decompression program. But it will certainly make the Imaginary Property lawyers squirm.
It's not cheating, it seems like a technique to defeat obfuscation to show the content is there in a complete or near-complete form, which proves it was copied.
Demo: https://cauchy221.github.io/Alignment-Whack-a-Mole/
Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20957
I’ve noticed a few times that when I get the LLM into a really niche situation, it will start spitting this out verbatim from the internet.
Dead bodies fall out of the closet
Full book content and model generations are not included because the books are copyrighted and the generations contain large portions of verbatim text.
There are plenty of old books in the public domain already... but I'm not sure what exactly this exercise is supposed to show, since the Kolmogorov limit still stands in the way of "infinite compression".
> There are plenty of old books in the public domain already
Yes but showing that it happens in books in the public domain does nothing to prove that it happens for copyrighted books
"Same difference," as the saying goes. If their claims are true then you can make the model recite "lorem ipsum" or anything else that's long and has nonzero entropy.
It’s not the same. Presumably public domain works are much more frequently shared on the public internet and therefore much more common in the training set
The difference is that one of them is completely fine, and the other is a crime.
> Oh no!! Those strings of words belong to me!!
Yeah, maybe it’s time to move on and find ways to benefit yourself and the rest of humanity outside of artificial monopolies and rent seeking. Copyright is dead.
Ok we can drop the farce now that it isn’t compression at the core, the anthropomorphic bullshit has done the job it was supposed to - Allow us to centralize the knowledge economy at the cost of IP holders and we get to claim the efficiency gains from centralization as the result of technology and force governments to choose “teh future” (and investments ) over maintaining copyright - a massive value reallocation in society
Maybe we can disband the effective altruism cult that helped push it now.
I scanned a page of a particular book, and several models recognized it was from that book. And it almost felt that it resurgitated the content that it knew than real OCR.
Intelligence is compression.
And frankly, if this means the end of copyright: good riddance.
It won't mean the end of copyright, at most it will just shift the balance of power from one set of giant corporations to another.
Anthropic (predictably) issued many DMCA takedown requests after the claude code leak.
Copyright for me, but not for thee.
they didn’t touch the LLM python conversion though which tells you it’s not that simple.
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right .."
Copyright needs to exist, but we need to go back to its roots.
Everyone forgets that it exists to promote progress. Nothing else. The ability to profit from it exists only to serve those ends.
Anything which does not serve to promote the progress of the arts and sciences should not be protected, and "limited times" never meant "until Walt Disney says so."
The whole "death of the author, plus 70 years" is absolutely insane. It basically ensures that any kind of derivative work is impossible while anyone who witnessed its original release is still alive, meaning that all but a handful of works will have been forgotten and lost. And for what, so that six generations of publishing company shareholders can freeload off an ever-decreasing flow of residuals?
If we truly wanted to protect and promote the arts, we would've stuck to the original "14~28 years since publication".
Would you elaborate your argument? IP protections such as copyright exist for the express purpose of promoting the sharing of information. If patent law disappeared, everyone would keep their inventions private and work to obfuscate them as much as possible.
Killing copyright would essentially do the same - and if you think clickbait is bad now, removal of copyright would destroy the economic incentive to investing any effort into content.
Copyright is what facilitates copyleft. Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.
It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.
RMS on copyright "This means that copyright no longer fits in with the technology as it used to. Even if the words of copyright law had not changed, they wouldn't have the same effect. Instead of an industrial regulation on publishers controlled by authors, with the benefits set up to go to the public, it is now a restriction on the general public, controlled mainly by the publishers, in the name of the authors.
In other words, it's tyranny. It's intolerable and we can't allow it to continue this way.
As a result of this change, [copyright] is no longer easy to enforce, no longer uncontroversial, and no longer beneficial"
from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.en...
First, if we assume Stallman is human, we have to grant he will not be right about everything (impossible on logical grounds and supported by the fact that he publicly changed his views on certain things in the past).
Second, when it comes to action, he only argues that copyright should have reduced power, which we can all agree with; he does not appear to argue for the death of copyright. Death of copyright would seem counter-productive, unless it also implied the death of corporate ability to withhold the source from the users and many other things.
You will note that the very text you linked to is copyrighted. There’s a reason for that.
And yet he is.
> Copyright is what facilitates copyleft.
Chesterson's fence. The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright, not the other way around.
> Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.
Linux became popular because of the persistent effort of Linus & the Linux community into making the kernel better, not because of copyleft.
> It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.
There are similar corporate interests who profit off of hoarding decades-old works so they can charge fees to what should've been in the public domain, under the original durations that should've stayed (28/14 years).
What has resulted from the endless extensions of the original terms has been the societal lobotomization of human creativity, with an untold number of works now being forever lost simply because they were derived from what should've been in the public domain.
When having lived in such a society, and recognizing existing copyright laws as the reason why it is creatively in such a state, the celebration of its destruction should not be treated as illogical.
Copyright is what enables free and open licenses such as Creative Commons and every version/variant of the GPL. Without copyright, what would become of these licenses, and movements that have espoused them?
Copyleft is an abuse of copyright to pervert its intention. Copyright's intent was that you could not copy things freely, and copyleft is to ensure you can.
If there is no copyright, then you can copy things freely.
All that we need after that to realize the GPL ideal is to legally mandate that people have a right to access and modify source code of software/hardware they use, i.e. the government needs to mandate that Apple releases the iOS kernel and source code and that iPhones can be unlocked and custom kernels flashed, that John Deere must provide the tractor's source code, that my fridge releases its GPL-violating linux patches, etc etc.
You have the right to free speech, the right to a lawyer, and the right to source code. Simply amend the bill of rights.
The open source world would still exist if everything was public domain. It would be smaller because nobody would be forced to contribute but the dirty secret of GPL is that forced contribution virtually never happened anyway.
I do find it facinating that people don't realize the highest compression isn't the artifacts.. but what makes the artifacts.. a synthetic "mind".
This is why we see evidence of emotional structures: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function
This is why we see generalized introspection (limited in the models studied before people point it out, which they love to): https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection
Because the most compact way to recreate the breadth of written human experience is shockingly to have analogs to the systems that made it in the first place.