Tim Waring

I study the cultural evolution of sustainable behaviors and institutions. and

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

🚨 Excited to share a new paper 📃, years in the making, with Zach Wood.

We propose that human evolution is characterized as an Evolutionary Transition in Inheritance and Individuality (ETII).

Explainer and OA paper below:

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.

Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.

Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.

They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.

The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.

Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.

Then it got worse.

The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.

It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.

One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.

Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.

Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.

That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.

Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.

This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

@harscoat https://t.co/dEamXwcN6P

Preprint: https://t.co/CT5Bi5Seno

Cultural inheritance is driving a transition in human evolution
📷 Novel evolutionary transition in humans
📷 Evidence from gene-culture co-evolution
📷 Provides testable predictions

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

🚨 Excited to share a new paper 📃, years in the making, with Zach Wood.

We propose that human evolution is characterized as an Evolutionary Transition in Inheritance and Individuality (ETII).

Explainer and OA paper below:

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

@UAP_Andrew With all due respect. Read the paper.

I'm not a transhumanist. And if you read the paper you would see that there is no central goal of perpetuating any specific institution. Instead we lay out a way to understand the role of group-level cultural structures on human evolution.

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

@whatKCthought @Infinituple I have no idea what you are talking about when you say "intergenerational filtration" are you espousing eugentics, cause, no. That's not at all what this is about. We are talking about patterns of human cultural evolution. Again, read the paper.

[Kevin Casey @whatKCthought]

@tmwaring @Infinituple wait so you think it is functioning according to that ideal?

[ゆきまさかずよし @Kyukimasa]

人類進化で有利だった問題解決プロセスは世界的な問題解決には使えない
https://t.co/MFWkQL0gnm
人類社会集団の競争や多様性（ある集団が失敗しても他の集団が解決する）で人類が進化した（仮説）。
考えてみればあれだ、「都市間自然淘汰主義」
都市にキャタピラ付けなくては

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

@whatKCthought @Infinituple Well, it's not an "ideal," it's our estimate of change. But yes, the strength of cultural group selection only seems to be growing.

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

@MacrinePhD Here you go:
BioScience: https://t.co/9h0aIEp7gb
or
OA preprint: https://t.co/CT5Bi5RGxQ
or
free print: https://t.co/I76jALVySU

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

@KevinMShea @royalsociety Yup. That pretty much sums it up. But dying alone isn't quite right. More like die fighting each other ever more aggressively over ever declining natural capacity. Currently, we are working to make this into a usable applied theory. We need models and data!

[Agathonia Media @ResisdanceFM]

#HomoStupidus/#WorldSystem: "Central features of #human #evolution may stop our species from resolving global environmental #problems like #ClimateChange, says a recent study led by the University of Maine."

https://t.co/r7se5EKpz4

[Agathonia Media @ResisdanceFM]

Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the #Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences #capitalocene https://t.co/OgL53TBKAf

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

@AndrejSpiridon4 @singerstone Excellent point. But again, this is global environmental effects driving evolution, not eco-evo competition dynamics over resources/growth. A very different dynamic, I'm sure you'll agree.

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

@AndrejSpiridon4 Well, of course not. The point is that there has been a change in the strength of eco-evolutionary feedback.

[Andrej Spiridonov @AndrejSpiridon4]

Haha, finally read it in full
https://t.co/yYZQi9ncBg
Their definition of Anthropocene, shown below, is rather ignorant of the Quaternary (and paleo-)sciences.
My question is: Was there a time period when human (or any other lineage) evolution was independent of global change!??

[Felix Schlumpf @Felix3S]

Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences https://t.co/8wl4oHmVl0

[Annie Leymarie @AnnieLeymarie]

New study:
"Our species must alter longstanding patterns of cultural evolution to avoid environmental disaster & escalating between-group competition".
"The typical description of the challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene is understated".
https://t.co/vLSITQeAwe

[Tim Waring @tmwaring]

@KirkegaardEmil Next step is formal modeling. We need to turn this into an applied science very quickly.

[Emil Kirkegaard @KirkegaardEmil]

The Population Bomb, but now with climate fears instead of population fears, and also more evolution.

Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions

https://t.co/EzfkNLMGVF

[didaclopez @didaclopez]

@arqueoleg I per què hauríem d'evitar aquest col·lapse?
https://t.co/WdvJ0gZZ0M