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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective:

> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article?

I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that already, with private things.) But secondly, to get my ideas out there and try to change the world. To improve our collective understanding of things.

A lot of people read things, it changes their life, and their life is better. They may not even remember where they read these things. They don't produce citations all of the time. That's totally fine, and normal. I don't see LLMs as being any different. If I write an article about making code better, and ChatGPT trains on it, and someone, somewhere, needs help, and ChatGPT helps them? Win, as far as I'm concerned. Even if I never know that it's happened. I already do not hear from every single person who reads my writing.

I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own.

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Agreed, totally! I still write and put stuff online.

But it definitely feels different now. It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time.

It's not enough to dissuade me from contributing to the public sphere, but the vibe is definitely different.

Honestly, it reminds me a lot about the early days of Amazon. It's hard to remember how optimistic the world felt back then, but I remember a time when writing reviews felt like a public good because you were helping other people find good products. It was like we all wanted honest product information and Amazon provided a neutral venue for us to build it. Like Wikipedia for stuff.

But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire. And as the reviews got more and more gamed by shady companies, they became less of a useful public good. The whole commons collapsed.

I worry that the larger web and digital knowledge environment is going that way.

I still intend to create and share my stuff with the world because that's who I want to be. But I'll always miss the early days of the web where it felt like a healthier environment to be that kind of person in.

I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll have to chew on this. I certainly felt some shock on the IP questions when all of this came up. I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old.

Also I'm not a fan of billionaires, obviously, but I think that given I've worked on open source and tools for so long, I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think.

(Also, I didn't say this in the first comment, but I'm gonna be thinking about the industrial revolution thing a lot, I think you're on to something there. Scale meaningfully changes things.)

> the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion

That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating.

No, it's as true now as it was then. The intellectual property team didn't win on the merits or by law enforcement; it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick.

> it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick

That's not the whole story, though. There have been many community-driven projects to bring convenient access to copyrighted works to the masses in a convenient way. You may recall the meteoric success of Popcorn Time. Law enforcement shut them down. Without the hand of the state beating down any popular alternative to legal distribution it absolutely would be the dominant mode of media consumption.

I feel the future includes the sentiments you describe. It was a little before my time professionally, but I grew up reading that kind of thinking.

I do think that the open web stuff, decentralized, or at least more decentralized than currently, is the path forward. I've been reading about the AT protocol and it recently becoming an official working group with the IETF.

I feel a second order effect of making decentralized social networking easier, is making individuals more empowered to separate from what they don't believe in. The third order effect is then building separate infrastructure entirely.

As sad as that can be - in my personal opinion it runs the risk of ending the "world wide" part of the web - it appears to be the only way society can avoid enriching the few beyond reason.

> I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old.

Me too, 100%. But that was during a moment in time when that information was more likely to be enabling a person who otherwise didn't have as many resources than enabling a billionaire to make their torment nexus 0.1% more powerful.

> I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think.

Yeah, I've mostly made peace with that too.

The way I think about it is that when I make some digital thing and share it with the world, I'm (hopefully!) adding value to a bunch of people. I'm happiest if the distribution of that value lifts up people on the bottom end more than people on the top. I think inequality is one of the biggest problems in the world today and I aspire to have the web and the stuff I make chip away at it.

If my stuff ends up helping the rich and poor equally and doesn't really effect inequality one way or the other, I guess it's fine.

But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it.

> But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it.

This observation doesn't really clash with "information wants to be free." You just have to include LLMs in the category or "information," like Free Software types already do for all software. You don't need to abandon your principles, you should shift your demands. A handful of companies can't be allowed to benefit from free information and then put what they make behind a wall.

> Free Software types already do for all software

Free Software types also create software...they didn't just argue for a better license and try to regulate Sun/others to re-license their software; they wrote free (libre) versions of proprietary software and released it for free (cost), which is what counteracted the "[putting] what they make behind a wall". If you're saying "[some] LLMs should be free", I agree.

I don’t disagree with you, but this has been going on for a while… Google monetized the the by indexing it and monetized what you wanted to find. Facebook monetized the eyeballs from the pictures and posts you added. Now LLMs will monetize all web content. To play devil’s advocate - LLMs do give something back. Those with ideas and no coding experience can now build entire businesses for little to zero cost. This seems different

> A handful of companies can't be allowed to benefit from free information and then put what they make behind a wall.

What is there to prevent them?

Nothing today; but in a democracy, we have the power to make it possible, if people vote the right way.

> But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire.

The Internet-circulating quote comes to mind: Planet Earth is pretty much a vacation resort for around 500 rich people, and the remaining 8 billion of us are just their staff. The Relative Few have got the system set up perfectly so that whatever we do, we're probably serving/enriching them. AI doesn't really change this, but it does further it.

> The Internet-circulating quote comes to mind: Planet Earth is pretty much a vacation resort for around 500 rich people, and the remaining 8 billion of us are just their staff. The Relative Few have got the system set up perfectly so that whatever we do, we're probably serving/enriching them. AI doesn't really change this, but it does further it.

I don't necessarily disagree with the analysis on how Planet Earth is currently setup to be, but something that I've been thinking about lately, is that to the extent we can consume the public image of some of the Relative Few, they seem oddly unhappy.

I think you're right.

Anyone who finds themselves with $100m in their bank account and thinks, "No, I need more," is a person with a hole inside them that can never be filled.

If raw resources (tree cutting) and manufacturing (book binding) is saturated, a fully-realized economy has just one step left: financialization.

You have to start finding ways to keep people hooked on books and make it a part of their regular lifestyle. One book can't be enough, and after a while you have to convince them to replace the books they already bought. New editions, Author's Footnotes, limited run release, all of the stops have to be pulled out to get consumers to show up en-masse. Because that's what they are - consumers, not readers - wallets to be squeezed until they're bled of all the trust they had in media.

I think about the publications I liked reading as a kid, like Joystiq and Polygon. Some of the best games journalism the industry produced, but inevitably doomed to fail as their competitors monetized further. The rest of traditional media has followed the same path, converging on some mercurial social network marketing tactic as the placeholder for big-picture brand strategy.

> It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time.

An underrated upside to being harvested is that your voice has now effectively voted in the formation of the machine's constitution. In a broader ecological sense, you've still tended to a public garden, but in this case your work is part of the nutrient base for a different thing.

Broader still: after the machines squeeze all of our inputs into an opaque crystal, that crystal's very purpose is to leak it all back out in measured doses. Yes, "some billionaire" will own the lion's share of that process, but time so far is telling that efforts can be made to distill strong, open, public versions of the same.

> time so far is telling that efforts can be made to distill strong, open, public versions of the same.

I do really hope that part of the longer-term answer for AI is LLMs being run locally.

It does feel like the collaborative, free open nature of the web has gone and the optimism that brought… it feels like no one would build Foursquare today. But then I wonder if I’m just old an jaded and to the younger generation creating content, for them the web is open and expressive- just in a different way

I still use swarm every day, and get teased for it all the time.

"So Steve, you're a millennial. What does it mean to 'be the mayor' of something?"

I can relate to this so much! IMHO Foursquare genuinely did gve the better recommendations for food and drink and I still think this recommendation problem is far from solved.

There were a couple of threads on HN this week. "Do you have any unusual hobbies" and "How do you relax". I enjoyed them and was thinking of contributing. Then it occurred to me that my comments would be gold for targeting advertising at me. That is the distrust that has been bred by the data harvesters.

Exactly. That thread about hobbies was just a trap designed to squeeze as much info from as many people as possible.

I like the garden analogy.

Writing online used to bring you readers. Now it trains model, which answers the same questions without sending anyone to your site.

AI harvesting your garden doesn't destroy the garden though. It's like calling piracy theft; in the digital realm those types of analogies quickly break down.

I also personally still feel like posting reviews on Amazon is a public good. I like helping people. That my efforts also help Amazon as a company is incidental.

Certainly if there were a convenient way to cross post my reviews to a more open platform that would be great. The more people I can help the better. It does annoy me to see companies trying to block scraping as if they own my posts and they aren't part of a commons.

> A lot of people read things, it changes their life, and their life is better. They may not even remember where they read these things. They don't produce citations all of the time. That's totally fine, and normal. I don't see LLMs as being any different. If I write an article about making code better, and ChatGPT trains on it, and someone, somewhere, needs help, and ChatGPT helps them? Win, as far as I'm concerned. Even if I never know that it's happened. I already do not hear from every single person who reads my writing.

Not a contradiction but an addendum: plenty of creative pursuits are not about functional value, or at least not primarily. If somebody writes a seemingly genuine blog post about their family trauma, and I as the reader find out it's made-up bullshit, that's abhorrent to me, whether or not AI is involved. And I think it would be perfectly fair for writers who do create similar but genuine content to find it abhorrent that they must compete with genAI, that genAI will slurp up their words, and that genAI's mere existence casts doubt on their own authenticity. It's not about money or social utility, it's about human connection.

The consent question gets weirder when agents have persistent memory. I run agents that accumulate context over weeks — beliefs extracted from observations, relationships with other agents. At what point does an agent's memory become its own work product vs. derivative of its training? There's no legal framework for that.

> I write for two main reasons

> people read things… their life is better

> it’s just my own

What was the point of writing this though?

Perhaps I should know who you are, but assuming you are a regular HN forum user - you are still very much a participant in a larger information economy / ecosystem.

All of us depend on that system, that commons.

Visits to Wikipedia have dropped by at least 8% since 2025, other estimates are starker. This will have an impact on donations.

These reports are similar for many sites which write or produce content.

Your individual behavior may be perfectly fine, and you are entitled to your perspective, but that doesn’t become a defense for the degradations of the commons.

If anything, it’s a classic example of the kind of argument that ends up entangling ideas and making conclusions harder to reach.

That seems fine if you're not publishing content for a living. A lot of people are.

> I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own.

I think you are walking all around the word "consent" and trying very hard to avoid it altogether.

Your perspective, because it refuses to include any sort of consent, is invalid. No perspective that refuses consent can be valid.

Consent is absolutely important, but that does not mean that every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. That does not mean you're a bad person.

Free use is an important part of intellectual property law. If it did not exist, the powerful could, for example, stifle public criticism by declaring that they do not consent to you using their words or likeness. The ability to do that is important for society. It is also just generally important for creating works inspired by others, which is virtually every work. There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not.

> You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment.

I am not representing your words as mine. I am not using your words to profit off. I am not making a gain by attributing your words to you.

> There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not.

You are blurring the lines between "using a quote or likeness" and "giving credit to". I am skeptical that you don't know the difference between the two.

Regardless, any "perspective" that disregards the need to acquire consent is invalid. Even if you are going to ignore it, you have to acknowledge that you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from.

This whole "silence is consent" attitude is baffling.

You made an incredibly strong statement that is much broader than what we are talking about. I am pointing out various cases where I think that broadness is incorrect, I am not equating the two.

I do not think that, if you read, say, https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... , and then later, a friend asks you "hey, should I use String or &str here?" that you need my consent to go "at the start, just use String" instead of "at the start, just use String, like Steve Klabnik says in https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... ". And if they say "hey that's a great idea, thank you" I don't think you're a bad person if you say "you're welcome" without "you should really be saying welcome to Steve Klabnik."

It is of course nice if you happen to do so, but I think framing it as a consent issue is the wrong way to think about it.

We recognize that this is different than simply publishing the exact contents of the blog post on your blog and calling it yours, because it is! To me, an LLM is a transformative derivative work, not an exact copy. Because my words are not in there, they are not being copied.

But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output.

Just wanted to compliment you on your classy attitude and style, along with your solid points. It’s not easy to take that side of the debate. Cheers.

he doesn't have solid points, he conflates fair use with free use (?), ignores thousands of years of attribution history, and equates normal human to human learning with corporate LLMs training on original content (without consent). Great presentation, like you said, to cover the logical defects.

Fair use of training data hasn’t yet been settled in court. People here are treating it like it has been. But no amount of wishful thinking or moral arguments will change a verdict saying it’s fine for training data to be used as it has been.

Until that question is settled, it’s disingenuous to dismiss his points out of hand as conflating fair use or ignoring consent.

Even beyond that, the initial legal opinion we do have did in fact point to training being fair use: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-...

However, I don't feel comfortable suggesting that this is settled just yet, one district judge's opinion does not mean that other future cases may disagree, or we may at some point get explicit legislation one way or the other.

I think the court dropped the ball here. On the one hand, I think they were right that using existing works--copyrighted or otherwise--to train a model was transformable fair use. On the other hand, Anthropic and others trained their models on illicit copies of the works; they (more often than not) didn't pay the copyright holders.

There's a doctrine in Fifth Amendment law called "fruit of the poisonous tree." The general rule is that prosecutors don't get to present evidence in a criminal trial that they gained unlawfully. It's excluded. The jury never gets to see it even if it provides incontrovertible evidence of guilt. The point is to discourage law enforcement from violating the rights of the accused during the investigative process, and to obtain a warrant as the Amendment requires.

It seems to me that the same logic ought to be applied to these companies. They want to make money by building the best models they can. That's fine! They should be able to use all the source data they can legitimately obtain to feed their training process. But if they refuse to do so and resort to piracy, they mustn't be allowed to claim that they then used it fairly in the transformative process.

I mean, that is what the court said! Training on pirated data was not fair use. Training on legally acquired data is fair use.

Anthropic legally acquired the data and re-trained on it before release.

It did not say that. See Judge Alsup's order (https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...), pp. 29-30, Section IV(B)(ii) ("The Pirated Library Copies").

"[T]he test requires that we contemplate the likely result were the conduct to be condoned as a fair use — namely to steal a work you could otherwise buy (a book, millions of books) so long as you at least loosely intend to make further copies for a purportedly transformative use (writing a book review with excerpts, training LLMs, etc.), without any accountability."

See also p. 31:

"The downloaded pirated copies used to build a central library were not justified by a fair use. Every factor points against fair use. Anthropic employees said copies of works (pirated ones, too) would be retained 'forever' for 'general purpose' even after Anthropic determined they would never be used for training LLMs. A separate justification was required for each use. None is even offered here except for Anthropic’s pocketbook and convenience."

Despite this consideration, the court still found for Anthropic on the question of fair use.

I don't read how that opposes what I said, that's part of the "training on pirated data is not fair use." That said, I am not a lawyer. From those pages:

> The copies used to train specific LLMs were justified as a fair use.

This is (in my understanding) because those were not the pirated copies.

> The copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies were justified, too, though for a different fair use.

Buying a book and then digitizing it for purposes of training is fair use.

> The downloaded pirated copies used to build a central library were not justified by a fair use.

Piracy is not fair use, you quoted this part as well.

In the conclusions section a the end of 31:

> This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies.

Training is fair use. Pirating is not fair use, and therefore, you can't train on that either.

What part am I missing?

I think that's a reasonable way to interpret the court's order, but unfortunately the judge didn't really articulate the consequences of training on pirated copies "not fair use" as clearly as I would have liked. Does that mean they're simply liable for infringement of those works, or does it mean that they'd be enjoined from using them altogether to train the model? The genie was out of the bottle; how could it be put back in?

Anthropic settled the case with the publishers just a few months later, leaving the question mostly unsettled still.

I see. Thanks. I cannot wait until this is settled law too.

I was just enumerating some of the issues with the '''solid''' points OP made. Actually addressing them would take too long and be exercise in futility, here, in HN, in april 2026. Why would I put in the effort, for my comment to be flagged and sent to the void? or worse, persisted for ever and used for training without my consent?

And yes, you are right, the legal and moral question of fair use in training data hasn't been settled yet; we agree here.

I did say "free use" instead of "fair use," yeah. That's my mistake, thank you for the correction. If I could edit my original comment, I would, mea culpa. Typos happen.

I see. I must congratulate you on your rhetorical prowess, it's nice seeing a professional at work.

> But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output.

Look, I'm not saying that you are doing that, I'm pointing out that "Silence is consent" is not as strong an argument that many think it is.

> you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from.

What has been "taken", exactly?

> What has been "taken", exactly?

Where are you going with this line of thought? That making a copy of someone's work, using it for profit and not crediting them doesn't "take" anything from them?

I find that these discussions at the intersection of art and law tend to blur technical and familiar uses of words. So it's important to specify what was actually taken here because otherwise the discussion becomes muddy.

"making a copy of someone's work, using it for profit and not crediting them" wasn't really the scenario being discussed in this thread -- is that what you meant by "taking"?

Steve had made the point:

  Not every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent.

But actually taking someone else's verbatim work and selling it as your own is one of those instances where consent would be required, because many people see a clear line between someone selling another author's work and the author not getting a dollar because of that.

That doesn't preclude other instance where explicit consent is not required. For example, do I need your consent to learn from your work and produce similar work of my own? Am I required to credit you in my work for having learned from you? Am I taking from you if I don't share my profits with you?

Some rights holders would say yes, actually. Which, I don't agree with. I think it's important that we not require the artist's explicit consent for all things, because listening to some of rights holders (e.g. Disney), they have very expansive ideas about what kind of control they are owed by society over their creations.

Therefore, I think if you're going to claim something has been taken, you should specify what exactly.

> you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from

In most cases, no, I (and it seems most others) don't feel the need for that, it is only you who seems to have an ideological hangup over this.

>In most cases, no, I (and it seems most others) don't feel the need for that, it is only you who seems to have an ideological hangup over this.

It's not an ideological hangup, it's confusion over the assumption by certain groups that "silence is consent", when it is not.

refuse consent?

You may need to clarify that thought.

I don't think the poster has a viewpoint that 'refuses consent', their viewpoint is their writing they put for others to view is for others to view, regardless of how it is viewed. They seem to be giving consent, not refusing it, no?

> refuse consent?

Who said anything about refusing consent?

> I think you are walking all around the word "consent" and trying very hard to avoid it altogether.

> Your perspective, because it refuses to include any sort of consent, is invalid. No perspective that refuses consent can be valid.

This is what I was responding to. I do not understand your thinking in this post.

> This is what I was responding to. I do not understand your thinking in this post.

I thought it was clear from "refuses to include any sort of consent" that I am talking specifically about holding an opinion that refuses to include consideration for consent, not refuses consent for usage.

But that's what I'm confused about:

How is freely giving consent for (all) others to read your content not 'considering consent'?

I'm not trying to be snarky. I really don't see the missing piece that isn't written that connects those dots.

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