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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

By this logic if you are commenting on anything you haven't paid for you are stealing. Even if it's published openly on the Internet and you don't have to pay to access it.

Did you pay for all the content you used to create your comment? If not how did you dare to write it and publish it?

You've stolen the fraction of their income because after reading your comment I don't need to go read your source if I'm only interested in information you stolen and shared.

What if you cause the demise of those sources with your (and your copycats) shameless theft?

This is silly. Technology evolves all the time. Things die and they should die. Other arise in their place to fill the gap.

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Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

Morals aside, AI will run into serious problems in 10-20 years when the world has rearranged itself around AI content. With less non-AI content available and no reliable way to differentiate AI vs non-AI content, there will no longer be a dataset to train against.

Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly, but AI summarizing every news article is a problem on a whole different scale. Basically the same as the difference between getting a mosquito bite and being stabbed in your carotid artery - both are just blood loss, but one is a minor annoyance and the other is fatal.

If news agencies still had reporters that would be a problem.

They haven't since the 1980s.

Everything that you say as some sort of doom and gloom prediction about the future _is the world we've lived in for the last 40 years_.

This no reporter argument is so false but gets repeated often. If I only read internet articles from internet media companies you might have a little bit of a point, but actual newspapers have actual journalists. Some might be good and some might be bad, but they do employ people that do more than build an article around a tweet.

Here's a random newspaper that you're saying doesn't have reporters: https://www.tampabay.com

> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

Then the AI will go to the primary sources that the human journalist currently go to.

Will it be flawed? Yes.

Are humans already? Also yes.

Is there a huge risk that "the algorithm" will be politically biased? Totally.

Can you name one press organisation, larger than a local one-city-only paper, that hasn't been accused of that?

> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

It will evolve towards consuming more raw data and more information that people self publish to produce news. Newslike narration constructed on actual factual information is so bland and repeatable that there is no need for more training material. News is so uncreative and predictable that I can pick up a newspaper in language I don't know and still guess with high probability what most articles are about from photos, common names and few words of that language that I do know and general tone.

> Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly,

There are so many humans doing that that the effect is not negligible. I skip reading all paywalled articles and read just their comments instead.

> By this logic if you are commenting on anything you haven't paid for you are stealing.

Can you expand on this? Because I'm not following the flow of your logic AT ALL.

Your brain isn't magic, you learn from experience.

AI isn't magic, it learns from experience.

If the inputs used to train an AI are "stealing", why aren't the inputs (experiences, what you read, what you listen to) to your brain?

And I don't mean in the reductive sense of "you are a human and the AI is not" I mean the act and the process and the result are the same, what differs is the substrate and the architecture — proton exchange across lipid layers vs. electron flow across doped semiconductors for the former, and transformers vs. the evolved chemical mess of the human brain for the latter.

If AI training company needs to train only on materials that they paid for the copyright of and never on materials that are just publicly available on the Internet then a person should have the same obligation. What you read influences what you create. If AI company trained on publicly available texts that it didn't pay for can't publish AI creations then a person who trained themselves on information they haven't paid for a license to shouldn't be allowed to publish anything either.

What's silly is your argument. You're comparing a person commenting on a forum to a service designed to serve millions a summary of someone else's work that's also powered by billions of dollars.

Technology certainly evolves but this is a shitty direction. You yourself are calling the service you use shameless theft. Perplexity themselves have been caught doing shady things. I'm not here trying to defend media companies but I'm saying the current end game here is not pretty and more people should consider that.

I'm comparing millions of such persons to AI. Internet was supposed to be a demise of newspapers and to a degree it is. AI is just the same thing. Hard to tell if it'll be any better or worse.

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