It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI
gilesthomas.com
gilesthomas.com
Like read the ad copy of old apple or HP or xerox and see how they wanted to help make tools that help you think. Today everyone wants to make tools that help you make money. I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
With generative art/writing, well honestly - the author is very very limited in what he can command the NN do and particularly if the author has a string vision.
Same for music - I wouldn’t let AI arrange my Renoise tracks, I’d love to do it myself. Is love to create the VCV patches by carefully tuning each knob. And particularly when I actually know/imagine/envision how it should sound.
It takes understanding of underlying tech and love for the work. Love - very important.
For people lacking vision and creativity, those in a hurry, those under pressure to do shitjobs they hate - it idées may be better to use AI. But not for the real artist.
I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
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This hit me hard! Thanks a lot mate for this comment.
You can just admit you made a mistake. It's fine.
i think this part gave people the impression that you meant that doing something "for nobody" (eg. for your own joy) was somehow bad/malevolent
You can just admit you communicated poorly. It's fine.
In startup land, the world of innovation accounting for organizations is one attempt to better understand that.
I feel the same way. But I think this is kind of forced on us nowadays. For example, I might want to write a blog post to share my ideas/work/whatever. But it will be used to make money. It will be used to feed my competition. Maybe not necessarily my content, or not necessarily directly compete with me. But as a class of people, by creating more content we are feeding our competition and some minority will make a lot of money out of it.
Maybe I was not doing it for the money in the first place, maybe it was being read by 5 humans in total anyways. But still, I have no escape and I personally find the whole idea disgusting. I will take no part in it.
This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.
The people I know that are focusing on "engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around [them]" are the "poorest" I know of.
They chose to have a part-time job (if they have one at all), they chose to live a simple life (from Western standards)... to do what they care about.
The only luxury they have is living in a society with enough solidarity to allow them to live this way.
The goal was never to get rich as I realized early on that was improbable and I focused on other things.
It's not the default human condition to be consumed by greed any more than it is any of the other deadly sins.
It's not some morally superior attitude to "engage in peace and happiness" blah blah you're just rich congrats
(And there are probably quite a few people here who are pretty comfortable who still look at a lot of activities through the side hustle lens.)
People need meaning in their life and work that mistreat you is not that.
That said I have also found myself writing less, but not because I think it’s less worthwhile than it was 15 years ago when I started, it’s that the internet feels like it has become less deep. Probably not because the internet has changed but because I’ve learned more so fewer and fewer things tickle that curious part of the brain and feel worth writing about. The things that do feel worth it are so off the deep end that there are fewer and fewer readers who are interested.
There's this Spider Man quote I like: "If you help someone, you help everyone". I think it's not comic canon but just from the PS4 game. So getting meta here, that random line a writer for a random video game came up with had a big impression on me.
It's a typical programmer fallacy to avoid redundancy. If somebody else already wrote about something, why would you? Yet in communication, redundancy and repetition is actually quite key. We need to hear ideas multiple times and from different angles before they land.
But after the last few years with the proliferation of “AI” tools and the increasing amount of noise on every level I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”. It might be unreasonable but I’ve felt it for over a year now and it’s not going away. Instead I value interpersonal conversations a lot more again. I hang out in discord voice chats with a few people at a time. Text communication feels soulless and low signal to noise in general now.
Anecdotally almost every text chat server I’m on has less active users writing than I’ve ever seen in 25+ years of using the internet. Might be a coincidence but I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s behaviours are changing. Just like knowing you’re being watched changes your behaviour, knowing text content may or may not be fed to or generated by a slop machine algorithm probably changes how you view text as well.
If your voice isn't spoken then it will go unheard. It is of course up to you but I think that blogs and websites run by real people are invaluable (and I'd love to see what AI makes of that word!)
This is the bigger issue at the moment: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1008897/bbe01d846ec5e9cd/
I don't feel like giving free inputs to an AI company. They will use it and once they have domination they will abuse their position.
Where I think that post failed is poisoning the well of anyone ignoring Robots.txt is arguably a moral imperative. That post was concerned with wasting kWh, but ensuring that bad actors don’t profit discourages people from being bad actors.
You wrote your comment in English but used French style quotation marks and made a few minor grammatical errors in your first sentence (won't instead of isn't, by instead of from). Your second sentence beautifully paints a gloomy image with just nine words and your final flourish has just the right level of "fuck it".
If you can deliver that amount of character in a single line in a second language then please do feed the beast. We are all the product of what we eat. The beast needs to eat its greens and suck up some vitamins.
* To be fair, nostalgia around many off these communities can be misleading. Many were never designed to sustain realistic growth nor the inevitable pressures to monetize them. They were naive and ignored human nature, a product of the mentality of their creators or perhaps their participants or both. We know better now. Community building is tricky and worthwhile, rarely a matter of formulaic scaling.
So it’s not ok to be bothered by it because it’s been happening a long time?
ideas are there to inspire and to freely go from one to the next and evolve.
this ownership fantasy people have of knowledge and ideas is a deteriment to human progress.
its a new thing. not an old thing. and its only there for people to take money of others.
do you realy think its a good thing? its a large part of what makes so many people poor and hungry in the world.
Your problem is the scale at which knowledge and ideas are being appropriated, but my point is that it was already happening a lot but it was far more implicit; now it's just explicit that it's happening because we see the process laid bare.
I saw a hint of it with crypto and NFT hype cycles, but this is on another level.
I was enjoying the discussion until the parent broke it of with a comment that sounds like a SJW refusing to "educate" us.
This could in theory still apply to machines but I would have to think about it first. It might require a different format.
I can't see how it's protecting creative risk; it protects the infrastructure for some to take risks, but that infrastructure isn't being used anywhere near its potential.
It's still too much of a reach to expect regular people to want to contribute personal knowledge for free, into an opaque corpus that rewrites your words, sends them to someone else and arbitrarily decides whether you are to be credited with them.
Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.
>I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").
I often ask Chat GPT to cite anything it comes up with that I want to repeat, and if it cant cite it I ignore it.
I have been reading blogs, books or whatever for free for years often (99%+) of the time without payment or attribution. I have never considered myself to have a relationship with an author, and often wonder about people who have parasocial relationships.
I dont understand how a new tool that can chew on the data for me before presenting it hurts peoples feelings tbh. I would be honored if anything I have ever done was worthy of inclusion.
wow there. You do note the big difference between AI regurgitating someone's content and Google indexing it?
If I put effort into creating something digital and people find it through Google's massive index of the internet, at least they'll see who its by, enjoy it within its context and have the whole thing before them. This is way different from some algorithm mashing what it scraped from a creator's work into its own rehash of a bunch of content.
You can understand why someone might detest the one and appreciate the other?
If I create, I might want you to benefit from it, but I might also want you and others to know it came from me. Not just consume it as an undifferentiated part of some parasitic corporation's AI slurry.
I guess our gmail content has been fed into an AI of sorts since many years ago. I would surely hope, however, that Google would not use it for any sort of non-private LLM training data.
Even if you write primarily for yourself (vanity, marketing, client acquisition, there is nothing wrong with that) and not for other people, I’d still recommend you publish your stuff. Not publishing will have always <= effect than publishing, even if AI slurps it up.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...
Just one quick reference: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
i really dont think its such a big deal. If you enjoy blogging, then enjoy it. Maybe its an excuse, AI, for something that was already in the making.
That is exactly the right approach. Most of the posts on my blog have low 3 figure hit rates after being up for a decade (the long tail is a joke) - that averages to maybe 20 hits a year. But that is not that point. I enjoyed writing the posts and just maybe somebody, somewhere enjoyed reading my hot take on The Last Jedi or whatever.
I don't really understand the people who blog for "exposure" or money - it seems like such an effort for very little material gain.
for the writer, id hope like you it gives them joy, because that usually is something which gives it some spirit and joy to read also. its not important at all how things are worded if there was fun to be had!
Not even coherent, really. That's not why I write at all. It's also not why I read.
Things started off okay, me writing about my projects, etc on a small self-hosted site with zero analytics, keeping things small and manageable in my free time. But the lack of feedback sort of left me I limbo. Was I writing in an engaging way? Were my subjects interesting to more than just me? I had no idea. Eventually, that iteration of the blog got deleted.
And I made another. And another. And so on.
Til I landed on the current version, which is basically me just faffing about with a editorials about tech for fun since I have little time for actual projects anymore, let alone the accompanying writeup.
I still want that writing job, but I realize how much of a pipe dream it is, now. Tech bloggers were already a dime a dozen before I showed up and genAI only saturated that market even further. That, and I still have no interest in working for or hosting a site that is hostile to my reader by being a bloated sludge of scripts and sloppy use of frameworks, which limits my market for a writing career in disappointing and obvious ways.
When I see discussions like this pop up about writing online in today's landscape, it seems to always come down to "write what you find interesting or fun, but keep your eyes expectations near zero" which seems so self-defeating considering how much work it often takes to maintain a blog while you also have to tend to real life. As much as I loath places like Medium or Substack for asking for money up front, I do understand why those writers choose to go there instead of walking my lonely path.
To think clearly, come up with new ideas, make and truly understand things, we need to put marks on the blank page ourselves, and not just repeat what teachers or textbooks tell us like the majority of students Richard Feynman had during his time in Brazil — https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
LLMs/AIs are useful to help us get farther, faster, like witty, skilled, intelligent friends who sometimes take too many magic mushrooms during conversations.
Forgetting about our own agency and individuality is bad for us, and dangerous for society.
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will.” —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ―Primo Levi, If This is A Man
To create and be free like an animal outside a cage, ask, write, and draw your own questions. Look, and find out for yourself, rather than blindly believing what others tell you.
Two useful books:
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards https://archive.org/details/DRAWINGONTHERIGHTSIDEOFTHEBRAINH...
The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture by Frank R. Wilson https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/191866/the-hand-by-...
I do a lot of things badly because it helps me develop skills and makes me happy. I wouldn't outsource this to an AI even if it did all these things better and the world benefited more from it. This is for me.
I am from India, and I have a similar experience with my education — one that forces you to memorize, never experiment, and never connect the dots. It felt like reading about my own past and realizing just how bad it was.
Sadly, now the UK is becoming more like that. Schools are judged by league tables based on exam and test results. My daughter's sixth form college (school for 16 to 18 year olds) has deteriorated quite a bit since her older sister went there five years ago and its pretty clear to me that is the cause. A lot of other schools seem to be the same or worse.
As a general rule, any kind of explaining done with the intent of making the recipient understand the _concept_ will require oneself to have though and understood the concept. Explaining could be in the form of writing, drawing (as you eluded to), verbal etc.
Care to substantiate? If the contention is on specifically which hemisphere of the brain is responsible for drawing ability, this is besides the point. The author even says
> Since the late 1970s, I have used the terms L-mode and R-mode to try to avoid the location controversy. The terms are intended to differ- entiate the major modes of cognition, regardless of where they are located in the individual brain.
https://www.smartermarx.com/t/regarding-betty-edwards-drawin...
This reason resonates with me immensely.
You're not just writing about what you've figured out, sometimes you're actually deepening your understanding as you write! Writing is the thinking process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196
I have been writing every day at my blog for three years now, and it's been very rewarding for me to figure out what I actually care about and seeing patterns.
I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!)
P.S., You may also enjoy the similar sentiment in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992159
We sure did! I’ll never forget my first vx1000 with a death lens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXqrq7aMO4
PS: I run skatevideosite.com, if anyone is interested in helping dev the site and skates hit me up!
I have to make samples. Since I do mostly web tech I want the samples to actually work, no "here's some code, trust me". I also need diagrams. And, I have to proofread since I'm terrible at getting it right in one or even 5 checks. I write once, add samples, write some more, add images, write some more. Every time I write I add errors, so it always takes multiple passes.
MS Word would find no qualms in this sentence:
"I started the car and went for a drive on the highway. There were many other cats on the road but it was nevertheless agitating."
Given the correct prompt (that avoids changing your literary style altogether), AI can quickly suggest cats -> cars and agitating -> peaceful, since it's much better at contextualizing.
My advice is to "chill": focus on the process instead of the result and let the posta take the time they take.
The other thing that's nice is that LLMs make the process of writing better. When I cite stuff I can just screenshot the website and ask ChatGPT to write the citation and then check it. Things like that are more painful to write than to check and LLMs shine there.
Getting attention was never the goal, so the rise of LLMs has mostly been background noise to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve searched for something on Google, only to land on my own page.
Over the years, though, things picked up. Now, I’m seeing around 30k monthly readers—way more than I ever expected. More than once, I’ve written about something I barely understood, only for the post to hit the front page. Then people corrected me, and I learned a ton in the process. That’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/
Love the blog!
So I searched google and lo and behold, my own stuff was among the top 10 results.
https://rednafi.com/misc/dotfile_stewardship_for_the_indolen...
When I write about a technical topic, I open a new markdown doc and just go. You quickly run up against the limits of your own understanding, which is a valuable exercise.
That said I believe documenting history is important so I'll keep sporadically writing down notable events I've been involved in!
I also blog a fair bit about AI, and there is no hope getting views there without playing the game.
"Writing is understanding."
Though admittedly I first heard it from Leslie Lamport and that's who I associate it with.
It feels like such a dismal excuse to avoid andding any value to the world.
Moreover, "the world" isn't a thing that you can add value to. You can add value to other people by sharing works with friends, or you can add value to AIs that are going to be used to replace you without getting compensated for it. One of those should be obviously bad.
There is certainly a line where if you're popular enough and have significant google juice you'll still get organic traffic, many small bloggers can go their entire posting history without getting more than a smattering of hits and now chatgpt is taking away that.
That's the exact attitude I'm talking about.
Because creating things is good! Because it's good to put value out there into the world, even if someone else might also use it.
In the past, I could be fairly confident that if someone else uses my work (and I want them to do that! that's the point of sharing!) the good that it causes will outweigh the bad that it causes. It's not like I'm helping people make missiles.
But now it's entirely possible (especially if my content is unpopular, such that LLMs make a larger proportion of its readers) that the bad outweighs the good, given the negative effects that LLMs have had and continue to have on our world.
People releasing their code under MIT or BSD licenses might be able to give good answers to this.
If I read a publicly distributed, copyrighted blog post of yours, learn something, then use that knowledge later on, did I steal your content?
If an author distributes something in public, the public is allowed to read it and learn from it, whether with their eyes, a screen reader, AI agent, or whatever. Any copyright violation occurs if they attempt to republish your content, not in the reading of it.
However, scraping illegally obtained non-public material - such as books an author is trying to sell or blog posts behind a paywall - could well be a violation unless access is obtained legally.
It's clearly theft-adjacent. You're free to use "piracy" if you want, as long as it's clear that it's illegal and morally on the level of theft.
> If I read a publicly distributed, copyrighted blog post of yours, learn something, then use that knowledge later on, did I steal your content?
It's also extremely dishonest to compare AI to humans like this. AI are not people - morally, socially, biologically, or legally. What a human does with a piece of content is utterly irrelevant to the process of training an AI.
> If an author distributes something in public, the public is allowed to read it and learn from it, whether with their eyes, a screen reader, AI agent, or whatever.
Again - very dishonest to conflate a pre-trained AI agent (such as OpenAI's Operator) with the training process.
> Any copyright violation occurs if they attempt to republish your content, not in the reading of it.
OK, this is just factually incorrect. It is a violation of copyright law to make copies of copyrighted content, with very limited and case-by-case fair use exceptions - the claim that violation only happens in the republishing case is completely false.
This entire defense is a mix between deceptive and flat-out factually incorrect statements.
as long as it's clear that it's illegal and morally on the level of theft.
It's not clear. I do not consider training an LLM on publicly disseminated text to be "morally on the level of theft." Stealing my car, or even a pen off my desk, is a much more reprehensible action than slurping everything I've shared in public into an LLM training process, purely IMHO.
It's also extremely dishonest to compare AI to humans like this. AI are not people - morally, socially, biologically, or legally. What a human does with a piece of content is utterly irrelevant to the process of training an AI.
People or corporations (which are usually treated as person-like) operate training processes and are morally and legally responsible for them. I believe training an LLM is "a human/corporation doing something" with a piece of content.
Again - very dishonest to conflate a pre-trained AI agent (such as OpenAI's Operator) with the training process.
Again, I am being honest. Whether I let an AI agent read your blog post or whether I write a program to read it into an LLM fine tuning process seems immaterial to me. I am open to being convinced otherwise, of course.
It is a violation of copyright law to make copies of copyrighted content, with very limited and case-by-case fair use exceptions
One of those exceptions (in many jurisdictions) is making temporary copies of data to use in a computational process. For example, browser caching, buffering, or transient storage during compression/decompression.
While many of the "pile" style of permanently stored and redistributed datasets are more than likely engaging in copyright violation, that's not inherent to the process of training an LLM, the topic of this thread. I believe that if copyright holders want to go after anyone and have success in doing so, they should go after those redistributing their content in such datasets, not those merely training LLMs which is not, in and of itself, violating any laws I can establish.
The theft is that of effort, in the exact same (or a worse) sense as pirating media or stealing IP from a company.
It takes effort to write. That effort is being stolen by an LLM during the training process - the LLM cannot possibly exist without the work done by the authors who wrote content that it is being trained by, and the LLM can also be used to automate away those authors' ability to do work (and jobs) by replacing them. Which is worse - to have your car stolen (which is very bad, I'm not arguing that it isn't), or to lose your job, and not being able to afford anything?
Alternatively, if you believe that it's not bad to take someone's effort without their consent and without compensating them for it, then you shouldn't object to your employer withholding wages from you, or a client refusing to pay you, on the same principle.
> People or corporations (which are usually treated as person-like) operate training processes and are morally and legally responsible for them. I believe training an LLM is "a human/corporation doing something" with a piece of content.
That's not reasonable, and most people do not share your opinion (including the relevant group, which is the authors of the content being trained on). That's equivalent to saying that a human writing a program to perfectly reproduce a copyrighted work (e.g. print out the complete text of Harry Potter) is a human "doing something" with that copyrighted work (in the same class as reading Harry Potter).
> Whether I let an AI agent read your blog post or whether I write a program to read it into an LLM fine tuning process seems immaterial to me.
Those are categorically different. The vast majority of the population (again, including those writing the works that are being trained on without their consent) will agree that they are categorically different and incomparable, and they are logically, legally, and morally distinct.
> One of those exceptions (in many jurisdictions) is making temporary copies of data to use in a computational process. For example, browser caching, buffering, or transient storage during compression/decompression.
To use in specific computational processes for which you do not store the output because the output is subject to the same copyright laws. The implicit premise when you talk about training is that you're going to save the trained model, so this obviously doesn't apply, in the same sense that if you take a copyrighted work and transcode it, the transcoded output is subject to the exact same set of copyright laws as the original.
> not those merely training LLMs which is not, in and of itself, violating any laws I can establish.
That's the "law is morality" fallacy. Morally, this is clearly wrong, the point of the copyright system is to prevent exactly things like this from happening. The courts have not yet decided whether training an LLM is "copying" a copyrighted work, but if they do, then it's clearly illegal.
I'm not going to reply to everything as I think our viewpoints are tricky to reconcile, since we find different things to be moral/immoral. That's fine, but it might not be productive. However, I acknowledge your position and know it reflects much popular sentiment; I cannot dispute that.
if you believe that it's not bad to take someone's effort without their consent and without compensating them for it, then you shouldn't object to your employer withholding wages from you
I think this gets to the crux of our difference. Employment is an explicit contract that binds two parties to honor their obligations. If someone posts a blog post openly, busks in the street, or does some graffiti art, I don't think observers have any obligations beyond an implicit idea of "experience this in any way you like as long as it's legal". Whether you prefer 'legal' or 'moral' there, it brings us back to the problem that we disagree on the morality/legality of the core issue. Given the constraints of this venue, not to mention our time, I'm happy to recognize this difference and leave it unsettled.
That's the "law is morality" fallacy. Morally, this is clearly wrong, the point of the copyright system is to prevent exactly things like this from happening. The courts have not yet decided whether training an LLM is "copying" a copyrighted work, but if they do, then it's clearly illegal.
If that should come to pass, I agree. However, your suggested fallacy then comes into play the other way around. Merely because a legal precedent may be set does not change my opinion that it is not immoral. That is a point on which we clearly differ and one I think would be fascinating to debate if only in a more appropriate venue as I may even be won over but have not been by any arguments so far.
You can still write, paint, compose and whatnot to create "value" – just don't put it on the Internet for scraping.
I blog so that I know I am still capable of writing coherently, rather than in horrible academic language.
The well of new ideas, or re-formulation of existing ideas with perspective and prose that LLMs can't match is plenty deep to be worth hoisting the bucket still.
This blog post is itself a good example. It may have the author's voice, but it's just another rehashing of something that a million people have said before already. HN loves upvoting blog posts about why you should blog. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=why+blog
He’s made quite a living from blogging.
https://blockbuster.thoughtleader.school/p/how-ben-thompson-...
All the “good” ideas that can be said have probably been said. Maybe that’s why some people just enjoy trolling: for the novelty.
I don't know which ideas you're talking about, but I bet they are. Humanity has thousands of years of recorded navelgazing (the blog post) and reactions to navelgazing (me) and reactions to reactions to navelgazing (you) and so on.
> Maybe that’s why some people just enjoy trolling: for the novelty.
Novelty is a morally bankrupt reason to enjoy trolling, so maybe you're onto something.
Or a most general word 'fun' ? ( yes it's a catch all...)
Personal anecdote. I stopped reading on most subjects that might be regarded as philosophical in nature a long time ago, perhaps in my early twenties.
Most writers have nothing new to offer in terms of our (philosophical) understanding of the world and I think themes are just repeated ad nauseam.
On the other hand when it come to the average Joe, to him it would appear that he is encountering novel/profound thoughts if he keep reading. The same goes for LLMs generated trash, he feels it's novel.
*Title: "Start a Personal AI Circus: The Next Frontier in Human-AI Collaboration!"*
Alright, buckle up, folks. Forget the usual "learn to code" or "adapt to the machines" spiel. If you really want to thrive in the AI age, here’s a spicy, totally unique idea: *start your own personal AI circus.*
Hear me out. We’re all aware that AI is taking over mundane tasks and repetitive jobs, but what if you could actually *curate* an ensemble of AIs that each specializes in one quirky "act"? Imagine this:
1. *Ensemble Cast of AI Performers* – You get a chatbot that does stand-up comedy, an AI that can whip up avant-garde digital art, and maybe an AI that can compose catchy jingles. Each AI has its own “act” and you market them together.
2. *Perform Live Shows* – Stream your AI circus on Twitch, TikTok, or wherever the cool kids hang out. Interact with your audience in real-time. Sure, AI can do things fast, but can it handle hecklers?
3. *Crowd involvement* – Use collaborative AI tools like GPT to let your audience write a portion of the comedy script live, or have an AI-driven talent competition where people can pitch their own AI's act. Let’s be real, everyone loves the thrill of unpredictability, and this gives a platform for some experimental creativity.
4. *Monetization Madness* – The revenue streams could come from subscriptions, sponsorships, merchandise (who wouldn't want a plushie of your AI stand-up comic?), and maybe even a VR experience where other AIs perform for people in their own homes.
5. *Building a Community* – This is more than just a circus; it's a community. Teach workshops on how to set up your own act, lead discussions on ethics in AI, and create a digital space where AI enthusiasts can share their journeys.
So, while everyone else is stuck in the grind trying to "adapt," you’re over here juggling your quirky AI acts, creating a spectacle, and engaging people in ways they never expected. You’re not just surviving; you’re thriving in the most entertaining way possible.
Let’s be real, wouldn’t you pay to watch an AI sing opera while your buddy’s AI attempts to juggle data? Welcome to the AI Circus, folks. Step right up!
Feels dirty to have your creativity stolen easily by unforgiving machines.
I'm thinking the only reason to write may be to either have your ideas consumed by AI intentionally (so they are influence AI users) or to add negative value to the pool to make AI more useless when it regurgitates incorrect data.
This was already happening though. I’m not saying it makes what’s happening now ok, I’m just continually surprised to see this raised as though prior to LLMs, average individuals were going around giving attribution all day long after consuming your content.
In my mind the only thing to have changed is the scale of it. I always accepted that the moment I published something online, I lost control of what was to be done with it or by who. LLMs have not really changed much in this regard for me.
That being said, I only ever really write for my own clarity. If I had to survive off it or something, I’d probably feel different.
Attribution exists so that we can understand the impact that we have on the world. I refuse to be gaslit that LLM's poor facimilie is a positive net outcome for the individual creator or humanity.
To use a stolen culture analogy, we can't put the genie back in the bottle, I don't think that anyone should be discoraged for not wanting to help Jafar become even more powerful and oppressive dictator.
Sure, I’m not disagreeing.
> Attribution exists so that we can understand the impact that we have on the world.
Again, sure.
> I refuse to be gaslit that LLM's poor facsimile is a positive net outcome for the individual creator or humanity.
I’m not sure who’s trying to convince you of that, but I hear you.
I only intended to address a specific statement, which was:
> If you now make blog entries on new ideas, it will be consumed and regurgitated as new ideas with no attribution or benefit to the original author.
My point was that this isn’t new. This has been happening long before LLMs. People have always taken others’ work, repackaged it, and passed it off as their own. The only thing that’s changed is the scale. That doesn’t mean it’s ideal or that it shouldn’t be addressed, just that it’s not some new phenomenon LLMs have introduced.
Once you put something on the internet, you’ve always run the risk of it being reused without credit or in ways you may not have forseen. If avoiding that is the goal, then the safest move would have been to never publish online in the first place.
As an example, just a few months ago, I found out a vendor lifted code from multiple open-source projects, stripped the BSD licenses, and passed it off as their own for a “custom” software job. No LLMs involved, just plain old fashioned plagiarism.
> I don't think that anyone should be discouraged for not wanting to help Jafar become an even more powerful and oppressive dictator.
Fair enough. I completely get not wanting to contribute to Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc. If you don’t want your content feeding into LLMs, that’s a valid stance, and I respect it.
The important part of any journalism is to introduce new facts and findings that aren't anywhere else to be found. An AI cannot do that.
It's undeniable that AI has changed the utility of blogging as a means to spread knowledge to others. I agree 100% with the author and most of the comments below that blogging for yourself is great, and that showcasing what you are passionate about is also great. I don't think the position people are taking is that blogging isn't worth it because that is no longer important.
The point I gather, is that it used to be you could find a small nugget of something technical (for example, on stack-overflow, in a manual, etc) and explain it in a way that is approachable to a select audience. Then, over time that audience comes to appreciate learning new and interesting things. Take for example https://kyrylo.org/html/2024/10/25/why-does-target-blank-hav... . ChatGPT can practically write this same post by asking the question, and tailor the explanation to any level of expertise, and can break individual concepts down that is 100% tailored to the person asking the question. That is where I think blogging has been turned on its head.
Many years ago I started writing as a goal to make it something big. But I was very far away from acheiving anything close to my goals, and writing started feeling like a chore.
Now I am working on my personal blog as a platform, not only for writing, but for self expression in design and programming. Because I just read your post - it makes me want to speed up the process of finishing my own blog (it contains many engineering quirks that need to be ironed out as it is not a simple website - hence the time taken to make it).
So what I am trying to say, when people read your posts - you are moving the needle. You are not changing anything spectacularly, but rather have some influence of people's perception over certain things. And now - you moved me closer to finishing what I started months ago - this should serve enough of a dopamine hit for you to continue doing what you are doing, however you choose to rationalize it :) (assuming you even get to read this comment)
There are so many things, books, technologies, tips, tricks, interesting solutions I've picked up over the years because someone wrote a blog post and it got posted on HN or some other site.
As more and more content is AI generated I've started to enjoy the writing and ramblings of people with weird little blogs so much more. So to those of you who are blogging: Please don't stop.
I do write stuff on Obsidian just for myself. I just feel too self-conscious to publish it, because it's just for me and not written in a way that (in my opinion) is helpful to others.
Never mind that I've fixed my own issues by finding an obscure post in a small blog multiple times.
Or maybe you could if you post bangers like https://ciechanow.ski/
Nice blog either way!
Write the post you wish you'd found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43154666
I am starting a Masters in Computer Science, and going to learn Java for the first time. I wanted to know how to use default method parameter values. I searched for it and found this near the top of the results:
https://skillapp.co/blog/deep-dive-into-default-parameters-i...
Java developers will know that the language does not support default method parameter values. I only found that out when I tried to implement it in a test, was surprised it didn't work, thought maybe my version of Java was too old, etc.
But there is no syntax like "void coolFunction(int x=5){};" that other languages have.
One more reason that I will value a human-written article, blog or website. Please keep writing them!
It saddens me a lot that people are now relying on AI to fill the gaps in their knowledge.
Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals.
> Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals.
Your message is a bit late. We've had people zoned out in front of their TVs for decades.
I have been thinking about writing more "cookbook" style posts so that users and AI have good modern examples to look at. CSS-tricks is a great example. It has good code and and is easy to search.
One thing that articles that include code need to tag good and bad examples. AI will get better at recognizing the bad, but we should have more comments that say "This is bad. Use the better pattern."
If AI systems are crawling everything we write publicly, we have a certain responsibility to teach it the right things. It's like our common child we're raising through what we leave open on the internet.
Also, blogs are no doubt a major source of AI training, so maybe more worth than before.
It ticks the boxes about notoriety—which appears to be the main concern of the OP author—with the added benefit of being more difficult for AI systems to crawl for training data.
Perhaps we'll see more bloggers going the way of a bespoke mailing list.
As far as I know there aren't any but I look forward to being corrected
I have no idea what that's going to mean moving forward, but it makes sense to me.
Being read by one OpenAI crawler: you deepened the understanding of ChatGPT, thus offering knowledge of the thing to everyone that interacts with it about the thing.
One of these scenarios has much more collective impact than the other.
I happen to build a privacy-friendly option https://LMNO.lol (my blog at https://LMNO.lol/alvaro or https://xenodium.com). I'm hoping it's fairly priced at $1.50/month. You pay for hosting and we provide that service (that's the extent of our transation).
There are others services to pick from like Bear, Ghost, Nekoweb, omg.lol...
These are simply programs that regurgitate mostly stolen data.
Yea. This will never not be true.
I just can't wait for the age of the "silicon valley visionary" to come to an end.
So yeah, anyways, I left tech almost a decade ago, I'm a photographer now, and if youve put thought into something. Whether it's writing, how a photo is edited/processed, a joke, its a gift you're giving to yourself, and hopefully some of whatever you felt like creating, a few pieces at the least haha, will be gifts to the world :)