The absolute Brainrot-state of an average GenAI subreddit Part 2

The whole Generative AI boom is built on a simple, criminal premise: plunder first, maybe deal with the lawyers later. It's a business model based on mass-scale theft, and now the bill has come due. OpenAI is just the one caught most directly in the blast radius, but the shrapnel is hitting everyone. We saw Anthropic, the supposed "ethical" AI company, get cornered into a record $1.5 billion settlement with authors, all while having the brass balls to claim "no wrongdoing." That's your certified B Corp ethics for you.

But OpenAI is the main event. Their legal problems got so FUBAR they had to bundle all the major lawsuits into one giant multi-district litigation cage match in New York. The Authors Guild, The New York Times... everyone wants a piece.

This isn't just about paying back royalties anymore. The plaintiffs are now digging for evidence of "willful infringement," a legal kill-shot that cranks the penalty up to a possible $150,000 per stolen book. And they may have found their smoking gun. A court has ordered OpenAI to turn over internal Slack messages and emails where they allegedly discussed deleting a dataset known to contain pirated books.

That context makes their recent legal face-plants even more spectacular. In October, their high-priced lawyers trotted out the tired old "it's not a copy, it's learning" defence. Judge Sidney Stein basically told them to fuck off. He pointed out that ChatGPT was spitting out summaries so detailed they were practically plot-for-plot recreations, ruling a jury could easily see it as blatant infringement. That single ruling gutted their entire legal strategy. It confirmed the problem wasn't just the secret training data; the product itself is an infringement machine.

Then you have the sheer clown-show incompetence of The New York Times case. Not only did they get caught stealing, they were then caught trying to burn the evidence. After the Times' lawyers spent hundreds of hours sifting through data, OpenAI "accidentally" wiped it. Their excuse was a "glitch." The court, not being staffed by complete morons, went nuclear, and the entire episode now reeks of obstruction.

So that’s the reality. A company whose core technology is industrial-scale theft, caught red-handed, tried to destroy the proof, and is getting systematically dismantled in federal court. All because they couldn't be arsed to, you know... just buy the books or work out a deal. And this is the half-trillion-dollar company we're talking about, using the corporate equivalent of "my dog ate my homework."

Now, with that reality firmly established, let's talk about the actual clowns: the GenAI Redditors.

And you know how it is with Reddit, reading sources and comprehension is basically kryptonite to them, so instead they just regurgitate whatever bias they see in titles. It's even more hilarious in this case, after I read the rulings.

They love to spam a link about Meta winning a "fair use" case, waving it around like a holy relic that absolves all their corporate gods. See if you can get through this without laughing: A judge in San Francisco did grant Meta the win, but spent his entire ruling explaining that the plaintiffs' lawyers were just fucking useless. He literally wrote the ruling "does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials... is lawful," and called Meta’s arguments nonsense that "doesn't pass the straight face test." So these geniuses are celebrating a "victory" where the judge all but said, "Meta got lucky, please bring me a competent lawsuit so I can nail them to the wall."

Then you have the perfect specimens of the subreddit's collective brain trust. One clown's opening gambit is the classic, foundational delusion of the entire cult: "There's no copyright infringement because there is no copy." This is their magic trick. It completely ignores the fact that to "train" the model, you first have to make a digital copy of the book. Full stop. That's the crime. His argument is the intellectual equivalent of stealing a car, stripping it for parts, melting the chassis into a metal cube, and then arguing you can't be charged with auto theft because "the car no longer exists."

But the absolute jewel in his crown of idiocy is this piece of legal analysis: "Yes, and it's piracy, not copyright infringement." Holy shit. This is like arguing, "It's arson, not illegally setting a fire." Piracy is copyright infringement, you absolute walnut. He's inventing a meaningless distinction to sound clever, revealing he has no fucking clue about the basic terminology of the subject he's so confidently pontificating on.

Of course, we can't forget the grand philosophers of the "Copyright is Bad, Actually" brigade, the most pathetic clowns in the entire circus. Their argument is a masterpiece of delusion. Yes, copyright law is a mess, largely thanks to decades of lobbying by American mega-corps. But how, in their galaxy-brained logic, does another half-trillion-dollar corporation committing grand larceny on an industrial scale magically fix things for the writer trying to pay their rent? It's a terminal case of teenage idealism. They're just useful idiots for the boardroom, a volunteer cheerleading squad for their own creative obsolescence, parroting this delusional idea that OpenAI's mass plunder will somehow trigger a noble revolution in IP law.

And now, for the main event.

The final boss of pseudo-intellectual brain rot. This one comment needs to be bronzed and mounted in a museum dedicated to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Someone asks the simple, sane question: "where have our ethics gone?"

And our resident Nietzsche, fresh from his first philosophy podcast, chimes in with this masterpiece:

https://i.postimg.cc/sg4XcnVv/Screenshot-2025-11-08-165041.png

What in the actual fuck is this guy smoking? This is the intellectual equivalent of a toddler covering his eyes and thinking he's invisible. He's deploying a half-arsed Philosophy 101 concept as a smoke bomb to obscure the fact we're not debating the fucking trolley problem; we're talking about a half-trillion-dollar company committing grand larceny.

"No universal ethical truth." Fucking brilliant, mate. Let's just throw out the entire basis of civilisation, shall we? Is murder okay, as long as you "frame" it as a lifestyle choice? Is grand larceny just a "non-traditional asset acquisition"? Is burning down a library the "'ethical choice'" because it frees up the land for a more efficient data centre? He's trying to opt out of the basic social contract because it's inconvenient for his favourite tech toy. He acts like this is some deep philosophical quandary. It isn't. We, as a species, figured out "don't take my shit" somewhere between discovering fire and inventing the wheel.

And the real chef's kiss of stupidity is his weasel word: "frame." He doesn't have the balls to say it is ethical. He just says you can frame it that way. It’s an open admission that his entire position is a house of cards built on self-serving rationalisation. It's the coward's way of saying, "I know this is wrong, but if I squint and use enough big words, I can pretend it's profound."

Philosophy? No no, it's the smug manifesto of someone whose only moral compass is a broken spinner that always lands on "whatever helps my favourite tech toy is good." A complete and utter clown.