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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

How would an LLM training on your writing reduce your reward?

I guess if you're doing it for a living sure, but most content I consume online is created without incentive (social media, blogs, stack overflow).

I write a fair amount and have been for a few years. I like to play with ideas. If an llm learned from my writing and it helped me propagate my ideas, I'd be happy. I lose on social status imaginary internet points but I honestly don't care much for them.

The craziest one is the stack overflow contributors. They write answers for free to help people become better programmers but they're mad an llm will read their suggestions and answer questions that help people become better programmers. I guess they do it for the glory of having their handle next to the answer?

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Speaking as an SO contributor, I'm perfectly fine with having an LLM read my answers and produce output based on them. What I'm not okay with is said LLM being closed-weight so that its creator can profit off it. When I posted my answers on SO, I did so under CC-BY-SA, and I don't think it's unreasonable for me to expect any derivatives to abide by both the letter and the spirit of this arrangement.

This hits the nail completely on the head.

If the issue here was "just" training LLMs, like some AI bros want to deflect it to be, the conversation around this topic would be very different, and I would be enthusiastically defending the model trainers.

But that's not this conversation. These are companies that are trying to fold our permissively-license content into weights, close source it, and make themselves the only access point, all while pre-emptively perform regulatory capture with all the right DEI buzzwords so that the open source variants are sufficiently demonized as "alt-right" and "dangerous".

The thing that truly frightens me is that (even here on Hacker News) there is an increasing number of people that have fallen for the DEI FUD and are honestly cheering on the Sam Altmans of the world to control the flow of information.

I think a concern for people who contribute on Stack Overflow is that an LLM will pollute the water with so many subtly wrong answers that the collective work of answering questions accurately will be overwhelmed by a tsunami of inaccurate LLM-generated answers, more than an army of humans can keep up with checking and debugging (or debunking).

It's nice that people are willing to create content on Stack Overflow so that Prosus NV can make advertising revenue from their free labor. But ultimately only a fool would trust answers from secondary sources like Stack Overflow, Quora, Wikipedia, Hacker News, etc. They can be useful sources to start an investigation but ultimately for anything important you still have to drill down to reliable primary sources. This has always been true, and the rise of LLMs doesn't change anything.

For what it's worth, the Stack Exchange terms of service do prohibit AI generated content. I'm not sure how they actually enforce that, and in practice as the LLMs improve it's going to be almost impossible to reliably detect.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/gen-ai-policy

What is even more helpful than answers on S.O. are the comments. Of course it is only to begin an investigation. But who will want to clarify properly if most of the answers are LLM garbage, too many to keep up with?

It is not simply "nice", or for internet points, to take time to answer other people's questions.

Being able to pass on knowledge is the glue of society and civilization. Cynicism about the value or reason of doing so is not a replacement for a functioning structure to educate people who want to learn or to point them in the right direction.

We managed to pass on knowledge and keep civilization functioning before Stack Overflow existed. We'll be fine without it.

Not specifically Stack Overflow, but I don't think we are adapted to live in an environment where correct/useful knowledge is buried so deep in mountains of AI-generated advice which looks plausible but is in fact wrong.

> I guess they do it for the glory of having their handle next to the answer?

Yes, it's hardly surprising that people find upvotes and direct social rewards more exciting than being slurped somewhere into GPT-4's weights.

But they get to enjoy both the social proof on SO and GPT-4 existing.

It's not like they're getting validation from most readers anyway. People who vote and comment on answers are playing the SO social/karma game and will continue to do so whether GPT-4 exists or not. Conversely, people who'll find answers via an LLM instead of viewing it on SO are people who wouldn't bother logging in to SO, even if they had accounts on it in the first place.

People are complaining about losing the audience they never had.

> The craziest one is the stack overflow contributors. They write answers for free to help people become better programmers.

In my experience they do it for points and kudos. Having people get your answers from LLMs instead of your answer on SO stops people from engaging with the gamification tools and so users get less points on the site.

Yeah. I don’t think people do much of anything for truly no reward. Most people want to directly impact and be recognized by others.

> How would an LLM training on your writing reduce your reward?

Because you're not getting the ad impressions anymore. The harsh reality is that people do not click on to sources, so when sites like Perplexity copy your content, you lose the revenue on that content.

This, in turn, drives all real journalism out of business. And then everyone's screwed, including these AI reposting sites.

It's a literal tragedy of the commons

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