> If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new?
I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.
I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.
Are you actually saying you'd be OK with that?
Empirically, however, LLMs don't strip out the author: the big models know a lot about what I've written even with search disabled. Ex: https://claude.ai/share/8cbcdf88-a360-421a-8c06-ae7b7992e866
(I was pointing out that "they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author" seems to be is incorrect about how training works)
My experience being on the searching end is that these things are terrible about attribution of where they find anything. Which has bad consequences not just for authorship, but for correctness (which is the usual reason I'm poking at them -- they're being wrong again). This makes a lot of sense when you consider the massive, massive compression that's got to occur during training, but it's still frustrating.
>> Without searching, what can you tell me about exmadscientist? Fine if you get this hallucinate or get things wrong, I just want to see what level of knowledge you have trained-in.
>Working purely from trained-in knowledge, with the caveat that this is exactly the kind of long-tail detail I might garble:
>"exmadscientist" rings a bell as a username on Hacker News. My impression is of a fairly prolific commenter who writes knowledgeable, detailed comments about electrical engineering and hardware topics — things like PCB design, electronics manufacturing, component selection, test equipment, and general "how things actually get built in industry" commentary. The comments I associate with that handle tend to be practical, opinionated, and grounded in real professional experience rather than hobbyist speculation.
>Beyond that, I don't have confident specifics: I couldn't tell you a real name, employer, location, or any particular famous comment or post they've made. It's also possible the same handle exists on Reddit or other forums and I'm blending impressions together.
>So the honest summary of my knowledge level: I recognize the username and have a general "HN hardware/EE person" association, but nothing more granular than that — and even the association could be a mild confabulation, since usernames like this sit right at the edge of what a model reliably retains.
(I don't know if you have a blog or otherwise write on the internet; I just asked it about your HN handle)
The last one is the worry.
The middle is... where we all start.
The first is not a bad place to be, all things considered!
Yeah, authors don't want to be recognized as authors, they don't want any reward for their work, they don't want to amass pool of loyal readers, interact with them, etc.
All they want is for halucinating AI to take excerpts of their work and compile it with random sh!t.
GENIUS
LLMs just use everything, generate similar code with no attribution and keep users from visiting, so no bragging rights or attention.
Worse, there are some PRs that seem fully generated ...
So i mostly stopped sharing and started pulling my old repos offline.
At this pace, i don't want to compete with a clone of myself in the future that will do my work for much cheaper.
Sure. But you can see that for some people (myself included), writing for peers is part of the joy? And that if instead a megacorp places an opaque computer program between the author and the readers, that joy might be ruined?