Hacker News Reader

Comment by gilfoy | Hacker News Reader

> AI companies profiting

Are they?

If you boil it down to the AI companies are making money (subscriptions, etc.) based on content they did not pay to produce, then they are profiting from someone else's hard work.

Revenue is not profit.

'stealing is fine if you lose money when reselling'

I don't believe I wrote anything of the sort.

I didn't say it was. I understand that profit = revenue - cost.

I said they're profiting from other people's hard work, a separate concept.

profiting != profit

Do you use google search for work? Then you are profiting from someone else's hard work!

The difference is that when you search on Google - at least before AI overviews - you end up at the source site.

Also Google respects robots.txt. Every site that Google surfaces chose to be in the index.

Thats not entirely true. Google might or might not hide your pages from index. They'll definitely going to scrape it anyway. They also display summarized info from your page (famous "what is scrapping" joke showing wikipedias summary). Finally, you might just get your answer without visiting - just by skimming result description.

If you boil it down anyone on this planet can access ChatGPT (and other for profit LLMs) for free to answer any question they might have.

Knowledge is shared among humanity at a rapid speed. Everyone benefits.

It’s mind boggling how anyone could be opposed to that.

Well, don't we have enough Acme Corporations in the world that were unprofitable and existed purely on VC life support before they killed off all the competition by dumping the prices, and then made them skyrocket to recoup investments and become profitable after becoming monopolists?

People at these companies are receiving a salary to do these things that the person you're responding to is opposed to.

While not all the companies in question may or may not be profiting from these things some of them are, and most if not all of their employees certainly are as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com