You’re packing three different bodies of law into one spooky word, “theft,” and that muddies the water more than it helps. If it was your intent to muddy the waters, congratulations -- now go troll some other thread.

Think about it this way: If “the ideas were on the open internet,” then you’ve already answered the patent part yourself. Anything publicly disclosed before the filing date is prior art. If an AI regurgitates something that’s already out there, it doesn’t create a new patent right for the AI user – it just means the application is dead on arrival as either not novel or obvious. That’s exactly what the patent system is designed to prevent: locking up what’s already in the public domain.

More to the point: “Theft” is the wrong label for what you are talking about. Patent law doesn’t care whether you “stole” an idea; it cares who first conceived it and whether it was already disclosed. If someone copies an existing invention and tries to patent it, it’s not a clever AI loophole – it’s just an invalid patent application. At worst it’s fraud, and after the PTO kills it, the applicant will certainly get a visit from a process server with a civil tort, and (depending on how politically connected the corporation they are attempting to defrauded is) the DOJ.

Finally, copyright and scraping training data are not Issues that the USPTO deals with. At all. It is a different fight altogether. Training an AI on public data doesn’t magically transfer someone’s patent rights to the model’s owner, and it doesn’t erase prior art. Even in the most brain-dead interpretation of the scraping wars, you don’t get to turn “LLM saw a paper” into “we now own a patent on what that paper taught.” If the model outputs something substantially identical to a copyrighted work, that’s a copyright issue, not a patent issue. Neither of those scenarios gives the AI user a valid patent.

In a bucket, the new USPTO guidance doesn’t bless any of this. It basically says: AI is lab equipment, only humans can be inventors, and prior art is still prior art, no matter whether a human or a GPU found it. If your worry is “big players will try to slip bad patents through on things that already existed,” you’re late to that party – they’ve been doing that with manual searches, interns, and buzzwordy specs for decades. AI doesn’t change the core legal filters; it just changes how fast you can search and how easy it is to generate garbage that those filters are supposed to catch.

You’re giving the hardware way too much credit here. Drop a random into a state-of-the-art drug discovery or materials pipeline and they’re not going to “lock up progress,” they’re going to drown in garbage candidates. The stuff that still matters – and that the law still cares about for inventorship – is choosing the problem, defining the constraints, designing or tuning the models, sanity-checking outputs, and turning one candidate into something that works in the real world. That’s domain expertise and judgment. The new USPTO guidance doesn’t say “push the big red GENERATE button and collect your patent”; it says “we still use the same old ‘did a human actually conceive this invention?’ test, even if AI was involved.”

That dystopia assumes two things that aren’t actually true even after this policy change: (1) that you can get a patent on anything your model spits out, and (2) that nobody has to worry about human inventorship or the usual patentability hurdles. Even under the new guidance, a human still has to be able to stand up in court and say “I had a definite and permanent idea of this claimed invention,” not “I filed whatever the GPU burped out.” If no human ever reaches that benchmark, the patent is defective on old-school inventorship grounds, regardless of how many racks of H100s were involved. On top of that, as AI tools become standard, a lot of AI-assisted output becomes easier to attack as “obvious” to a skilled person using ordinary tools. So raw compute gives you an advantage, sure, but it doesn’t magically let you patent “all of human progress.”

On that much, I’m with you: the constitutional rationale is “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” not “to funnel perpetual rents to whoever owns the biggest datacenter.” But this particular USPTO tweak isn’t a radical new scheme; it’s the bureaucracy ducking the hard philosophical questions and saying: “AI is lab equipment.” Same inventorship standard, same novelty / obviousness / enablement tests. That absolutely does tend to favor big, opaque, capital-intensive R&D shops – just like every expensive tool does – but it’s an extension of the system’s existing bias toward incumbents, not a brand-new AI loophole.

If your broader point is that IP law has drifted a long way from its original “limited-time bargain” into something closer to “long-term tollbooths for incumbents,” I think a lot of us would nod along. But that’s a critique of the entire modern IP regime – term length, scope, litigation costs, DMCA-style enforcement – not specifically of this AI-guidance change. This move doesn’t turn AI into a magical rent-extraction engine; it just tells applicants, “We’re going to pretend the 19th-century conception doctrine still works in an AI lab.” That’s a fair thing to criticize, but it’s a different argument than “no creativity required, game over.”

I can agree with you on this point, as long as you are not trying to defend piracy as some kind of noble "sharing". But I have to say, judging by the rest of your post, “Sharing of info” is doing a lot of work here. This story is not about someone handing a friend a USB stick with some MP3s. It’s about a guy running a commercial IPTV service, charging 50€ for 3 months or 100€ for 6 months, reselling pay-TV he never paid to license in the first place, and a bunch of hotels/cafés using that to undercut competitors who do pay for legal subscriptions. Calling that “sharing” is like calling a pirate cable company “your generous neighbor.” The tech that makes copying easy doesn’t magically turn commercial theft of service into a noble act of information freedom. A thief is a thief, and there is nothing more ignoble than a thief who commits his crimes in the name of a worthy cause.

Sure, we can and should argue about business models -- subscriptions vs. ads vs. public funding, Creative Commons, whatever. But this particular setup already is a compensation system: broadcasters pay for rights, hotels and bars pay for commercial subscriptions, and the revenue chain keeps the content being produced. The IPTV reseller in this story isn’t experimenting with a better system; he’s just inserting himself into the existing one as an unpaid middleman and pocketing the money. That’s not “rethinking compensation,” it’s “I keep the cash and somebody else eats the loss.”

Again, nobody outlawed “sharing.” I don't think that word means what you think it means --get a dictionary (your choice!) and look up sharing. Then look up "piracy" in the same dictionary. Not even close, right? Greece passed a law that explicitly targets pirate IPTV networks and end users who knowingly buy access to illegal pay-TV streams, with fines between 750€ and 5,000€ (higher for commercial users, doubled for repeat offenders). That’s not “grandma got sued for emailing a recipe,” it’s “hotels and cafés running their business on stolen feeds while their competitors pay full freight.” Calling enforcement there a “waste of lives” is melodramatic. If you decide to run your business on obviously dodgy 100€-for-6-months “all the premium channels you want” boxes, the legal mess is not an accident; it’s baked into the choice.

Yeesh. The source is TorrentFreak, not some mainstream media outlet. TorrentFreak has spent years criticizing heavy-handed anti-piracy campaigns and is hardly a house organ of the copyright maximalists. If even TorrentFreak describes this as an IPTV piracy reselling network and talk plainly about “illegal streams” and “commercial exploitation,” maybe the problem isn’t media bias against “sharing,” it’s that this really is just bog-standard commercial piracy.

Well, look around you. In this thread we literally have: Slashdot summarizing, TorrentFreak reporting (from a pretty pirate-sympathetic angle), and people in the comments arguing about priorities and proportionality. What more do you want? This is exactly what a functioning public debate looks like. You can absolutely criticize copyright law, argue for decriminalizing non-commercial copying, or push for new compensation models. But using “information wants to be free” as a blanket excuse for a commercial IPTV gray-market — especially one used by businesses to gain unfair competition over law-abiding rivals -- just erases the actual victims and pretends there’s no tradeoff at all.

A typical Briton will only see lower energy bills when wholesale prices stay low, grid congestion costs stop wiping out those gains, and OFGEM ensures those savings actually reach the meter. While these record wind outputs are absolutely real and frequently drive wholesale generation costs down to near zero, the price Brits pay is currently dominated by the archaic rules of the UK energy market and the physical cost of moving power from Dogger Bank to London.

The primary culprit is the sad fact that dead dinosaurs are still setting the marginal price. Under the current "pay-as-clear" market structure, the price of electricity is set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand at that specific moment. Even if wind is providing 55% of the power for pennies, if the grid needs a single gas peaker plant to turn on to meet the last megawatt of demand, every generator gets paid that high gas price. Until market reform decouples renewables from fossil fuels, gas prices will largely dictate a typical Brit's electric bill regardless of how hard the wind blows -- this is the only thing that keeps gas peakers economically viable. As soon as renewables are decoupled from dead dinosaurs in OFGEM's repricing algorithm, fossil fuel generation will stop being a guaranteed profit maker, and start becoming a guaranteed loss. The fossil fuel industry knows this, and will do everything in its power to keep that decoupling from happening.

This is compounded by a massive hidden tax caused by grid congestion. As the Times mentions, Britain has spent nearly £1.3 billion this year paying wind farms to turn off because the cabling network physically cannot carry that much power south. Brits then have to pay gas plants closer to London to fire up to replace them. Realistically, consumers won't feel the full financial benefit of Dogger Bank, Hornsea, and Beatrice until the transmission upgrades catch up to the generation capacity. Brits are likely looking at 2026 for the first bottlenecks to clear, but true structural price drops won't arrive until the late 2020s when new transmission lines come online and the "gas-setting-the-price" mechanic is finally reformed. Wind is doing its job; the grid and the regulators just haven't caught up yet.

Honestly? For the laughs. But also for the insights. An LLM has billions of tokens to string together based on a prompt, compared to typical human adults, who have only a few tens of thousands of tokens to articulate an idea with. And this goes for non-verbal paradigms as well -- music and art are languages with idiomatic patterns that can be captured the same way Gemini or ChapGPT capture syntactic patterns in human writing. Not everybody is a Mozart or Michaelangelo, but machine learning let's everybody explore those landscapes the way an artist or a musician would. Musicians call it noodling, and artists call it doodling. It’s actually pretty fun, and emergent connections surface almost effortlessly. So when someone says “who even wants this?”, the answer is simple: anyone who enjoys exploring what creativity looks like when you’ve suddenly got a collaborator who can riff in any style on demand -- and is not constrained by verbal bandwidth the way humans are. But don't forget the laughs -- it’s pretty fun to hear Elvis belting out Led Zep's Immigrant Song. :) But mainly for curiosity, because the boundaries of “what if?” just got a lot wider. It's for all these reasons musicians plug into effects pedals and midi devices, or authors bounce ideas off writing partners — because sometimes it leads somewhere interesting. If Klay wants to monetize this process, I say go for it.

Way I see it, this isn’t about “protecting art,” it’s about protecting income streams. And honestly, that’s not the same thing. The artist who writes because they have to will create no matter what the lawyers do; the artist who writes because it pays the mortgage has to protect the parts of their work that copyright actually covers. Style isn’t protected. Vibe isn’t protected. Genre isn’t protected. What is protected is the melody, lyrics, and arrangement that put food on the table.

And that’s where AI blows up the old boundaries. If you ask an AI to turn Nights in White Satin into Gregorian chant, you didn’t invent a genre, you created an unlicensed derivative work. That’s been illegal since long before GPUs got involved. Led Zeppelin got away with it for a while only because nobody had automated fingerprinting in 1970; today the Moody Blues’ publisher would nuke that chant remix before you finished uploading it.

So yeah, it’s easy to yell “jerkwads,” and sure, the labels aren’t exactly monasteries of artistic virtue. But the mechanism they’re using isn’t new, and it’s not anti-art. It’s the same copyright lever any working musician would have to pull if someone else started generating alternate versions of their songs on a platform that turns it into ad revenue. Artists make art. Lawyers protect the parts that pay the rent. Those have never been the same thing, but they’ve always been connected.

You didn’t “raise concerns.” You ran the full fossil-fuel-shill playbook: swap global system-level data for isolated anecdotes, misstate the claims in the articles, throw in some turbine panic, and hope nobody notices the pivot. Nobody compresses this many logical fallacies and misdirections into one post by accident.

Not knowing a research group is not a rebuttal. Ember is literally one of the main global electricity-market data aggregators used by IEA, IRENA, and multiple national regulators. If your argument starts with “I’ve never heard of them,” it’s already off the rails.

A captive industrial PPA for a hyperscaler is not a global trend. It’s a hyper-specific procurement project servicing one load spike. Pointing at a single dedicated 1.2 GW plant to disprove global generation trends is statistical malpractice — the equivalent of claiming one guy buying a Hummer disproves EV adoption.

Yes — that’s the annual output of one privately contracted facility. The articles are discussing net global generation and net additions, measured in hundreds of TWh and hundreds of GW. Your “math” here isn’t wrong; it’s irrelevant to the claim -- typical smokescreen from a typical shill.

Temporary gensets at data centers prove exactly one thing: data-center load is growing faster than local grid interconnects. This is just more misdirection and obfuscation. You are talking about planning lag and hyperscaler impatience, not about worldwide fossil demand. Hospitals have backup generators too; that doesn’t mean the grid doesn’t exist.

Yes — because AI load is exploding faster than turbine manufacturing capacity. That’s not “renewables aren’t growing,” it’s “the fossil sector can’t scale production fast enough even with unlimited demand.” You’ve taken evidence of strain and tried to reframe it as evidence of resurgence.

Your anecdotes describe a single industrial sector’s procurement scramble, not global electricity generation trends. You are trying to change the subject, like the obedient fossil fuel industry shill that you are. The graphs are accurate; they’re just describing the system as a whole, not the narrow slice you want to talk about. This is called "cherry picking" by the way; if there was any doubt about your fossil fuel industry bias, you just put it to rest right here.

Then widen your sources. FERC, EIA, MISO, SPP, PJM, ERCOT, and multiple state regulators have published retirement schedules and net declines in fossil capacity. Coal is retiring fastest; gas is flattening. Your “not hearing” is a function of selective inputs, not empirical data.

Show the filings. A handful of emergency restarts or industrial-PPA one-offs does not constitute a “coal comeback.” Net coal capacity has declined every year for a decade, and FERC projects further contraction. A few noisy exceptions do not overturn the aggregate. The real story is solar and wind are rolling out grid scale installations faster than the fossil fuel industry can roll out peaker plants, and doing it more cheaply as well -- even when demand is through the roof and cost is not an issue. The writing is on the wall for fossil fuel peakers.

In a bucket: Solar + wind added more new electricity than global demand growth in 2025. Fossil stayed flat. Coal fell below total renewables for the first time.
Your post swaps out global system-level data for hyperscaler procurement anecdotes and tries to pass it off as contradiction. The only thing you successfully disproved is your own objectivity.

Because the civil side of RICO, the CFAA, and the Lanham Act give Google standing even without direct monetary loss. Lighthouse’s phishing kits impersonate Google, misuse its trademarks, spoof its services, and target its users at scale—that’s textbook Lanham Act territory, and it's exactly the kind of systemic harm that the civil provisions in RICO and the CFAA were designed to combat. Google isn’t doing this out of charity; it’s defending its brand, its infrastructure, and the long-term viability of its messaging platforms. And thanks to the civil provisions in those laws, Google doesn’t have to wait around for the DOJ to get involved.

If Google's lawsuit moves forward, Lighthouse’s lawyers are going to have a very uncomfortable conversation with their clients. Civil RICO and CFAA both allow judges to issue ex parte asset-freeze orders, seize domains, force registrars and hosting providers to shut down infrastructure, and compel U.S. (and EU) intermediaries to turn over logs and identity records. Once the court grants early discovery, anyone even loosely involved—from resellers to developers to “affiliates”—can be subpoenaed, deposed, and pulled into joint-and-several liability. In practical terms, Lighthouse’s Western-reachable assets get seized, their infrastructure goes dark, their payment processors and crypto off-ramps get locked, and every employee or contractor who ever touched the operation suddenly needs their own lawyer. That’s the quiet part Google is saying out loud: this lawsuit isn’t symbolic—it’s a legal kill-switch.

It absolutely does say that—just not in the way you apparently think. RICO and the CFAA aren’t purely criminal statutes. Both include civil causes of action that private entities can invoke. That’s exactly what Google is doing here: filing a civil RICO and civil CFAA suit to go after Lighthouse’s infrastructure and operators.

No, Google isn’t pressing criminal charges. Yes, Google is using the civil provisions of those laws to bring enormous legal pressure to bear—completely in line with how those statutes were written.

This isn’t ambiguity, or spin, or Google LARPing as the DOJ. It’s just basic statutory reality.

Drive-by dismissals are fine, if you actually RTFA. Since you obviously didn't, take your drive-by snark and go pollute some other thread.

I hear you, man. Under normal circumstances “pressing charges” is absolutely the government’s job. But in this case the article is (for once) not playing fast and loose with the terminology -- RICO and the CFAA both have civil provisions explicitly allowing private plaintiffs to sue.

That means Google doesn’t have to wait around for the DOJ. They can file a civil RICO action, drag Lighthouse into federal court, freeze infrastructure, claw back damages, and generally make life miserable for everyone involved. And Google has the pockets to hire more lawyers than Lighthouse has people.

So yeah—no criminal indictment here, but Google does have some very long levers to pull.
In this particular case? Yay Google.

Fall behind in what? The race to the bottom of the ethical barrel? Apologies to Gary Larsen for borrowing a couple of his characters to illustrate my point. Thag was an optimist; Thog was a pragmatist. Thag sharpened the first stick to bring down dinner. Thog used the same stick to bring down Thag and take his cave. Both sets of genes made it through natural selection because competition works in a world with limited calories and no Geneva Conventions.

The problem is, that’s not the world we live in anymore. "Falling behind" isn’t measured in spears per capita. It’s measured in how well we can keep the Thogs of our species from turning every new tool into a weapon. Ethics are not a luxury; they’re a competitive strategy in a civilization that no longer gets a do-over.

Every generation of humans has stood around its campfire debating whether the new tool -- fire, bronze, dynamite, fission, AI -- will make us gods or ghosts. We’ve survived this long precisely because enough of us insisted that how we use the tool matters as much as whether we can.

The choice you present is pretty clear to me: If it is falling behind to build a world where Thog doesn't get to rewrite your neural firmware while you sleep, I'll take the slower race every time. Progress without guardrails isn't progress; it's just entropy with better marketing.

Interesting. I was 15 when the Holmes Basic Set hit shelves -- and I've rolled plenty of dice since. I guess if you are talking Social Security full retirement age sure -- that's 67 for my cohort. I was a teen in the mid-70s -- but I've "retired" twice, and I'm still several years shy of 67. In the real world, people's retirement rolls have as much variation as their character sheets; retirement age is a pretty elastic notion. Retiring at 67 is a bureaucratic artifact, not a biological or financial necessity. I retired after twenty years in the military, and retired again after fifteen years in cubicle land at a large defense contractor. That last "retirement" was in 2013 at the ripe old age of 51. I've been soaking up the sun in southern AZ ever since. I figure I spent half of my allotted three-score-and-ten working; I've earned the right to spend the other half playing. :)

Hmmm. I empathize with a lot of your points, especially that $80 game point the industry is creeping towards, but you do seem to be making a fundamental error in a key part of your post, and you are (pretty obviously) letting your concerns over AIs taking jobs away from humans inordinately bias your comments.

You’re mistaking rendering with content creation. This is the fundamental error you are making. The hardware bottleneck you’re describing — frame rate, shader throughput, rasterization limits — happens after the art pipeline. Generative AI has more to contribute to AAA games than pushing more polygons into a 4K framebuffer on your 5090; it also makes the creation of assets faster, more flexible, and less soul-crushing, which is what this entire article is about. Artists today already work at resolutions and levels of detail far beyond what ends up on-screen. They do it because the high-fidelity source allows lighting models, LODs, and texture compression to downsample cleanly. Generative tools just accelerate that process — they help the artist reach the starting line faster, not the finish line worse. Let me be clear, here: Frame rate limits belong to the GPU; content limits belong to the imagination. Generative AI only fixes one of those — and it’s not the one measured in hertz. I think that if you were to take a couple classes in digital art, followed by a couple classes in gpu architecture, you'll see what I mean.

Just...no. You are rehashing arguments made by coders who know they can be easily replaced by an LLM and feel powerless to stop it. If this is you, I sympathize with your plight, but I question your tactics. You should be joining a union to make sure that when your job is transitioned to an LLM, you are part of the process, not a victim of it. But honestly, if AI were actually a silver bullet for cost reduction, every AAA studio would already be profitable. The truth is uglier and simpler: crunch, debt, and risk are baked into the industry's AAA game model. Generative AI won’t fix that overnight, but it can make iteration cycles less brutal for the people who actually build the worlds we play in. It’s not about greed, it’s about giving overworked artists (and journeyman coders) a few more hours of their lives back — and maybe, just maybe, letting them spend it making better games.

If EA joining forces with Stable Diffusion sounds like “AI replacing humans,” you’re missing the point. Every creative leap in this industry — from the first digital paintbrushes to procedural generation to motion capture — has been met with the same fear, often from the artists themselves. Yet each wave expanded what creators could achieve.

Generative AI is just the next evolution of that continuum. A piano doesn't write the concerto; the composer does. A chisel doesn't discover the statue in the marble; the sculptor does. Generative AI is a collaborator, not a competitor. It’s a "smarter paintbrush," as EA says, that still requires a creative mind to wield it.

What I find interesting is that EA isn’t outsourcing creativity — it’s instrumenting it. If this partnership succeeds, the line between imagination and implementation gets thinner, not erased. Calling this “cost-cutting” misses the point. The real constraint in AAA development isn’t payroll, it’s iteration velocity — the ability to test, tweak, and polish before launch. Generative AI could shatter that barrier in spectacular fashion — turning crunch time, AAA’s most dreaded ritual, into a relic of the past.

If this is what “smarter paintbrushes” look like, I’m all in.