cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48284303

A sum that would bankrupt these companies and set an important precedent.

Yesterday, there was news of publishers doing the same. Let’s see what other industries follow.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago
    • The headline reads “now there’s proof”, but they leave the proof as an exercise to the reader to go read The Atlantic’s article where the proof actually is.
    • The fact it’s “$150,000 per song” is functionally meaningless. Anyone can slap any amount onto a lawsuit (in this case, over $3 trillion total), and that’s two-year-old news anyway.
    • So much of the Gadget Review article is tangents; for example, it randomly devotes a paragraph to a tool developed at U. Tennessee two years ago that had no relevance to this lawsuit or to The Atlantic’s investigation – just that it can prevent this kind of plagiarism. Which, “cool”, but this article is allegedly about how this already happened and “now there’s proof”. This is trying to be a secondary and a tertiary source at the same time (respectively, summarizing this specific issue and the AI industry’s theft writ large), and it fails at being either.
    • Its two throwaway references to Engadget once again don’t mean the overall article isn’t just a worse, surface-level version of the one from The Atlantic; it just means there are tangents thrown in as filler.
    • There’s a paragraph: ““Trained on copyrighted recordings without permission” — that’s how label plaintiffs have characterized the practice in filings, as summarized in industry commentary.”
      • This citation has zero reason to exist. You do not now or ever need to cite “industry commentary” for that absolutely trivial analysis. No fucking shit that’s what they claim; that’s the whole point that we’ve been talking about. A professional writer wanting to write informatively would not write like this. If written by a human, it’s begging you to think it’s done more than five minutes of surface-level research. This alone shows an utter disregard for quality.
    • It’s blatant that this site is a slop content mill. The thumbnail image here is generated, but human authors have done that too, so let’s look at their[1] series[2] of[3] “resource[4] articles[5]” that are among the sloppiest shit I’ve ever seen attributed to a human writer. This mill evidently has no hangups with publishing LLM slop and saying a human did it.
    • Gadget Review is just another in the sea of no-name tech content mills that have sprung up recently; I’ve literally never heard of it.
    • And the coup de grace: “Whether you’re an indie artist wondering if your EP got scraped, or someone who generated a birthday jingle on Suno last week, The Atlantic’s databases aren’t just journalism. They’re evidence.”

    I think this article is more informative and better than The Atlantic piece.

    I genuinely don’t know what to say except that The Atlantic has a proper investigation from Alex Reisner as part of a series he’s been doing for three years, whereas you apparently prefer obviously generated slop. I write encyclopedically as a hobby – reasonably adjacent to this style of “and this happened[1] and this happened[2]” from this article (and constantly reading news articles to write what I do) – and this is barely focused crap with little you couldn’t get by asking ChatGPT about The Atlantic’s article. Except I think it’d somehow do a better job than this LLM-generated shit.