From my perspective, the bad actors are the corporations and greedy people who turned copyright into a perpetual rent on IP. If copyright terms and IP laws were reasonable, I'd be 100% with you. But the idea that a novel written in 1940 is still not public domain, just so the heirs (or more likely, corporate purchasers of the rights) can continue to profit on a work that was itself but on the shoulders of thousands of years of civilization? Screw that.

The Walt Disneys of the world screwed themselves on this one. If copyright was still the 20+20 it started as, and if the bulk of people being "stolen" from (don't get me started on using theft to refer to IP), then I think most people would be much more up in arms over the AI industry.

But, in a world with sane copyright laws, perhaps AI companies would have different approaches. Today, if they want anything after 1930, they're either breaking laws or in uncharted territory.

And siloing our knowledge is a silly response even if you are a copyright maximalist.

> the largest theft of intellectual property in human history. Every digitised creative work, whether in the public domain or not was taken, often outright pirated, with the explicit intention of being able to trivially produce compelling forgeries

Is it theft?

Does knowledge belong to a person, or to the civilization? After all, their knowledge could not have come from nothing, as they too stand on the shoulders of giants - all of us do.

If we took the different route - opening knowledge up instead of focusing on gatekeeping - we'd probably allow people to achieve more.

Multiple times I've hit the gate when it was not necessary. Just yesterday: - Want to read a research paper? Pay up. - Want to access tax funded satellite images? Pay up. - Want to dig through some old parts of the public archives? Pay up. - Want to read an old publication that might contain knowledge, written for the public, which somehow ended up in a collection that requires you to pay up just so you can read 1 paragraph from a 188 paperbck or verify a certain catalogue number exists? Well well, open up your wallet.

In which case are we talking about theft?

Someone's NYT bestselling novel? Those are mostly so cookie cutter it ain't hard to copy them without an AI.

Music? How many times have musicians riffed and ripped off of one another? And now someone can just more easily create a similar song/tune.

Art? You cannot copy a physical art piece. You can reproduce it, but you cannot copy it - it won't have the same value as the original. Even in cases such as Warhol's mass produced art, the original prints have much more value than a random print on a dollar store t-shirt.

And after all, even Google and Open AI are sharing their models for free. You can use Gemini and ChatGPT without paying a dime to any of them. And they are also so kind to share the knowledge on how to build these magic machines AND even give you their machines for free so you can train one of your own.

So I wouldn't call all of this "the largest theft", more like "the largest liberation".

> The lineage of every LLM of relevance today was the largest theft of intellectual property in human history.

I can't say how strongly and completely I think this framing should be rejected.

What is the point of knowledge if not to learn from.

> Physical works are being enthusiastically destroyed

This makes me sad.

> I'm sympathetic to the idea that knowledge should be free but that isn't possible when bad actors like Google and OpenAI are preying on the commons.

Google and OpenAI are expanding access to the commons like nothing before.

interesting to me is, that the small entities are not protecting their gardens and are freely sharing it usually. and mostly the large corpos are building walls.

>We are siloing our knowledge out of desperation.

but why does knowledge need to be siloed? elsevier has every right to make a deal with the author of the research and put it behind a paywall or whatever they'd like to do to keep their multi-billion dollar business going, but is this something we should be defending and celebrating as a "solution" to prevent LLMs from making knowledge more available?

and in this instance, why should a researcher that is probably funded by public money, care if openai is disseminating their research?

> I'm sympathetic to the idea that knowledge should be free but that isn't possible when bad actors like Google and OpenAI are preying on the commons.

This doesn't make sense. If knowledge were (legally) free, then what Google and OpenAI are doing would be fine, no?

Their current transgression is that they're violating laws and conventions about knowledge not being free.

As the tech matures folks will align around RAG with authenticated data sources meaning the models will create demand for licensing of originals that did not previously exist.

Lots of this research work is paid for by the People - via government wealth transfers. The knowledge should rightly be distributed to the People.

If you want to argue that the cultivators of new knowledge should be treated better, I am in agreement, they should receive a greater share of rewards.

The real victims of a shift to open knowledge society would be the publishing cartels, and I can't say I'd feel too bad about it.

Theft/stolen implies it's been taken and the owner deprived of it. Pirated or copied is more appropriate, but still not quite exact as it's been encoded into what amounts to lossy memory. If I ask a person to tell me about a paywalled article, they'll share what they can remember and likely get some facts wrong. An LLM is the same (these days; GPT-3 was another story).

I do agree that the methods of obtaining much of the material (eg. the published works torrents) were stupidly wrong and they should pay for that. However, legally acquired media being "read" by the training process isn't so different than it being read by a voracious reader: it's lossily encoded in (what amounts to) memories.

The insane scraping levels and behaviors ... not wrong. If only there were companies who already did that responsibly they could contract with for data. Hmm. (But they have to "own" it, as is the SV fashion these days.)

Sorry but just because IP has somehow become the current "thing" on the self-described 'left' is not going to convince me that corporate IP & knowledge restriction is actually a good thing and elsevier are the good guys.

> exponentially increasing the cost of hosting

We're on a technical forum, everyone knows the cost of hosting plaintext and what an exponential is.

If TOS is the main concern, then surly a “Are you over 18? Yes/No” style page should be enough.

Who says it wasn't? American AI providers are sticklers for making sure their users don't colors outside of the lines.

Well the Google SWE didn't make a mistake, the media made a mistake in misreporting it, and we at HN are making a mistake by giving it undue attention.

We are reading this article because it continues and amplifies the AI hype machine, and no other reason. If a motivated amateur had made the discovery through any other means, and motivated amateurs do things like this all the time, then it would never have gotten an article, never shown up on the HN feed.

I would be very surprised if LLMs were adequate for doing archaeological lit review. My experience is that you often find sites documented halfway through a stack of undigitized records in a physical archive somewhere, and it's usually a verbal description that's difficult to localize to a specific location. Heck, I've even contributed to the problem by finding new sites as we're packing up camp, when I didn't have time to properly document them outside field notes.

Why burn compute on that? He reached out to the Mexican Government and asked them if they knew about it - they said they didn't have it in the database. The discovery is relatively new (2025) so maybe sitting in a queue at the central office waiting to get into the system, not necessarily anyone's "mistake". On the contrary, the excitement gives visibility to the active research going on in this area, which is a positive outcome.

And then another agent swarm to make sure that the research swarm didn't hallucinate any false positive matches!

LLMs are great, and they keep getting better, but I'm so tired of current shortcomings being blamed on the prompter "holding it wrong".

Yeah we devs call that deduplication.

Not so fable, this llm thing if it's missing a literal pyramid in the room

A year or two ago, I wasted over a month on side projects that I thought were novel. Now, another LLM scrutinizes any idea in an area I don't know well ("I have just received this from a junior researcher on my team. Scrutinize it very critically. Don't hold back. This early stage is the best time for honest, harsh feedback. Don't forget to include the analysis of X, Y, Z in your report.").

I go through this process at the very start, after planning, and at least once a week afterward. With AI, the landscape can change dramatically during one week. I am not being hyperbolic.

A fancy autocomplete still. Said with no intent to disparage. If the prior art hasn’t been pulled into the context window, it’s not surprising for the completion to not take it into consideration.

I enjoy the contrite rationalizations and turns of phrase LLMs use when encountering a discrepancy.

"Prior art has reduced the novelty of the discovery" is a great one

It’s like a shell game. It’s likely overfitting on its training data.

Yes, and I think this point and the post you're replying to are the central fact of this story, which the OP should acknowledge.

My own attempts to use agents to develop new historical knowledge [1] point to this as being both a very promising and interesting domain, but also one where the agents reliably and repeatedly make claims of novelty that are based on having read ~80% of existing research. Obviously to make an actual well-grounded claim of novelty you basically need to approach 100%.

This is partly why math is so tractable for this sort of thing - mathematics papers tend to be publicly available and searchable, whereas for history, it might be the case that you have an agent swarm duplicating a find that some French person in the 1870s previously reported in an obscure undigitized book.

[1] Detailed more here: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/using-opus-55-to-discover-...

you can see they're obviously the same structures in the images. just search for the author and you'll find the paper.

The approach did work, but the discovery isn't new. Independent re-discovery happens all the time science.

[dead]

I told my agent to bypass Cloudflare captcha's and it happily did so.

He expects me to click this link with my own finger? And then read it with my own eyes?

He checked with the Mexican government before claiming it was new, which is reasonable due diligence surely?!

Don't look beyond the veil, you'll strain your eyes.