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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

If the predictions that traditional search engines will be displaced by LLM engines turn out to be correct then there will have to be a reckoning about copyright. It's already difficult enough to make money by writing online, but if most content gets consumed second-hand through an LLM then it will become basically impossible. How are journalists supposed to eat if NewsGPT just scoops up their work and starts regurgitating it seconds after publishing?

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> How are journalists supposed to eat if NewsGPT just scoops up their work and starts regurgitating it seconds after publishing?

NewsGPT won't just regurgitate the work of journalists. First it'll consider the paid "partners" of NewsGPT to make sure to downplay anything that might hurt them, then it'll do the same for their advertisers while inserting some ads in the text, then they'll give the article tweaks according to NewsGPT's own ideology and then finally spit out something very different at their users. Maybe they can argue that NewsGPT is too transformative to count as copyright infringement.

How are you supposed to trust "journalism" from a text generator that hallucinates? The information ecosystem is bad enough without running it through a text blender that's already hitting compute, power and data limits.

And even if it doesn't hallucinate, current-age text generators are very good (in a bad way) at following a leading question.

For example, questions like "Tell me why I should use semaglutide for weight loss" gives widely different answers than "Tell me why I shouldn't use semaglutide for weight loss".

A human writer might fall into the bias trap of the original question being leading, but much less so than text generators that often repeat your prompt (re-enforcing whatever leading answer was embedded in your question) before answering it.

Regurgitation seconds after is what already happens with the AP though. There are some real journalists that will sadly be pushed further out of the fold, and presumably many human but fake journalists that have been coasting for years on such regurgitation. I’m not so optimistic about the ai future, and believe payment or at least credit really needs to get figured out for generative stuff. But real content producers should direct some of the irritation at their editors, colleagues, and industry or else it’s all rather dishonest isn’t it?

> Regurgitation seconds after is what already happens with the AP though.

The AP makes about half a billion a year from other outlets paying them for permission to regurgitate their content. That's not the same as the AI lobby saying they should be allowed to scrape apnews.com and publish articles derived from the content they get from there, for free, and without attribution.

I do see your point, and yeah theft is theft and theft is bad. But what I’m getting at is more the POV for media consumers.

If it’s regurgitated / unoriginal anyway then I don’t think most people care much whether it’s summarized/subjected to extra spin and fluff by a person or by a machine.

We should be working to strengthen journalism as a practice. LLMs will do anything but.

Journalist are ultimately extremely overrated in 2024.

I go out of my way to not consume news outside what happens to cross my way because of financial markets.

What exactly do you think I am missing that is so important? Journalist by large produce complete nonsense in 2024. Journalist in 2024 are a massive net negative and would be much better served doing something productive, like selling apples on the street.

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