The thing about screaming and waving your arms is it makes it hard for people to connect with the argument.

A quick scan shows a lack of rigor that usually points towards zealotry rather than a reasoned position: you imply that models are only trained on copyrighted work, you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place, you don’t distinguish between training on an 80 year old copyrighted work whose author is dead and rights are just in a company portfolio, and you assert that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has ever done anything altruistic.

If you enjoy the screaming, have at it. If you want to persuade people, dialing it down a few notches and at least giving token acknowledgement that nuance exists would help.

I don’t see any screaming and waving arms in the parent. It’s a passionate but well reasoned and carefully presented case. If that is to be dismissed as zealotry we’ll all need to stick to writing journal papers to avoid the label.

If anything your “copyright forever” drumbeat and incorrect read of “only being trained on copyrighted works” are more hyperbolic than anything you’re responding to.

Also, the models from China are only being released open weights as competitive positioning against the globally more used competition. If the Chinese companies had a dominant market position they’d be falling prey to the same forces that have caused OpenAI and Anthropic to behave the way they do.

> you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place

1. You're mischaracterizing and exaggerating the policies to falsely support your point. Things go into the public domain all the time: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/.

2. It's not like the model companies had the attitude "oh copyright is too long, we disagree on the term." Their attitude was precisely: "We want it and we don't give a fuck about you. Published yesterday, published 50 years ago? We will take it, we won't pay for it, and we will use it to replace you and make ourselves rich. Don't like it? Suck my data center."

"Quick scan"? It's a few paragraphs. You can't read a few paragraphs? What's the point of replying when you don't even know what you're replying to?

> you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place, you don’t distinguish between training on an 80 year old copyrighted work whose author is dead and rights are just in a company portfolio

You're describing what Pirate Party proponents have been championing since the start. Not that I disagree with that notion. Copyright law needs to be changed for modern times. But the laws as currently exist are what they are.

> The thing about screaming and waving your arms is it makes it hard for people to connect with the argument.

The question is whether people like Altman, Amodei, Musk are part of the common case in Hanlon's razor or they want to trigger emotional responses to gain agency in the mess.

If you would like to discuss the nuances you're welcome to elaborate. If the end result of this nuanced is they get to stay kings of the crab bucket and reap greater and greater rewards it's reasoning at both ends to get the middle you want.

> A quick scan shows a lack of rigor that usually points towards zealotry rather than a reasoned position

You're doing the same thing:

> you imply that models are only trained on copyrighted work

Actually, they said "The technology is built off wholesale theft of protected works without compensation". The word "only" never appears here, nor is it really implied.

> you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place

This is pure "whataboutism". Both things can be bad.

I mean, you didn't address wealth inequality or global warning.

have you considered that you're not the person this argument is trying to convince?

Such investment in technicalities to undermine the above post could itself speak of zealotry to a certain side in itself if one was prone to cynicism.

Not to mention that those nuances, as you state, mean very little. To say it was trained solely on copyrighted material or to say it was trained in large part on copyrighted material doesn't much move the needle over the fact it was done, a lot. Making a distinction between an "80 year old copyrighted work" or a recent one is also moot as it a matter of public record they themselves didn't make that distinction and happily fed on both kinds.

On to not being able to say they didn't ever do anything altruistic, well animal rights and welfare had great strides under the Nazi regime, not sure it evens out the rest. The same logic can be applied to the current state of affairs, doing a little good does not even out a lot of bad.

In closing, nuance is relevant when its relevant, after that its just being pedantic.

I think you can realize how ludicrous it is to invoke 80 year old copyrights for a product whose main use case is coding. How much code from 1946 was it lawfully ingesting?

Get real, you think LLMs got to where they are by training on 80 year old works? Your point is technically true, just basically irrelevant for LLM training.

If you really believe OpenAI, Anthropic, or any corporation for that matter has done something truly altruistic then I have a bridge to sell you.

there's persuasion, and then there's inspiring people already on your side. the upvotes/downvotes will give you a clue who the audience turns out to be. it was an upvote from me.

> If you enjoy the screaming, have at it. If you want to persuade people, dialing it down a few notches and at least giving token acknowledgement that nuance exists would help.

You’re not going sufficiently far back in comment histories (or using AI summaries of it from existing search tooling), or viewing the entire body of work I’ve written, shared, or discussed about all of those topics for the past twenty years.

I scream and wave my arms because nobody cared for decorum. I cut to the meat of the argument because nobody cares for context. Hell, this is the comments section for crying out loud; nobody is expecting a nuanced treatise about systemic interactions of multiple market and policy forces that resulted in this specific outcome in the comments section, even on HN.

Further, I suspect most folks here don’t actually care. I scream and wave my arms because it’s actually had the best results in outreach thus far - people see the flailing, read the bullet point, check the history, and somehow decide to reach out to me for more context (which I am always happy to give). When greeted with a wall of plaintext on an algorithmic site, the trained human response is to basically fuck off and go find a dopamine hit elsewhere, not stick around and read someone’s shoulda-been-a-blog-post on a social media comment page.

For all the crowing about “decorum” and “professionalism” and “intelligent debate”, the grim reality is that such concepts can actually detract from arguments by making it seem like we have time to discuss these further, that things aren’t that bad yet, that we can really think this through.

To which I say: no, we cannot. This language is a dire threat, it is a crimson red flag of intent to deliberately cause harm. You do not make an impassioned and polite argument about the nature of market forces or copyright policy with a mugger brandishing a gun, you do something about it.

The latent space must have property boundaries as real and respected as those in the physical domain, lest we lose our ability to capitalize on them.

For now, and into the future, I hope that we protect that unique and novel idea of an anthropomorphic mouse, which should be expanded to cover all forms of anthropomorphism, if we're being honest with ourselves.

And, to that point, the protection of that idea should also extend to the (clearly infringing) hit 90s YA book series Animorphs, as it somewhat sounds like anthropomorphism.

Protect their rights! Anything produced within the conceptual acreage that has been clearly marked and claimed is theft!