Ask HN: The most useful LLM agents aren't allowed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The most useful LLM agents aren't allowed?

1 pointthimkerbell9 comments

I hope I am wrong on this: where LLM agents seem like they'd be really useful right now would be doing better search filtering and then initial contact/negotiation Q&As on platforms that match e.g. buyer and seller, like Craigslist. But CL for one has (had?) terms of service that prohibit building stuff that scrapes it, and doesn't seem to have improved its search interface for decades. So how do you legally & respectfully get agents to do the work that you need them to do?

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How do you legally and respectfully do something someone has explicitly outlined in writing they don't want you to do?

One argument is that breaking the T&C is an act of resistance.

For all the talk about LLM training there has been little talk about how LLM inference could be a major countermeasure to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

in that an LLM can read the ads and the spam and scams so you don't have to.

One could argue that the T&C is an unfair use of power in that a site like Craiglist has a major impact on the community which does not get to "consent" to it in any meaningful way. For one thing, there is the two-sided market phenomenon which means that a zombie site like Craigslist can prevent new and better competitors from appearing [1]. There's also the fact that craigslist and a lot of marketplaces suck: like you reply to somebody's post and you have less than a 20% chance of getting a reply, right now people on my local NextDoor are complaining that people make posts advertising house cleaning services but when they write to them they don't even get a reply saying that the services aren't available.

[1] the counter to that is going to be Facebook Marketplace

Personally, I'm happy that there are platforms that prohibit this. It means that there are places for people who object that sort of thing.

I'm sure that we'll see analogous services starting up that actively embrace this sort of thing, and that would be good as well. Choice is a great thing.

If an AI is doing work on your behalf it isn't scraping.

You don’t.

So, if say you are searching for a listing for a particular item (with particular characteristics) that you need, your 21st century workflow is identical to what the the 20th century one would have been?

Yes. Maybe I bookmark the search url with parameters in my browser if I am lazy. This is how I check for a certain used vehicle make and model on carmax at the moment.

Seems suboptimal somehow.

https://xkcd.com/1319/

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