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Comment by aprilthird2021 | Hacker News Reader

aprilthird2021

I have actually cut back on blogging (partly) because I don't want my hard work to be slurped up and regurgitated by an AI. I write for other people. Not for AI

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People had been stealing ideas long before computers started doing it.

> People had been stealing ideas long before computers started doing it.

So it’s not ok to be bothered by it because it’s been happening a long time?

I can't imagine how culture could exist without ideas being taken without permission.

Straw man. I can’t imagine how culture could exist without some people being thrown in prison. That doesn’t mean that criticizing a law or law enforcement practice is equivalent to arguing for abolishing prisons.

We can agree that prison and appropriation are both necessary for culture, regardless of their negative effects.

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.

No, that is not “my problem” with it. It is one facet of it, there are lots of sucky ways to take ideas that have nothing to do with scale, and there are lots of ways that fundamentally mechanically harvesting “ideas” as data is different than just learning quickly, but I’m not interested in re-arguing any of this for the 500th time on HN.

It really is getting tiresome. I guess a lot of HN commenters are directly or indirectly heavily invested in the AI bubble and so cannot / will not argue in good faith because they’re barred by personal interests.

I saw a hint of it with crypto and NFT hype cycles, but this is on another level.

It's rude to subtly accuse the GP of not arguing in good faith due to personal conflict of interest without any evidence.

I was enjoying the discussion until the parent broke it of with a comment that sounds like a SJW refusing to "educate" us.

Sounds like that contemptible SJW needs to stop being so judgmental. And it’s definitely rude to imply motives that someone doesn’t directly state, isn’t it?

exactly this lol

you're not allowed to make fire. get inspired by music and make it yourself. write anything in any known written language.

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.

Operative word being "you", not "a blender that predicts what a perfectly average person would create". AI is a blight on creative works.

Do you think you might be being a touch reductive there? Perhaps ignoring factors like context, medium, the economic realities of who makes this “data” and who ends up making money off of it at their expense, the difference between mechanically harvesting data because it’s there and internalizing things through the lens of your mind and existence and making it your own… you know… pretty much everything about it except the razor thin slice of the situation you’re choosing to take into consideration? Any complex and nuanced situation can become cut-and-dried if you ignore enough.

I consider it a honor if people are inspired by my ideas or thoughts.

This could in theory still apply to machines but I would have to think about it first. It might require a different format.

Yeah, and the movie and music industries moved fast to have laws passed protecting their "ideas". The average person has no equivalent protection nor the means to pursue legal action. So opting out of the charade is a perfectly legitimate move.

And in clinging so hard to their 'ideas', the substance has slipped through their fingers and they've mostly reduced themselves to cloning their own movies.

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.

I'm no fan of the music/movie industry, but they abide by a set of common rules. If you take a piece of music and use it verbatim or close to it in your song, the original composer must be credited and the royalties shared.

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.

I welcome people to steal my ideas. I don't welcome the AI companies. They claim they want me to lose my job. Most people online don't want that for me.

I am a person (allegedly) and I would benefit from AI regurgitating your content.

Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.

Google gives attribution and maybe provenance, while AI gives you smoke and mirrors. I guess we'll decide if copyright has any legs left to stand on in the modern world, or if it falls as collateral. It's so sad that commercial piracy has hit such an incredible tipping point that even I feel bad for creative people and their bleak economically dead future ahead.

I want to be optimistic, but I suspect what we'll end up with is a legal interpretation which allows LLMs to steal content from creators without the cool side benefit of being permitted to steal content ourselves. It will become legal for an LLM to turn your blog into a part of its library, but you won't be able to apply the same logic to read out-of-print books.

Reading and writing are both intimate activities. The reader holds the writer's thoughts in mind, and the writer knows this and acts accordingly. Personally, I don't particularly enjoy reading material that was made by an LLM. The fact that so little effort was applied suggests that there is not much reason for this to exist beyond a chance to serve a few quick links. Since the llm is also running this as a business, 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 agree, but its not the only way to use an LLM. I tend to focus my time with ChatGPT on getting it to prompt me on good ways to do things. Like playing cooperative writing games, or coming up with coding training exercises.

>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.

Sure, but I am the creator of the content. And I'm fine with Google indexing the content. I'm not fine with AI doing it. Especially since many of the AI's monetization goals are to make me, specifically, jobless

>Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.

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.

Makes me wonder, how about changing your blog to a mailing list?

Yeah maybe that's the move. I don't really have a following though, lol

I don’t think there has to be some practical economic business justification to a) feel bummed out by your creative output getting munged up into something that, for all its better uses, will feed the great fire hoses spraying trillions of gallons of bullshit all over our information landscape, or b) reduce your creative output because of it. It’s weird how entitled people feel to other people’s creative work and get mad when people don’t freely create for and share with them, while simultaneously minimizing the value that work and its authors bring to our society. Despite what many say, the way people receive and interact with your work mentally/emotionally is really important, and all your work being sucked up into these models— often to create commercial products that are openly antagonistic to the people that created the work that made it possible— changes that. It’s sad that AI has devalued creative processes even to the creators themselves.

You could hack the email addresses out of a website, make disposable email addresses and send your writings to everyone including the replies from the previous newsletter with your response to them.

That's no guarantee it won't get slurped up by an AI at some point. Anything that goes into, say, GMail is ripe for plucking. And there's always a good chance your newsletters will get publicly archived on some web page somewhere, whether intentional or not.

I had the same thought. Still, perfect or not, I bet it'll be an attractive option for some.

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.

AI doesn’t care, the people using AI care. If you really write for other people, I’d recommend you reconsider blogging again.

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.

JD Salinger took a lot of heat over his reticence to publish any more of his writings after Catcher In the Rye and the Glass family stories. In 1974, he responded to the NY Times, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work."

Isn't there a robots.txt equivalent for AI?

It’s not respected, there’s a lot of posts on HN about this.

Just one quick reference: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

You'd probably have a better time using something like Cloudflare to block known scrapers than trust companies that pirate terabytes of books to train their models to obey a "please don't" text file.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...

What about the idea that writing for the AI is your best opportunity to help contribute to it's direction?

Where's my cut of the AI profits?

Nice retort, but serious question: Except for NVidia (and maybe AMD's GPU division), is anyone making any money from AI/LLMs yet? I think no.

SV companies have that cycle where they give things for free until peoppe get dependent or until they killed competition. Then they switch to using every trick in a book to make you pay.

what will happen if it was? some kind of end of the universe event?

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.

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