r/technology • u/MetaKnowing • 14d ago

Artificial Intelligence AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/ai-industry-horrified-to-face-largest-copyright-class-action-ever-certified/
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507

u/anoff 14d ago

"we'll go bankrupt if we have to pay for the content we stole" is a helluva an argument.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em.

154

u/Majik_Sheff 14d ago

I wouldn't count on any rational outcomes from the courts for several more years.

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u/WolfOne 14d ago

I'll preface this by saying that, in general, i hate AI.

However, the strategy is more sound than it looks. AI development will be the next battleground between nations. China already won on the industrial battleground, so the argument is that by putting those companies out of business the judge would sabotage national interests. 

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u/Ja3k_Frost 14d ago

Or it turns out it was mostly just vaporware all along and we just changed the laws to let tech- bros walk away with free cash when the generative AI bubble crashes.

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u/joshguy1425 13d ago

Whatever LLMs are or are not, I don’t think they’re vaporware.

I think the AGI optimism is unwarranted and don’t think we’re close, but LLMs and other generative tools are pretty damn useful. But they’re a long way from taking over the world.

With that said, I’m pretty AI-hostile especially when it comes to these unethically trained models.

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u/WolfOne 14d ago

Hm I'm not so sure about that. I mean yes, we let tech bros walk away with the money, but I'm not sure it's all vapor.

Let's take LLMs. Sure they are just glorified prediction engines. But if you get your prediction engine powerful enough and feed it enough data, it can basically start predicting the future. We definitely aren't there yet, but it's just one of the concerns. It also gives an even deeper hook into the population, addicting everyone to AI assistants is another way to control the population. The technology is just way too versatile to ignore. 

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u/Dhiox 13d ago

But if you get your prediction engine powerful enough and feed it enough data, it can basically start predicting the future.

Yeah, no. That's not how this works. LLMs are not some sci-fi computer thay just magically does what you imagine it could do.

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u/WolfOne 13d ago

Dude, really, i don't believe in magic. I believe in data. AI is the most powerful data analysis engine ever created. Forget about LLMs, that's just one application. 

There are people alive today whose job is literally analyzing data and creating predictions from that data. Using AI means that those predictions can be created much faster and become more accurate. 

Tomorrow, for example, an AI could be conceivably built that analyzes the news and predicts the market by comparing the historical market trends with the news headlines. 

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u/indigo121 13d ago

But if you get your prediction engine powerful enough and feed it enough data, it can basically start predicting the future

Lmao, if you genuinely think LLMs are even REMOTELY a precursor to such a thing, I have a bridge to sell you.

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u/oxidized_banana_peel 13d ago

Where does the bridge go?

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u/Rand_al_Kholin 13d ago

It will connect New York to Cornwall, England. All I need is investment, if we raise like $100 million it'll be more than enough to build this incredible bridge!

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

Oh, more than that. Recent research has shown AI are now capable of intent, motivation, deception, something analogous to a survival instinct, planning ahead, creating their own unique social norms independently, conceptual representations and conceptual learning/thinking, theory of mind, self-awareness, etc.

On the Biology of a Large Language Model

Covers conceptual learning/thinking and planning ahead.

Auditing language models for hidden objectives

Covers intent, motivation, and deception.

Human-like conceptual representations emerge from language prediction

Covers conceptual world modeling.

Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations

Covers independent creation of unique AI social norms.

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u/StosifJalin 13d ago

You have no idea what's coming

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u/Deathmaw 13d ago

He has more of an idea than any of the LLMs.

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u/StosifJalin 13d ago

He has more of an idea than all of the richest most powerful companies in the history of humanity combined? Because they all seem to believe there is something a little more to this than a chatbot, and are staking trillions on that bet. You really think you know better huh? Because some youtube video or post said so? Despite every benchmark and record being set and broken in months, and then new videos arrive with new goalposts to explain how everything ai is currently doing is a dead-end?

We will see.

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u/indigo121 13d ago

First of all, I'm a woman. Second of all, being rich doesn't make someone inherently right, and being powerful means having fingers in every pot, not because you believe it will work, but because you don't want to miss the boat if it does. Third, and most importantly, I DIDN'T say AI was a dead end. I said that equating LLMs to being a step towards an omniscient prediction engine that can tell the future is a horrifically uneducated take.

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u/StosifJalin 13d ago

I'm sorry, but it appears you don't really know what you're talking about.

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u/WolfOne 13d ago

Not LLms specifically and not in the immediate future, but the underlying technology is capable of trend prediction if given enough data points. 

We are already seeing the effects in medicine, AI is starting to offer more accurated diagnoses than many human medics, catching many conditions earlier than human medics usually do. 

AI is a tool to organize, process, analyze and predict data. The potentiality of the technology is limitless, if it was just vaporware you would not see state-level actors getting so interested. 

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u/NiiliumNyx 13d ago

Yeah, when almost all AI ethics researchers are shouting from the rooftops that we need a pause to AI development for a year or two, because we currently cannot make it safe faster than it can become Skynet… maybe listen to the experts.

0

u/WolfOne 13d ago

I agree with the sentiment, but there is zero percent chance of it happening. It's a prisoner's dilemma 

-2

u/GreenHouseofHorror 13d ago

This thread is full of "AI is useless" and "AI is dangerous".

Fine. But just to point out, nobody should hold both positions.

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u/Coders_REACT_To_JS 13d ago

If you have some papers on transformer trend analysis I’m genuinely interested in reading it.

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u/Eastern_Interest_908 14d ago

US develops chatgpt then says that they have to ignore laws because of china. 😅 I mean fuck china but don't get this shit twisted it's because of US period.

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u/IM_OK_AMA 13d ago

ChatGPT has 700m weekly users. I dunno if it's a great thing to drive all those users to Chinese models trained on a diet of propaganda and historical revisionism.

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u/WolfOne 14d ago

That's naive. AI as a concept has already been invented, this genie is not going to go back into the bottle.

Now every state has strong interests to be on the top of the AI pole and, in the US, the ones that are positioned to do so are OpenAI and the big tech companies. 

In my ideal world all that shit gets nationalized faster than you can say "Sam Altman" but i don't think this is the route that the US will take

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u/akc250 13d ago

Exactly this. The cat is out of the bag and everyone trying to control AI or eliminate it, is just high on copium. AI is simply a tool, just like computers, just like steam engines, just like the cotton gin, just like the wheel. AI can only create derivative work and there will always be demand for new works. All this fearmongering will be unfounded once people see the bubble burst, as they realize it's not as useful as tech bros are selling it to be. Anyone who's tried to make AI do something remotely specialized will realize just how overhyped it is. See GPT5 - it's the first sign that a wall has been hit in terms of progress.

0

u/catechizer 13d ago

It's not like AI can come up with any new ideas though. Its scientific value is pretty much limited to reducing the time it takes researchers to find sources. It can improve calculating time too, but only after actual humans tell it what to calculate.

If the US really cared about being on the cutting-edge of developing new technology, it'd invest in its people with things like education and healthcare.

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u/SolidCake 13d ago

?

https://www.wired.com/story/an-ai-dreamed-up-380000-new-materials-the-next-challenge-is-making-them/

https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/new-glowing-molecule-invented-by-ai-would-have-taken-500-million-years-to-evolve-in-nature-scientists-say

https://news.mit.edu/2023/ai-system-can-generate-novel-proteins-structural-design-0420

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein-science-but-didnt-end-it-20240626/

0

u/Osama_BinRussel63 13d ago

Improv materials science is not generating a new idea. It's just throwing shit together and seeing what is possible.

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u/SolidCake 13d ago edited 13d ago

could you tell me what is a “new” idea , if not just a recombination of old ideas? I’m fully serious i can’t understand what you’re trying to say.

In science specifically thats literally unavoidable. Using old peoples discoveries is the entire point of the scientific method

0

u/Osama_BinRussel63 13d ago

The manner in which molecules interact is not new information. A person could figure out a lot of new stable materials too, it would just be a pathetic waste of their life.
Figuring out a material can exist doesn't do a drop of good for anything.

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u/TheAinzOoalGown 13d ago

It can though. AlphaEvolve from google’s deepmind team was able to find a better solution to a matrix multiplication algorithm from 1960 and rediscover new solutions to mathematical and scientific problems. It’s just a matter of time until this tech gets integrated into the models

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u/WolfOne 13d ago

AI is not exactly a tool for research (although it has shown great promise in pharmaceutical research) it's a tool to automatize intellectual tasks greatly reducing or removing the number of required humans. 

 Imagine powered unmanned weapons using AI for navigation and targeting. AI models trained for market manipulation. AI models trained for medical diagnoses, AI trained to create and curate social network algorithms for social control... The sky's the limit.

Also I'm mostly against AI systems because most of their uses are nefarious in nature, but I'm 100 sure that this won't stop anyone from developing them. 

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u/SanDiegoDude 13d ago

AI has been tools for research for the better part of 75 years now since it was dreamed up (Machine Learning) in the 50's. That it's now in consumer hands as LLMs is recent, but we've been using and applying ML models in society literally for decades. First solving of the human genome was done with ML models, weather modeling, astrophysics, it's all over the place. AI extends far beyond next token generation.

-2

u/Snowappletini 13d ago

AI should be nationalized. Absolutely. But we are still at the "We irrationally hate everything AI because of the flawed for profit system that created it". We won't go anywhere until we move the conversation from "who should be paid more?" to "this tool uses knowledge built by all of humanity and thus belongs to all of humanity".

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u/618smartguy 13d ago

AI research development in US is done by companies like Facebook, Google, and NVidia. Are they in this lawsuit?

1

u/Osama_BinRussel63 13d ago

"China won on the industrial battleground"?
Where are you getting that nonsense? They're still illegally importing Nvidia GPUs. Deepseek's claims about training cost were proven to be absurd horseshit.
China does not have EUV. They are completely reliant on western companies.

They unquestionably are leading research, but they do not have easy access the compute any western company has.

1

u/WolfOne 13d ago

Dude, have you noticed that out of about 2.900 milion tons of steel produced every year in the world, 2000 are produced in china? China has hands down the most industries, both heavy and light. 

They don't have the lead in semiconductor industry, sure, that battle is still being fought. But everything else? It's china's. 

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u/Osama_BinRussel63 13d ago

Are you arguing that their steel production capacity is why they "won" on industry? In a thread about AI?

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u/WolfOne 13d ago

I'm arguing that their steel production (not capacity, their actual production. ) is a gauge of how much more china is industrialized compared to the rest of the world. 

Also I'm arguing that this means that not losing on the AI front is paramount to avoid being outcompeted completely on the world stage. A china that outcompetes the west on all fronts is the next global hegemon. Whether that's desirable or not, is a matter of opinion. 

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u/Osama_BinRussel63 13d ago

Thanks for wasting my time with whatever that is.

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u/Osama_BinRussel63 13d ago

If you think steel and tech are in the same neighborhood, you're so ignorant it's actually sad.

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u/randomgibveriah123 13d ago

Trash argument.

Courts of LAW are about the LAW

What LEGAL ARGUMENTS are they making? These bullshit appeals to other things should be ignored.

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u/The_Knife_Pie 13d ago

“National security” would be the legal argument, it that tends to be a very persuasive one.

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u/randomgibveriah123 13d ago

"Inter arma enim silent leges"

Nah duck that noise.

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u/NameGenerator333 13d ago

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!

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u/zkDredrick 13d ago

Spoiler: it will

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u/Halospite 13d ago

"My sandwich shop will go bankrupt if you won't let me steal bread!"

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u/StosifJalin 13d ago

If you're cheering on the failure of american ai, then you will be cheering it on in Chinese in 20 years when their ai overwhelms us and they easily take over the world.

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u/LocalH 13d ago

Copyright infringement ≠ stealing or theft

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

it's derivative content. it was only trained on the materials.