OpenAI feared Hacker News would see it used a "sketchy Russian website" for training data

Actual title: "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"

Twitter also mentioned:

"356. In July 2020, OpenAI employee Ryan Lowe assessed the risk of continuing to use LibGen for the book-summarization project. Lowe wrote that he thought “there’s a >80% chance that we have some exchange of the form: ‘where did you get the books data?’” and “‘we can’t say’[.]” Nelson Decl. Ex. 325 at -315. Lowe estimated “a further ~40% chance that that leads to a moderate-sized Twitter kerfuffle that negatively affects the external perception of our work.” Id.

Lowe added: “if we’re fully okay with these potential outcomes, then I’m comfortable continuing using Libgen for the project.” Id."

The Title should be: "Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"

Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics - i.e. 'openai uses

copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on HN would be unfortunate."

That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against OpenAI.

This is a lobby organisation using only the pieces and bits they like to push their own agenda.

"sketchy russian website", how about using some more clear description like: A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public. Only some of the material is copyrighted by authors. However, some of their work is so old that it is not reprinted anyway.

But of course such an explanation would not click.

I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless. Imagine if every robotic or automation company advertised like this: Yeah, you'll buy tons of expensive robots and still rely on expensive labor from real people without any efficiency gains.

Pulled datasets off libgen for a corpus once and it's overwhelmingly in-copyright textbooks, the public domain framing doesn't really hold up.

It's wild how much weight "they're destroying jobs" has.

I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.

Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260927062011/https://authorsgu...

Sure this article is published by one of the stakeholders (the authors) and thus they are not "neutral". Sure it may highlight some sentences taken out of their contexts, that were not meant to be public. But, in the end, it seems it still draws a portrait, where people that are cited seem to not value creative work, where they feel very confident about themselves and their superiority. The fact they seem to question the public reaction, rather than questioning if what they are doing is ethical, make them look like hypocritical. And it reads like they are ready to use any means necessary to achieve their goals, and it seems they are not that frightened by the law.

I know many people will think that's business as usual, and that's business are for profit and that's their only _raison d'être_, that winning the AI race is all what's matter, and trusting any promise from a company/CEO/executive make you a fool. But not everyone think like that, and they are allowed to exist because many people expect some positive outcomes from their work. But a healthy society needs a bit more to work than that to work. And asking for the same level of responsibility/accountability as any other business would be, in my opinion, a good signal in this direction.

And the very first step could be, indeed, to ask them to be accountable here, and the question could be "hacking is about celebrating creativity with computers, creativity is what make life enjoyable, doing creative work is something we ca […]

Not even openai want to get flamed on show hn