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Comment by pyrophane | Hacker News Reader

I am reminded somewhat of the ride & delivery apps here. While they did use tech to enable some cool things like demand pricing and efficient route planning, a big part of their innovation really came from using that tech to shovel most of the risk and cost of providing the service onto independent contractors.

LLMs are a genuinely exciting technology, but I am worried that a part of what they enable will turn out to be a sort of "content laundering." If you train your AI on a bunch of someone elses work, you can make it produce something very simiilar. You can extract whole aspects of an artist or writer's style and replicate their ideas much more easily now, and because it is generated inside this black box you have a sort of deniability when it comes to accusations of copying.

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I'm a mod/admin on a topic site, similar to HN in structure... one of the posts I removed a few weeks ago literally made me feel ill... it was a guide on setting up a website, then using an LLM to generate hundreds of "articles" for said site.

I've started seeing content sites that are obviously generated content looking at it... mostly in terms of recipe content for lower carb, or sugar free... some list ingredients, but no measurements, others list directions that don't match ingredients. TBH, these kinds of activities make the internet less useful overall.

Between the above and sock puppet accounts, I can't help but think it may be a time to return to self-hosted systems like the BBSes of the 80's and early 90's. I know some still exist, but they're mostly around those that were into the tech, or otherwise into the older turn based text games or artwork. I know there's various systems from discorse to lemmy that are a bit more modern. I can't help but think something closer to a single server version of Facebook Groups +_Chat might go a long way... not even federated, but single-interrest groups that aren't beholden to a larger org (reddit, etc).

That's fascinating. I'm also seeing the sort of effects that this recession has been having on people especially online, where a lot of the guides you're talking about are being pushed more and more as a way to "side hustle". Having a side hustle is pushed more and more these days because a "main" hustle doesn't exist anymore due to wage stagnation.

Part of the popularity of these sort of things stems entirely from how much money is reportedly up for grabs. If you tell people they can do this and bring in 2k a month on the side, they're all in. Likewise, if we had enough funds to not have to worry, these sort of things would rarely be used as there's no real joy in the pursuit of it. My theory on why AI is accelerating garbage content much faster than any other potential benefits.

Even the highlight of recipes is notable, recipe blogs are great earners due to the stability of ads and output of content. This becomes a target for AI (when I say AI here I mean people consuming AI API) due to the high ad value target. That way even if they do eventually drop, get found out, reported to google, all of that, they would have still made enough to do it again.

My Twitter verse is filled with people making websites with thousands of pageviews from ai generated content. Google obviously is turning a blind eye to this possibly because they are planning on something a lot bigger than chatgpt with ai. And when it happens the internet will be littered with ai generated content that it is impossible for anyone to accuse them and them alone for stealing content.

>I can't help but think it may be a time to return to self-hosted systems like the BBSes of the 80's and early 90's

I couldn't agree more. We need to stop using other people's computers to host our stuff. (Or, at least we need to rent the machines ourselves). These days, the BitTorrent protocol is popular enough that you could likely host the equivalent of a YouTube channel for very little actual bandwidth cost.

Text, forums, etc... without media, are almost free until you scale into millions of users.

Doesn’t the BitTorrent protocol use other people’s computers to host your stuff?

It uses everyone who has already downloaded a file to help share it, so the more popular a file is, the more people host it.

You don't have to keep sharing though, once you've downloaded it. It's voluntary.

To the above, have thought about trying to create some kind of turn-key option or close to it that can run on Cloudflare workers + D1 or similar... just to let people get started relatively inexpensively.

> If you train your AI on a bunch of someone elses work, you can make it produce something very simiilar

As a blogger of 10+ years this has been very interesting to realize. I can use ChatGPT to write really good first drafts because “in the style of Swizec Teller” works as a prompt. The results are way better than the usual generic corporate drone style of output.

BUT! And this is an important but. The insights it produces remain at that generic corporate drivel level. Even with a full list of bullet points of cool insights, an LLM takes those and averages them out into a big pile of meh. Every sharp insight gets dulled by “AI protections”, every hot take is two-sided to death, etc.

Despite superficially following my style, the AI seems unable to catch your attention. Everything it writes is a little boring, a little too long, a dash tiring to read. The spark is missing.

Also my style has evolved since 2021 and that’s missing.

> Every sharp insight gets dulled by “AI protections”, every hot take is two-sided to death, etc.

This is a OpenAI thing.

Run a "uncensored" llama finetune, like airoboros 70b. They are as hot and spicy as you want them to be.

EDIT: Actually someone is hosting 65b here, so you can test it and see what I mean: https://lite.koboldai.net/

Note that you have to get the instruct prompting syntax right.

If you train an LLM to mimic your own style, is that even plagiarism?

Relevant Zizek: https://www.newsweek.com/slavoj-zizek-self-plagiarized-new-y...

I think one of the flaws is: nobody seems to want to agree that editing is far more expensive than writing (the to point where editing is routinely skipped). I think it is well established in software engineering debugging is far more expensive then specification, writing, or testing- so one does not leave the big jobs for debugging. I personally believe the same is true for writing.

As a blogger, would you consider that approach to produce content? Don’t you find it incredibly boring and uninspiring?

> Don’t you find it incredibly boring and uninspiring?

That depends. For me the fun part is in producing the novel insight. But nobody wants to read 5 bullet points and they wouldn't get it either.

Turning those 5 bullet points into a narrative that guides readers towards understanding, that part feels like work. If AI can create the skeleton that I then edit into good writing, that feels like a win.

The writing process for me goes something like this: 1) Read a bunch of books, 2) Percolate/simmer/gestate for weeks, 3) Observe reality and seek anecdotes, 4) Simmer some more, 5) Wake up one day with 4 insightful bullet points, 6) Turn that into 600+ words (this part feels like work)

Acknowledging these LLMs are not human, but isn’t this kinda what humans do? Take in lots of different examples and produce something similar but distinctly different and not paying royalties or being considered plagiarism.

I mean, yes, kinda, but the sheer scale of what AI can do vastly, vastly changes the impact on society.

To give another "scale makes all the difference" analogy. Very early on when Google Maps Street View was originally released, there was debate about whether it was OK to show individuals faces. In the US at least, the argument went something like "People are out in public, they should have no expectation of privacy. If it's legal for a person to take a picture of someone else on the street (which it is in the US), why should Street View have any privacy concerns?"

The difference is that while I may expect that other people may see and even take a picture of me if I'm outside, that's different from making my picture searchable, geolocated, instantly available to billions of people across the world and online forever. And I think it's totally rational to think these 2 different situations require different approaches.

Lots of our previously common, intuitive notions of what is OK can change greatly when large scale automation enters the mix.

Humans also typically pay up-front for the content that inspires them and assimilate it over the long course of their natural lives, and are constrained in overall output.

Mechanizing that process so that it can be wielded at scale and automated is a pretty significant "change to the contract", and worth exploring what compensation is fair under these new circumstances.

Perhaps it's the "being human" piece that's important for determining whether royalties can be skipped or not?

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I think most people want credit for the original ideas and effort they put in, even for something like fanfiction. And fanfic is already legally very gray! Street artists in NYC selling copies of copyrighted work aren’t there to be creative, of course. But they’re also definitely breaking copyright law.

Yeah, I mean we have this term “inspiration” already for some time. I’ve long thought that when a person hits a dead end creatively what they need is to to go out and have more experiences and be exposed to new things.

The only thing that's copying is a copy. Copyright has never ever covered style.

That's a view of copyright that predates Williams v. Bridgeport Music.

The real "deniability" of copying will come when the NLP community gets off of its collective rear end and implements actual prompt engineering (i.e. any technique I mention in here: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/45c619ee22aac6865c...). Using "prompt blending" (i.e. https://github.com/ljleb/prompt-fusion-extension) will give genuine "deniability" on the grounds that "A beautiful story by {stephen_king|plato|aristotle|virgina_wolf}" will be very unique and moreover such kinds of interpolation are for the most part how real human writers write.

Taxi drivers already were independent contractors.

And taxi drivers themselves caused Uber to be so popular.

The amount of times I've gotten into a cab in London before Uber and the cabbie was like: "Cash only". What's that machine for then? "Credit card machine down". Yea right...

I absolutely hate what Uber did with 'contractors' but I cannot deny the fact that I like being able to travel for work without having to worry about whether the cab has a credit card machine or not.

> And taxi drivers themselves caused Uber to be so popular.

That entirely depends on where you are. Where I am, ride-share services were never better than taxis in any way except for price.

I wish I could say the same about my location. Where I live they can't even tell you how much the ride will be.

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