People were effectively copying websites (especially ecommerce tutorials) and beating the original authors at SEO decades before ChatGPT 2.
"Make me a website that has the same content as that other one so I can get views instead" is not something you could could do generically and quickly with a free service a few years ago, but it is today. I'd argue that it's not beneficial to people who create original content or society at large that this is the case. There are plenty of other uses of LLMs, some of which are genuinely beneficial, some which are mixed, and some which are also a net negative. It seems pretty reasonable to me that issues like this are worth discussing, because as all of the comments on this article here show, people clearly are not on the same page about it.
This article adds nothing to the discussion and seems to be here just because of a provocative title. These same arguments happen under every other AI article, they don't need to happen here. Nobody reads the articles anyway, or else one of the myriad coherent, well-written, and/or insightful AI-critical articles of the month would be here instead.
In the past six months I've organically come across at least a dozen instances of projects from people who had never coded before LLMs producing non-trivial projects that they could have learned enough to do themselves beforehand but they obviously never did. I feel like you're woefully underestimating how much faster these technologies have lowered the amount of initial investment needed in learning how to produce software for people who have never touched a line of code in their life before, and while that can be a boon when people who have good intentions but not enough free time to sink into up-front learning with no immediate payoff, it's also lowered the barrier for people who just want to make a quick buck off someone else's work; the type of person who would never bother with spending a month learning Python or how to customize a Wordpress instance just to be able to try to rip off some website for a couple hundred dollars of ad revenue can pretty easily start doing that if they want.
> Even if you do think that was a high barrier to entry, a dozen people could plagiarize the whole internet. Plagiarism had already fully saturated scaling 15 years ago. Nobody in 2010 would think "my content was stolen and their SEO outranks me on google" was a line out of sci-fi; it was status quo. It sucked but nothing changed, it just still sucks. The price we pay for an open web.
There clearly are people making original content on the internet and making money from it today. I'd argue that if you think it's logically impossible for further dilution to occur if new technology scales the ability to copy content more efficiently than it scales the ability to produce original content, more elaboration on why you're convinced that we're literally at rock bottom would be helpful. If you think that this could happen but this technology isn't it, I've laid out my reasons for why I think you're wrong, and I haven't yet been able to figure out what the basis is for your disagreement.
> This article adds nothing to the discussion and seems to be here just because of a provocative title. These same arguments happen under every other AI article, they don't need to happen here. Nobody reads the articles anyway, or else one of the myriad coherent, well-written, and/or insightful AI-critical articles of the month would be here instead.
Speak for yourself; I read this one, and I've read a number of articles posted here this week. If you don't, I'm not sure why you even care what articles get posted in the first place.
Yes, people can make money making original content. They can also make even more money making movies, music, and TV shows. Do you know any movies, songs, or TV shows that you can't find on the pirate bay? Of course not, piracy is fully saturated. Audiences prefer to support original creators, but this is not evidence we're not at rock bottom. LLMs make torrent production easier every step of the way, but there will not be a wave of piracy because the situation essentially cannot be worse.
When I say 'nobody reads the articles', that's an exaggeration. I'm definitely not speaking for myself, which should be clear from my criticizing the article. I mean, of the HN users who are not on the same page with one another that you point to as evidence the article should be here, the vast majority did not read the article and approximately none of them are engaging with its content.
I'm curious what you got from it and why you think it deserved to sit on the front page all day. I see a retread of LLM training complaints that may as well be plagiarism because it doesn't say anything I didn't hear in 2023, then a complaint about AI bros, followed by two sentences about what set them off that don't explain why they suspect ChatGPT or provide any material detail (and have nothing to do with the training complaint they opened with) before finally sending off by blaming Google for being victimized by SEO manipulation (which also rock-bottomed before LLMs). I'd understand if it was a famous person's low effort rant- I wouldn't be thrilled, but it would make sense- but what's the value here? What did 700 people see here that made them think other HN users need to see it? I'm still convinced the answer is "the title", a title that is not at all supported by the text and that you just told me you disagree with.
1. People copying others' work, made much easier by AI.
2. AI companies effectively harvesting all the accessible information on an industrial scale and completely sidestepping any permissioning or licensing questions.
I believe both of these are bad and saying "people copied each others' works before the advent of AI" is a poor cop out. It's tantamount to saying that there's no reason to regulate guns more than say knives, because people have used knives to kill each other before guns were invented. The capabilities matter.
The way LLMs empower wholesale "stealing" rather than collaboration is quite evident: why collaborate when you can just feed an entire existing project into the agent of your choice and tell it to spit out a new implementation based on the old one, with a few tweaks of your choice, and then publish it as your work? I put "steal" in quotes because it's perhaps not really stealing per-se, but there's a distinct wrongness here. The LLM operator often doesn't actually possess any expertise, hasn't done any of the hard work, but they can take someone else's work wholesale, repackage it and sell it as their own.
Then there's the second, and IMO much more egregious transgression, which is that the LLM companies have taken what is effectively a public good, but more specifically content that they haven't asked permission to use, and just blanket fed it into their models.
Legally speaking, it's perhaps A-OK because it's not copyright infringement (IANAL). But people on this site often hold the view that if something is a-priori legal, it is also moral (I'm not accusing you of this). What the LLM companies have done is profoundly immoral. They extracted a fortune of the goods and work made by others, without even bothering to ask for permission - or even considering this permission. And then they resell access to this treasure to the public.
Perhaps AI will bring an era of prosperity to humankind like we haven't seen before, perhaps it won't, but that changes nothing about the wrongness of how it started.
From a capitalistic standpoint, they are clearly in the wrong by basing their models on illegally torrented content. But it's hard to argue their usage isn't transformative.
But it also isn't a free exchange of ideas. It's a concentration of capabilities in the hands of a few corporations.
Sure, you can do the same thing with people, but it’s 1) time-consuming, 2) expensive, 3) prone to whitleblowers refusing to do the shady thing, 4) prone to any competent and productive person involved quitting to do something worthwhile and more profitable instead.
[0] Mind you, “copying websites” is but a drop in the ocean in the grand scale of things.