Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

[erronis]

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/ai_has_made_ip_violations/

Rights holders had better buckle up for years of legal wrangling, IP lawyer tells The Reg

You don't have to be smarter than a fifth grader (or even a first grader) to commit potential copyright infringement using AI tools. One IP attorney watched over the weekend as his young son built a bedtime story generator that used copyrighted characters without permission.

"When experimenting with Google's AI Studio over the weekend, my 6-year-old son had the idea to create a website that would tell stories and generate pictures of the story," US IP lawyer Jonathan Menkes, a partner at the Knobbe Martens law firm, explained in a blog post. "In less than 2 minutes, he created a fully interactive website, including the proposed name 'Bedtime Story Weaver.'"

All it took to get Menkes the younger to create his tool was a few basic prompts that were "so simple, even a six-year-old with zero coding experience" was able to create a web app asking users to provide a target age, theme, characters, an optional morale or lesson, learning objective, preferred story length, and tone, to get an instant AI-penned tale.

. . .

This piece in The Register doesn't adequately convey the colossal amount of AI content that will be stepping on other IP. And it can not be blamed on a person/company, but a technology with no guardrails.

[highplainsdem]

1. The copyright infringement has been going on for as long as there've been illegally trained genAI tools.

The AI companies should be sued out of existence, the AI models should be destroyed, and those responsible for the IP theft should go to prison.

And yes, it can be blamed on a company. Google, OpenAI, Meta and all the other companies that trained their AI tools illegally on stolen intellectual property.

[erronis]

2. As long as anybody can browse the web and collect data this risk is everywhere.

It's not just the large search engine/AI consumers. Spiders/harvesters/whatevers have existed for decades and retrieved content that should not have been exposed. I ran a few such engines to pull data from US government sites (open platforms) but I do know that many organizations harvest far afield, ignoring the niceties such as "robots.txt".

Yes, we could try and punish these "too big to fail" companies but we know that won't happen. The cats are out of the bag and post-facto punishment or old-fashioned legalese won't put them back.

[highplainsdem]

3. The creatives fighting this aren't giving up, and shouldn't. The robber barons deserve punishment,

and IMO those using the illegally trained AI despite knowing of the IP theft are unethical and should be treated as such. And penalties for fraud should be in order if they don't label their AI slop as AI.

There's a lot of contempt for AI and AI users out there. Not the people given no choice but to use it for school or work, but those using it voluntarily. There's a lot of whining from AI users that the fraudulent slop they have AI generate for them isn't taken seriously as creative work - but that's because it isn't.

[erronis]

4. Agree. IP theft is unethical (and illegal). The recording industry foisted DRM and $50,000 fines

on anybody who copied one of their tracks.

I doubt that Sony/etc. will try to do that too Google/Amazon. They'll just meet at the country club (which we aren't invited to) and hash things out.

[DavidDvorkin]

5. The moral is that this will destroy morale.

[mucholderthandirt]

6. Already having to fight this nonsense. People stealing from us left and right.

Individuals and corporations/companies are using "AI" to steal the work of creatives, using it to make scams to get creative's money ("book club" offers to feature a book, for just a small fee, of course and much more).

Why pay someone for the work when you can just steal it? It's all over now, and only going to get worse as more and more stuff people think is "real' is just "AI" generated nonsense, a lot of it meant to fool you.

In my FB feed I was getting all kinds of ads for some memory loss miracle cure. The spokesperson? Bruce Willis. Cured of his very uncurable dementia. It's magic! I've seen other products with ads done using obvious "AI", pretty much everything you search for online, every blog, every site with articles, all done by "AI", and not well, either.

I get sites on my FB feed with info about women, AA persons, inventions and so on from history, and it's all "AI" generated. These articles are very long, poorly written, some with no punctuation or paragraphing. It's not hard to spot it, but some people won't get it.

[jfz9580m]

7. It's bad enough

That I feel like carrying around a legal disclaimer in online and offline engagements .

I got a headstart into these stupid things which I didn’t buy into then and I don’t buy now.

It’s sweeping the real world and the internet like kudzu. And well..I mean..I was already tolerant of a society anywhere with many things I don’t like but where large enough swaths of one’s life were protected by democratic rights and the gains suffragettes and feminists gave so much for.

And worst of all is a jostling slew of late to the party Cassandras who I absolutely support in their new grift. But I don’t want to accidentally get hustled into the new lame, blah Groupon that the old blah, lame Groupon has “evolved” into. Can’t we get a completely not amicable “divorce”…a metaphoric abortion?


I was already not super enthusiastic in general and then this unforeseen new shit which is accelerationist happened 15 years ago. It’s fundamentally stupid to say..”Oh it’s like the printing press..oh it’s like this or that.” How long will people fall for that shit?

There is no way to sugar coat stuff. I like Lina Khan. When I first saw this I didn’t want a damn Groupon with the kinds of blah people who..who will then represent you as extreme till things go wrong and then gloss over it and still pull the same shit.

It’s much easier to travel alone, but now one needs legal disclaimers in all interactions. “I don’t mean you or you or you or you. I definitely mean that person, and that person and that person and that company. “

It’s exhausting and exasperating ..dammit.
Man I love Lina Khan. She’s so..not a lame, blah Groupon.

What really ticks me off is physical AI and space grabs.

They are never ever ever ever getting goddamn thing from me without decent IRB and informed consent.

After this much sleazy Accelerationism they still want this sleazy lame middle ground that is extremist. It’s not objecting to a world this fucking right shifted that is extremist. It’s not doing that which is. Why would anyone trust the judgement of these guys?

I don’t try to meet some fucking basic standards to then endorse a blah, lame Groupon by bloody 2025 ffs.

If it was ai you could get past physics stack exchange..they are nice and obnoxious but also fairly innocuous…
I am not saying obnoxious is good but it’s better than dead-eyed cultishness.

I am already “moderate” within reason irl. But don’t shove accelerationist shit at me and then expect lame lameness. Yeesh. And immediately it becomes about how much weed one uses.

But these guys are so sleazy. Their standards are completely non uniform and they are definitley tilted towards the private sector, anything undemocratic and misogynistic.

They never acknowledge any errors. You can’t coexist with these creeps. And I am not litigious in term of suing for money.

But if they have such a problem with democracy and some regulation of the kind Lina Khan was bringing in and she wasn’t inhumane or carceral. But if these guys are going to be dicks about stuff while being all awwwwww about their errors and compromises with creeps..

Sorry Erronis. I myself sound like lousy AI as the poster above derided.
I would probably get deplatformed just about anywhere but on DU.

But I draw the line at getting “deplatformed” in my own home or my own street as these things encroach more.
They need stringent regulation and yesterday.

This is lame..