Your intentions might not have been to make money, but you were creating social credit that could be redeemed for a higher and better paying job. With GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc., you are adding to your resume, but with AI, you literally get nothing in return for contributing.
My contributions to Stack Overflow have all been done anonymously, and I haven't ever felt even the slightest bit of desire to link that identity to my real one, add it to my resume, brag to friends.
Having and sharing knowledge to me is its own reward, and I have no intention of profiting from it in any way.
Your own personal way of thinking about the world shines through when you search for ulterior motivations and state as fact that those factors, like a desire for fame or money, must be present.
I have spent the last year in a new area (sql) and I've written a lot of questions to LLMs, which it gas been able to answer well enough for me to make speedy progress.
I'm a big fan of StackOverflow, and Google, and before that reference books to gather and learn.
Each technology builds on the layer before. Information is disseminated, repackaged, reauthored.
I get that some people feel like their contribution should be the end of the line. Despite perhaps that they got that knowledge from somewhere. Do they credit their college professor when posting on Reddit?
So again, thank you for your contribution. Your willingness to answer questions, and the answers you provided, will exist long after you and I do not.
I tip my hat.
Given that, as a thought experiment, would you be OK with your answers/comments being attributed to others, or that once you've submitted them, there is no linkage to you at all (e.g. you can't even know what you submitted)? Would it be as satisfying of a process if your contributions are just dissolved into a soup of other data irreversibly?
That doesn't sound like a system I'd be as keen to contribute to. Maybe the ulterior motive is at least being able to find my body of work as a source of personal fulfillment. Where is my work in the various LLMs? I have no idea, and will likely never know.
Yes. Wikipedia _almost_ operates like this. I have no expectations of anyone digging into who wrote what, it turns into a soup of information. I still do know I contributed, but I don't care if what I wrote gets rewritten, replaced, improved.
4chan does operate like this, and back in the days that /prog/ had meaningful discussions, I enjoyed participating in threads there.
I guess I never really thought about having a dog in this race (effectively being a tradesman as I am, and not a "content creator"). I did write a ton on ServerFault.com. I guess I am in this unwittingly.
I'm a little salty about the LLM training on my Stack Exchange answers but I knew what I was getting in to when I signed-up. I don't really subscribe to notions of "intellectual property" so I don't feel strongly on that front.
It just feels impolite and rude. More like plagiarism and less like copyright infringement. A matter of tact between people, versus a legal matter.
The way LLMs turn the collective human expression into "slop" that "they" then "speak" with a tone of authority about feels scummy. It feels like a person who has read a few books and picked up the vernacular and idiom of a trade confidently lying about being an expert.
I can't attribute that scumminess to the LLM itself, since it's just a pile of numbers. I absolutely attribute that scumminess to the companies making money from them.
re: Stack Exchange social credit and redeeming it - I'm not a good self-promoter, and admittedly ServerFault.com is a much smaller traffic Stack Exchange site than Stack Overflow, but begin the top-ranked user on the site for 5+ years didn't confer much in the way of real-world benefits. I had a ton of fun though.
(I got a tiny bit of name recognition from some IRL people and a free trip to the Stack Overflow offices in NYC one time. I definitely got a boost of happiness every time a friend related a story to the effect of: "I ran into an issue, search-engined it, and came up with something you wrote on Server Fault that solved my problem.")
so if they weren't making money (or weren't planning on making any), then would it still be "scummy"?
In other words, do you feel that they're only scummy because they're able to profit off the work (where as you didn't or couldn't)? Why isn't this sour grapes?
The reality is many wikipedia, stack overflow, etc contributors want information to be free and correct, and don't want money, so it's not sour grapes, it's rather annoyance at a perversion of the intent and vision.
I contributed to wikipedia because I want a free reservoir of human knowledge to benefit all, I want the commons to be rich with information. Anyone making money off it is scummy not because I couldn't figure out how to, but because they are perverting the intention of information to be free.
Instead, we've ended up with one of the main interfaces to wikipedia being a paid often inaccurate chatbot for a for-profit company which doesn't attribute wikipedia and burns down forests as a side-effect.
This isn't sour grapes, this is recognizing exploitation of the commons.
Equally I'd suggest that the commons is not free. It has to be paid for by someone. Wikipedia exists by begging for donations. Google sells advertising (as does StackOverflow as job listings) etc.
I mean, the first carpenter who took "common knowledge" and wrote a (paid for) book did the same thing. Knowledge is definitely not free, and it costs money to spread it.
(As an aside, I've been using LLMs for free all year.)
All through history people have exploited the commons. The printing press, books, universities, education, radio, television, through computers, Google, sites like SO. LLMs are just the latest step in a long long line of history.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Over grazing common pasture land, results in its decimation.
There are national and international level bodies required to ensure we dont kill all the rhinos. Hell - that we dont kill all the people.
The printing press, universities, education - these are NOT commons in many places, nor do they function as commons. Let alone function as LLMs.
Common knowledge is not the same as the commons.
does it diminish, if the commons is knowledge based, such as online sources? Those sources does not truly disappear after the information is extracted and placed into an LLM.
Unlike a physical commons, which has limitations on use, informational commons don't.
So the fact that someone else is able to gain more value out of the knowledge than others is not a reason to make them scummy - as if they alone don't deserve access to the knowledge that you claim should be free.
If contributors, after seeing how someone else is able to make profits off previously freely available knowledge, feel that they somehow now suddenly deserve to be paid after the fact, then i dont know how to say it but to call it sour grapes.
I pay for o1-pro cheerfully, but I wouldn't pay anything at all for Stack Overflow. ChatGPT certainly generates its share of BS, but I have yet to have a question rejected because somebody who was using a different language or OS asked about something vaguely similar 8 years ago.
Sure, if AI was made free for everybody (or only be charged for cost to run).
With Stack Overflow, GitHub and others, there is a mutual understanding that contributing can benefit the contributor. What is the incentive to continue contributing if the social agreement is, you get to help define a statistical weight for the next token and nobody will know?
I think the future business model may require AI companies to pay people to contribute, or it might not be a technology roadblock, but rather a data roadblock that prevents further advancement.
I think lots of people contribute everywhere without getting any benefit at all.
I don't doubt that some who do contribute hoping for, or expecting, some ancillary benefit.
I'd suggest that pretty much the only tangible benefit I can see is those searching for a job. Contributing in public spaces is a good technique for self-promotion as being skilled in an area.
Then again I'd suggest that the majority of people participating on those sites are already employed, so they're not doing it for that benefit. I'd even argue that their day job accomplishments are likely to be more impressive than their github account when it comes to their next interview.
So perhaps I can reassure you. I'm pretty sure people will continue to absorb information, and skills, and will continue to share that with others. This has been the way for thousands of years. It has survived the inventions of writing, printing, radio, television and the internet. It will survive LLMs.
Guilds used to jealously guard their secrets. Metallurgy techniques were lost when their creators died, or were silenced.
And most crucially - the audience has always been primarily humans. There has never been an audience composition, where authors have to worry about plagiarism as the default.
The idea of free exchange of ideas is something that we enjoyed only recently.
This isn’t naysaying or doom and gloom - this is simply reality. Placing our hopes on the wrong things leads to disappointment, anger and resentment when reality decides our hopes are an insufficient argument to change its ways.
But the company benefits from less confusion and a better user experience. Companies are literally paying employees to provide content as it benefits the company.
I do believe there are people who freely choose to contribute with no strings attached, and I guess we'll learn in the coming years if people will contribute their time and effort for benevolent reasons.
Heck - how many people will go to stack overflow when they can get pseudo good answers from GenAI in the first place?
And stack overflow is filled with bots, and not humans?
Why would they contribute, when every action they take will simply mean OpenAI or someone will benefit, and some random bot will answer?
Signal vs Noise is what the internet is all about. Plastic was a godsend when it was invented. It’s a plague found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench today.
I’m not like anti what’s happening or for it, it’s just, that social credit depends on those institutions surviving.