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Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?

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Yes - previously there was some chance someone reading the ideas on the blog would contact the author to thank them, or ask them to collaborate.

When laundered via LLMs whose pretraining destroys all credit, that can't happen.

If all you care about is financial, expected value of someone reading your blog and asking to collaborate is MUCH lower than odds of being part of some settlement in the future with these AI companies ingesting your data for training purposes.

From their phrasing I don't think the reward they're looking for is financial: more the emotional reward of knowing that someone else appreciated their ideas. I dunno how much less likely this is in the age of LLMs, though.

In that case, more LLMs scraping the net will read your blog than people, that's almost a guarantee. And they'll immortalize your ideas at least in some sense, well after your hosting platform ends up gating your content, or GitHub pages is down indefinitely, or you forget to renew your domain.

I don’t think that’s fair. Some bloggers may hope for financial reward, but many just want recognition for their creativity, to attract a readership, or build a community around their work. Those are meaningful ends, apart from financial reward. What’s not meaningful is to perform free labor to produce the raw materials that a mega corp then goes on to monetize without any recognition.

OK, and there's still some chance, right? I don't understand why you say it can't happen any more.

Search is dead, so they'll never see the blog post in the first place.

he's missing out on any attention that his shared thoughts would bring? and all benefits that might bring if he's good at what he does.

he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.

It feels like volunteering at an Amazon warehouse when you previously volunteered at a charity store. Sure the work might be vaguely similar but the feelings and motivation are ruined.

That's a very striking - and depressing - comparison.

This is such a good analogy, I might have to steal it. :)

Is he? Why? People never read blog articles any more, and only consume content generated by AI?

> he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.

So? That's not a harm.

The downside, as stated in the message, is implicitly supporting the LLM data ingestation pipeline by providing fresh content. It's not a direct harm in itself, but feels very tragedy of the commonsy

> The downside ... is implicitly supporting the LLM data ingestation pipeline by providing fresh content

I don't understand why that's a downside.

> It's not a direct harm in itself

I don't understand how it's a harm at all.

Idée fixe that AI is axiomatically bad.

Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity that explicitly financializes that work's benefits? Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work?

For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.

> Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity that explicitly financializes that work's benefits?

Yes, that was one of the things that I hope happens with the open source software I write.

> Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work?

Sure, that's what doing SEO on one's own blog is, isn't it?

> For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.

I think this is probably the crux: that writing is no longer discoverable because people aren't using search engines any more. It would be interesting to put some hard numbers on that. I reckon writing is still more discoverable (in absolute numbers) than it was when blogs first took off (over 20 years ago?)

A lot of blogging especially in the tech space is driven by recruiting (startup blogs), or establishing a reputation as a thought leader (personal blogging, LinkedIn). So there were upsides that are now gone.

Why are they gone?

Publish some interesting info on a startup eng blog and nobody will see your pitch to apply for jobs, they'll just delegate the task that needs the info to an agent and it'll remember the answer from its training.

Ditto for personal blogging and thought leadership pieces. You get drowned out by the volume of AI generated pieces, and any unique ideas you do propose will be presented by the models as their own.

Is there some downside to the slave who is housed and fed for free? Are there any upside he would have were he not property of another man?

I would be grateful if you could explain how that is related to my question.

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