Posted by ridesisapis 4 days ago
In other words: AI stole someone’s soul with its own metallic claws! Out with the devil machines.
So it seems reasonable to infer that the submitter felt that emphasizing the AI angle would be the part worth discussing.
The article fully embraces these weakly-connected insinuations:
"But it’s not surprising to see it coming from an agency that has leaned into generative AI so heavily. As they proudly explain, “Every page on this site was written in Claude” using an “author persona” that they call “Q.” [ADVERTISEMENT FOR CLAUDE (yes, really)] "What’s missing here is consent, which feels like the original sin of AI. As I’ve written about many times before, generative AI models are all trained on a massive corpus of human-authored works without attribution, consent, or compensation, extracting value from creators while centralizing power among a tiny handful of massive tech companies."
No-one is seriously fighting the tyranny of copyright that covers basically the whole world. Even AI companies just retreated and hid after they got what they needed, like a shy teenager with empty wallet who still craves access culture, with no real attempts to change the system.
Meta is only putting up a token fight because it has been directly sued, but we all know how this ends: they will eventually bend the knee. They accessed human culture for practical, not moral reasons.
That's clear evidence that human culture was sucked dry and is no longer needed. OpenAI won't fight to open access to Anna's Archive because they no longer can get any benefit from using it in training. They can pay reddit and such for trickle of their fresh drivel. But the usefulness of any book ever written ran out some years ago and new ones are just riffs of the old ones so not really worthy of pursuing.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is the present and the future and human output becomes something not worth (or legal) to even cite in any interesting volume.
This story has practically nothing to do with AI. It could have been done 20 years ago, the crappy Midjouney illustrations and generative text interface merely add insult to injury.
The title made me think that he released a paperback that competes with the original.
> If you agree with copyright at all
The only part of copyright I agree with is right to inalienable attribution (which the rest of copyright makes often hard for purely financial reasons). So whoever made this silly little thing gets a pass from me.
What is your basis for this belief?
Did you read the part about the obviously intentionally-added affiliate links to the original book?
> The only part of copyright I agree with is right to inalienable attribution [...] So whoever made this silly little thing gets a pass from me.
Did you read the part about the fake site appearing higher in search results for the author's own name?
My experience inflicted stupidity.
> Did you read the part about the obviously intentionally-added affiliate links to the original book?
I find it nice that they linked to the original book. For every x earned let the original author earn many times more. It's probably a better deal than the author got from their legal publisher.
> Did you read the part about the fake site appearing higher in search results for the author's own name?
And who's fault is that? Google? Or this little slop maker that I'm (again stupidly) assuming is not a SEO hacker.
We've all been there.
> I find it nice that they linked to the original book. For every x earned let the original author earn many times more. > It's probably a better deal than the author got from their legal publisher.
These two statements sound contradictory to me.
> And who's fault is that? Google? Or this little slop maker that I'm (again stupidly) assuming is not a SEO hacker.
Why not both? I think there's plenty of blame to go around.
Also, the publisher who presumably convinced the author that it would be a good idea to assign them exclusive rights. The affiliate link the blog post refers to as "the author's own" actually belongs to the publisher.
How so?
All numbers made up. I don't have any idea what they might actually be. I'm just presenting my logic with an example, in service of hopefully better understanding.
I'm sorry, what? What exactly do you think is happening here?
https://webflow.com/@qontour?msockid=0946eab0f6bf6a55192dfcc...
If that doesn't look like a marooned freelancer down on their luck I don't what does.
I mean, what's your read on this?
Is this a person who secretly hates the book and the author and re-published its contents because he knows that people who have the content will never, ever purchase a book, no matter how much they like it? And he provides the links to buy the book only for plausible deniability and makes them affiliates for even more plausible deniability fully knowing nobody will ever now buy this book?
Or is he a grifter trying to earn heaps of money with affiliate links to one obscure book providing it with better visibility through SEO tricks Google is powerless against even though they are in this business for nearly three decades? And he also published the full text of the book because of ... how does this helps him earn more money exactly? I ran out of ideas.
And the most important question. Is this person a worthy target of the internet wrath?
This isn't Reddit and we aren't "the internet". We aren't brigading and organizing harassment or whatever here.
That is why the particulars of the web designer's personal life and state of mind are mostly uninteresting.
We get to discuss anything that doesn't get moderated.
> This isn't Reddit and we aren't "the internet".
It's a reddit for techno snobs and we are the internet as much as any other part of the internet.
> That is why the particulars of the web designer's personal life and state of mind are mostly uninteresting.
Depends on the perspective. IP law and it's fake aspirations for a morality that's voluntarily mob supported by a small but very vocal group of people is what's interesting for me. And who's being ground by it also kind of matters more than what imagined offences agains the letter of the "law" they commited to trigger that.
Let the humans use the internet however they want to, and now it's the age of AI, so let humans do whatever they want using AI.
I don't have the answers or a remediation plan for this. But could see this coming eons ago.
And the future is only going to get darker from here. May God help us!
It's ultimately a fruitless endeavor to go after because you would have to prove that you can use the said AI tool to create the exact word by word copy and that is going to be very expensive and shaky in court
I think its time that we stop extracting rent from outdated copyright laws. Once AI gets good enough you aren't going to be bothering with them anyway. All copyright law does is put money in the pockets of those that created the law and a portion of that goes to the creator.
Copyright laws are basically tax on the poor.
Do you really think either of these companies or their lawyers would say something like this?