Hard disagree. I put a great deal of work into my website, putting hard-earned information on the internet for the first time. Now Google reaps all the value I create without as much as a "thank you".
Now an LLM just knows all the content you painstakingly gathered on your site. (It could also be, and is likely that it was also collected from other hard to find sites across the internet).
The original web killed off the value of a certain kind of knowledge (encyclopedias, etc.) and LLMs will do the same.
There are plenty of places to place the blame, but this is a function of any LLM, and a funcamental way LLMs work, not just a problem created and profited from by Google- for example the open-weight models, where no-one is actually profiting directly.
First time learning that scraping and training on data that they have often been explicitly disallowed to obtain for free or for that purpose by the rights holders is "fundamental to how LLMs work". If not, then there is no reason those who gathered the information wouldn't stand to profit by selling LLMs this data.
I don't think there is any reason they couldn't do that
Gathering that knowledge is work, and if anyone should capture that value, it's the people doing the work. Seeing bug tech slurp it all up, insert inself in the middle and capture all the value is heartbreaking.
I hate that AI is destroying the economics of the independent web, and people cheer for it because they landed on Forbes one too many times. It's insulting to all the people who did their job right, and still get their work slurped up by an uncaring corporation with no way to stop them.
We will get the web that we deserve.
I wonder how many people will decide to just stop sharing technical knowledge because of that, and how much we will lose because of it.
Eg: instead of writing a blog post, you'll submit a knowledge article to an AI provider and that'll go into the AI's training set and it'll know "you" told it. And maybe (even more skeptical) pay you for it.
Again: highest degree of skepticism, but at the same time, that's the only way I could see people continuing to write content that teaches anything.
Even then, you'll get malicious compliance. The best case scenario would be a bit like Spotify: everyone getting fractions of a penny.
One problem with monopolies is their massive multiplicative effects on otherwise manageable problems.
I have zero interest in providing free labor for LLM companies with no human actually reading my words. I don't think I'm alone in that stance.
Similarly, I used to help people on forums for free. My reward was getting respect of my peers, the feeling of helping another human being and sometimes them being grateful, rare side job opportunities thanks to people finding my specialist posts. That was fun, being anonymous question-answering bot for AI to scrape is not.
Expectation of these in particular makes your blogging a product.
> with no human actually reading my words
But it - or at least the idea - is being ultimately read by humans, as long as some article is in the top results for relevance to some LLM prompts. It just may be summarized, or particular parts extracted first, or reworded for clarity (like I may ask for an "eli5" if I encounter something that's interesting but I find concepts going over my head), or otherwise preprocessed in order to fulfill the prompt parameters. All actions which the very human users may have to do manually anyway in order to efficiently consume your content (or give up and move on if they can't be bothered), is now automatically done by LLM agents.
Of course they won't be nearly as many as those who publish with expectations, but also history has shown that whenever there's a gap, someone tends to fill it just because. I'm not worried about content gaps at all. What I see is an overall increase in quality as no-expectation sources float to the top of search results.
I can also confirm that I will do a lot less of it since it's threatening the parts of my business that supported me and gave me so much free time to release things for free. It almost halved my audience, so I have to do the same amount of work for nearly half the pay, half the community, and half the credit.
lol what. That only works when the demand is actually paying. You are talking about FREE content!
>They literally have no expectations
I'm sorry but this is completely false.
If that were the case why do we have so many licenses? Why GPL/MIT/Apache, CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND, and so on, when it's either "free or not"? Surely we don't need all this fluff when the only thing free for real is Public Domain?
Just consider this: we're living in an age where even people who publish MEMES on Reddit watermark them because they don't 9gag/Instagram/Facebook pages reposting it without permission/credit. And they are MEMES!! Even I find this cringe. But it proves that the author has some expectation. Even if you don't agree with their expectation, it proves that the expectation EXISTS.
What is next? Are you going to extend this to say that all web comics accessible for free on the web are "free free" so you should be allowed to remove watermarks to repost them on Facebook? You are filling the gap of having a single place where people can read funny comics for free, except you didn't make any of the comics and you have no right to post them. In fact, this is a great example. How is ChatGPT different from a guy that just reposts comics and memes on Facebook? It's literally the same thing.
And then next you are going to say that all videos posted on Youtube/TikTok are "free free" so you should be allowed to rip them off too.
I feel like you're just going to make an enemy out of everyone who publishes anything for free on the Internet if you start thinking like this.
You should see the internet 20+ years ago. It was rich in forums, interest sites, etc where people just shared because they had this interesting thing they wanted to put out there. Reddit still has a bit of it, though it's mostly a mess now.
> why do we have so many licenses?
Because the way how the law works in some jurisdictions is that permission must be explicitly granted by the author via license, and some authors (who are aware of the legal requirement) just do up a thing without checking to see if there's something that fits their desires. And some want to tweak a license in some way to account for some other thing and end up creating a new license. See also CC0, 0BSD, WTFPL, Unlicense, and others [0].
BTW I'll clarify that it's not "expectations", but specifically "expectations of return". It's OK, and expected, for instance, that someone putting something out there for free wouldn't want to be held legally responsible if that thing is used in an illegal manner.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_equivalent_lic...
There is a difference between working for free for your community and working for free for a trillion dollar company's investors. Doubly so when you strip consent or attribution from the equation.
I hope that you understand that this is a metaphor for free labour intended for a community being exploited by big corporations with no way of stopping them.
(Though unfortunately in the Wild West Web of today it seems it does, practically speaking.)