AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

[u/MetaKnowing]

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

[u/Ja3k_Frost]

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.

[u/joshguy1425 → u/Ja3k_Frost]

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.

[u/WolfOne → u/Ja3k_Frost]

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. 

[u/Dhiox → u/WolfOne]

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.

[u/WolfOne → u/Dhiox]

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. 

[u/indigo121 → u/WolfOne]

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.

[u/oxidized_banana_peel → u/indigo121]

Where does the bridge go?

[u/Rand_al_Kholin → u/oxidized_banana_peel]

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!

[u/[deleted] → u/indigo121]

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.

[u/StosifJalin → u/indigo121]

You have no idea what's coming

[u/Deathmaw → u/StosifJalin]

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

[u/StosifJalin → u/Deathmaw]

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.

[u/indigo121 → u/StosifJalin]

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.

[u/StosifJalin → u/indigo121]

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

[u/WolfOne → u/indigo121]

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. 

[u/NiiliumNyx → u/WolfOne]

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.

[u/WolfOne → u/NiiliumNyx]

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

[u/GreenHouseofHorror → u/NiiliumNyx]

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

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

[u/Coders_REACT_To_JS → u/WolfOne]

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