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Comment by taylorlapeyre | Hacker News Reader

It seems silly to claim that we should all just stop publishing our thoughts simply because some process could come along and combine them with others in order to produce something unique. That is, of course, the story of all human history.

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Suppose I write a unique and deeply technical textbook on a subject. Someone could buy that book, read it, become an expert on that subject, and then profit from that expertise. This is all well and good. One of the things that makes ChatGPT different is its ability to scale such that it can provide that expertise to a much larger number of people and at a much lower cost.

> One of the things that makes ChatGPT different is its ability to scale such that it can provide that expertise to a much larger number of people and at a much lower cost.

That, and the fact that it regularly spouts "facts" that are complete nonesense.

I will point out that human Hacker News commenters also commonly spout "facts" that are complete nonsense; in fact, it is us that trained it to do so.

Where is the limit with copyright law then? Is ChatGPT allowed to be trained on books?

If the "terms" of the book ban it, can I just read the book and then write notes which I upload to ChatGPT? (Would a Microsoft employee be paid to take classes/read books for the purpose?)

I don't think we know the answers here yet. Information wants to be free though and we're going to have to reconcile that moving forward!

but what motivation do people have to create something, that will never been seen/read/listened to, and on top of that will just make the people that take it richer while providing no credit back?

you are just working for free so other people can get rich off your work.

Why are you assuming that no one will ever see it?

Will the chatbot that gives the answer also give a link to the sources it found this information at? if not then no one will go to your page (via search results) I've only played with chatgpt and it never gives back sources to where it finds the information.

Although someone in the comments above said Bing tries to include links back to sources where available, so that helps.

i sort of get your point, but in a way that's kind of what blogs/reddit posts, writing samples published anywhere, short of a paid publication, are. its just that GPT does it a lot more efficiently compared to your slow manual brain/process of scavenging the internet yourself for inspiration for your next novel or some creative thing.

There's a lot of sites out there that try to answer questions people are likely to search for specifically to monetise via ads. GPT probably kills them all if it becomes more popular than standard web search and then GPT slowly becomes outdated because people have no reason to publish the information GPT needs.

I've always wished I could have an ad free internet experience, I'd happily pay whatever revenue the ads would have generated.

Would it be terrible is GPT replaced ads with subscriptions? Of course they'd have to split the income with the sites they get the info from. Much how ads on a website make the ad network and the site owner money.

My guess is, if you look at what a subscription would actually cost to cover what ads do right now, it would be a figure so large per person that most people wouldn't pay it.

But how many of those websites depend on traffic? People still publish books because people still buy books.

I bet many people will try to get as much of their work into AI as possible, in order amplify their impact.

what impact? you get no credit for what you do. The only people I would see trying to do that would be special interest groups/religions/cults that want their point of view to be reflected in chat results.

One example I could see is if you have a certain brand/product, you could try making as many forum posts and articles about it as possible in hopes that the AI picks it up as a solution to the user's problem.

Kinda like SEO but for AI. I hope this doesn't happen though, since SEO crap ruined google.

I was wondering when people would start publishing bad code on github along the lines of: this is a bubble sort algorithm, but the last line of the code deletes every file on your hard drive.

then when people are just blindly inserting code they end up running that and nuking their computer.

(or install a rootkit)

Dunno, things are just starting. Ads benefit the ad network and the site. I don't see any reason GPT couldn't do similar.

Your ideas get to spread around. You might want to do that if you care about ideas more than getting credited.

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