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The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century

Tom Scott1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2021–2025
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explainer · general · evergreen · 2021–2025 on HN

A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture. It is animated and narrated as part of his series of videos…

HN points to it in discussions of AI copyright enforcement and badly specified AI goals, and recommends it alongside his other fiction.

8 comments from Hacker News

@SkeuomorphicBee2023-05 · in “Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers by Tom Scott”

I'd like to also recommend his other work of speculative fiction: The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century ▶ this video It is a great intersection of copyright maximalism and the dangers of making general purpose AIs without proper care in developing their goal function.

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@perching_aix2025-06 · in “Extracting memorized pieces of books from open-weight language models”

You remind me to all the shitty times in literature class where I had to rote memorize countless works from a given author (poet), think 40, then take a test identifying which poem each of the given quotes was from. The little WinForms app I wrote to practice for these tests was one of the first programs I've ever written. I guess in that sense it's also a fond memory. I miss WinForms. Good thing they were public (?) works, wouldn't wanna get sued [0] for possibly being a two legged copyright infringement. Or should I say having been, since naturally I immediately erased all of these works from my mind just days after these tests, even without any legal impetus. Edit: thinking about it a bit more, you also remind me to our midterm tests from the same class. We had to produce multiple page long essays on the spot, analyzing a select work... from memory. Bonus points for being able to quote from it, of course. Needless to say, not many original thoughts were featured in those essays, not in mine, not in others' - the explicit expectation was that you'd peruse the current and older textbooks to "learn (memorize) the analysis" from, and then you'd "write about it in your own words", but still using technical terms. They were pretty much just tests in jargon use, composition, and memorization, which is definitely a choice of all time for a class on literature. But I think it draws an interesting perspective. At no point did we ever have to actually demonstrate a capability in lite

@beeslol2025-05 · in “Creativity came to pass”

The opening line > This is written of a future. Not the future, but a future – one of many possibilities. reminded me of the opening line from Tom Scott's The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century ▶ this video > This is a YouTube video from a future. Not the future, just a future. Not sure if intentional or if you're both referencing something else, fun parallel nonetheless.

@NooneAtAll32025-05 · in “What if humanity forgot how to make CPUs?”

I don't think it's that bizarre we already had a sci-fi story, where humanity forgot all beatles songs ▶ this video

@throw832882025-02 · in “LLMs can teach themselves to better predict the future”

I think the problem is that from our human scale, mass-killings is the "best" method to eliminate the possibility of another organism causing harm for us. Hypothetically, if there was a more optimal (i.e less costly) method like just introducing some cheap catch-all combined vaccination/antiviral into their feed, we would just do that. We don't have things like that, but that could easily be a consequence of man's limited research capacity, something that an ASI would not necessarily be throttled by. From an ASI's perspective, there might be many methods that are both less brutal and more optimal to fix the "humans creating a competitor" problem. Not that they would be aligned (Think halting human AI research by rewiring our brains to just not be interested in it [0]), but at least not deadly. [0] ▶ this video