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Comment by frabcus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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