OpenAI execs feared LibGen quote about 'sketchy russian website' would show up on Hacker News

Court filings unsealed in Authors Guild v. OpenAI quote one OpenAI researcher writing: 'I was just worried about optics' because the phrase 'openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website' showing up on HN would be unfortunate.
Microsoft knew OpenAI used pirated text from LibGen as early as April 2019, when Sam Altman and Dario Amodei presented an early GPT-3 to Bill Gates and disclosed the LibGen use to Gates and CTO Kevin Scott.
OpenAI Policy Director Jack Clark wrote in May 2020 'Our work in this area will make people unemployed' and predicted the company would ignore artists' worries and release anyway.
Tarun Gogineni, hired in 2022 to raise model writing quality, aimed to have GPT write the 'last two books' of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and called author complaints 'acceptable economic disruption'.
Plaintiffs including The Authors Guild, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Franzen and David Baldacci argue OpenAI's GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books.

Hacker News 의견들

Court filings just quoted an OpenAI researcher saying: I was just worried about optics, meaning openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website showing up on HN would be unfortunate. Just one of several quotes dumped from the Authors Guild suit.

Most orgs already cover the need to STFU in their onboarding material, especially how personal comments can't represent the company. This lawsuit will definitely show up in the next version of that deck.

This is a lobby organisation pushing only the pieces they like. Sketchy russian website? It's a library for sharing books and articles, some of them arguably public domain because taxpayers funded them. People losing jobs to automation is also nothing new.

A lobby organisation? Please. A single author can't afford to fight a multi billion dollar company alone. And the sketchy russian website quote comes from OpenAI employees themselves.

Any source that it was a library? Sounds more like a Russian torrent site to me.

Do you have any evidence they're a lobby organisation, as opposed to OpenAI which spends millions actually hiring lobbyists?

Kind of sad this is the top comment. Remember Aaron Swartz and what happened to him? Big tech gets away with so much more.

It's confusing because the article style is mess, but the sketchy russian website bit is a direct quote from Anthropic's Sam McCandlish. Dario Amodei called it sketchy too. Saying that while running what's arguably the largest copyright theft operation in history is wild.

Sketchy Russian website is Sam McCandlish's words (at OpenAI back then), not the Author's Guild framing. And defending it on the basis that some LibGen books are public domain is like saying people use The Pirate Bay for Linux ISOs.

And OpenAI isn't a lobby organisation? Also you clearly didn't read it: sketchy russian website is a direct quote.

Incredible mental gymnastics. Some books arguably should be public domain, therefore it's fine to take from an 80TB library holding a huge share of every book ever published, including millions with zero public funding.

The real issue is principles and hypocrisy. You don't enclose the commons. OpenAI and Anthropic captured it, locked the model, and restricted outputs.

I once pulled corpora off LibGen and it's overwhelmingly in-copyright textbooks. The public domain framing doesn't hold up at all.

Does it bother anyone that a company openly announces plans to make thousands of writers jobless purely for profit? It contradicts the OpenAI mission line about AGI benefiting all of humanity, and the speed of it is the problem, not just the end state.

It's wild how much weight destroying jobs carries as an argument. Car makers knew they'd wreck the horse and buggy trade. Every better way of doing things displaces the businesses built on the old one.

Why is book piracy suddenly a better way of doing things?

I wouldn't put AI at the same level as the industrial revolution. Automation replaced discrete tasks, AI replaces humans outright. What is left for people to do?

Funny how this argument wasn't popular back when the internet made publishers and other copyright rent seekers redundant. Back then we just got harsher enforcement.

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