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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

I write things on the internet because I want to share ideas. If someone reads my post and tells a friend, that's great. If an AI crawls my posts and passes along the ideas that's great too.

(It doesn't work for ad-funded writing, but while I have substantial sympathy there this has historically been an unpopular argument on HN)

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Sure but this means that you’re no longer eligible to make living from your ideas, which can be fine by you but it eliminates entire class of people who used to make living from intellectual work.

This also could have been fine, it can bring back authenticity however for this to happen no one should be making money from it. Instead, only megacorps make money and they can just ignore your ideas and generate theirs. They control the distribution and the supply now.

Not making a living from ads specifically, sure, but many have things like Substack which actually directly incentivizes them to make good content rather than serving ads.

Substack is not all websites. There are more than one kind of website out there.

Sharing ideas with people is nice, the actual problem is your ideas in this case are just a vehicle for generative AI companies to monopolize access to information and control our own cognitive processes, which is not entirely something new but it feels like we are now moving backwards: from free access back to ministry of truth days

Setting aside ad-driven revenue - the ideas, when spat out by an llm, are disconnected from the author. If people like your ideas, they aren’t becoming fans/followers/long-term-readers. That means good luck leveraging some interesting writing into a book, a speaking tour, a podcast, or even any kind of consistent readership. The llm slurps up your content and monetizes it while you get nothing.

I'm not interested in a book, speaking tour, or podcast. I've never had consistent readership because I write about too many unrelated things. I blog because I have ideas I want to share; I don't feel at all ripped off.

And do you think that’s how everyone should feel? If not, how is it relevant to people not liking what Google is doing?

People are certainly welcome to feel a lot of different ways, not trying to be prescriptive here. My parent asked: "what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?" and I was describing what I get out of it, in the hope that others might feel similarly.

Fair enough, sounds like you won’t be impacted. But the vast majority of people i read online are able to write the content i enjoy because there are paths to earn a living off it. I expect the future of llm search will leave only hobbyists and slop producers standing.

Speaking as someone who is a bit more familiar with your site, the variety of content you post is really valuable. I know multiple people, myself included, who have either gone from EA to Contra or Contra to EA thanks to both being on your blog.

More broadly, I love it when an author I trust in one area writes about other topics.

AI crawls your post, corrupts your idea or alters it to advertise a product and then passes that along. Still happy?

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