> am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster?

Maybe, but there’s a big difference - Netflix doesn’t rely on Blockbuster, and Spotify doesn’t need Tower Records. Google AI results do need your articles, and it returns the content of them to your readers without sending you the traffic. And Google is just trying to fend off ChatGPT and Meta and others, who absolutely will, if allowed, try to use their AI to become the new search gateways and supplant Google entirely.

This race will continue as long as Google & OpenAI & everyone else gets to train on your articles without paying anything for them. Hopefully in the future, AI training will either be fully curated and trained on material that’s legal to use, or it will license and pay for the material they want that’s not otherwise free. TBH I’m surprised the copyright backlash hasn’t been much, much bigger. Ideally the lost traffic you’re seeing is back-filled with licensing income.

I guess you can rest a little easier since we got to where we are now not primarily because of technical means but mostly by allowing mass copyright violation. And maybe it helps a little to know that most content-producing jobs in the world are in the same boat you are, including the programmers in your target audience. That’s cold comfort, but OTOH the problem you (we) face is far more likely to be addressed and fixed than if it was only a few people affected.

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zahlman 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> TBH I’m surprised the copyright backlash hasn’t been much, much bigger.

Even when you have them dead to rights (like with the Whisper hallucinations) the legal argument is hard to make. Besides, the defendants have unfathomable resources.

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rurp 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The recent taking of people's content for AI training might be the most blatant example of rich well connected people having different rules in our society that I've ever witnessed. If a random person copied mass amounts of IP and resold it in a different product with zero attribution or compensation, and that product directly undercut the business of those same IP producers, they would be thrown in jail. Normal people get treated as criminals for seeding a few movies, but the Sam Altmans of the world can break those laws on an unprecedented scale with no repercussions.

As sad as it is, I think we're looking at the end of the open internet as we've known it. This is massive tragedy of the commons situation and there seems to be roughly zero political will to enact needed regulations to keep things fair and sustainable. The costs of this trend are massive, but they are spread out across many millions of disparate producers and consumers, while the gains are extremely concentrated in the hands of the few; and those few have good lobbyists.

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tim333 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The trouble is what the LLMs do is effectively read a lot of articles and then produce a summary. What human writers do is quite similar - read a lot of stuff and then write their own article. It's quite hard to block what people have usually done because it's done by an LLM rather than a human. I mean even if you want to ban LLMs, if an article goes up how can you tell if it's 100% written by a human or the human used an LLM?

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mushroomba 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sometimes, things that are fine become problems when done at scale.

Fishing, for example, is not terrible when it's you and your dad with a rod and bait. But we have the technology to create ships that dredge the ocean and exterminate all life. The scale is the problem.

To borrow a phrase, quantity has a quality all its own.

	▲	AlecSchueler a day ago \| parent [-]
		That's true but the GP comment was making a qualitative argument rather than a quantitative one.

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chrz a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

'write their own article' is using existing stuff and adding your own spin and flavor to it, thus creating something new. An LLM summary is lifefless summary and the moment we remove new human articles for LLM to summarize whats left is LLM summarizing other LLMs and then?

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IrishTechie 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If the AI summary was being posted as an article that sat and competed side-by-side with the content you wrote that might be one thing. What Google are doing is more like putting their article at the top of every search and yours and everybody else’s on the second page out of sight.

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Drew_ 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree whole heartedly. It seems clear to me that art and knowledge will transition to more private and/or undocumented experiences in the coming years in order to preserve their value.

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altcognito 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, there's always been a grey area even when it came to tiny snippets in the results, though those actually encouraged you to click through when you found the right result.

The beginning of the end was including Wikipedia entries directly in the search results, although arguably even some of the image results are high quality enough to warrant skipping visiting the actual website (if you were lucky enough to get the image at the target site in the first place) So maybe it goes back sooner than that.

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shortrounddev2 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We are heading for an internet Kessler syndrome, where the destruction of human-written text will cause LLMs to train off of dirty LLM-written text, causing the further destruction of human-written text and the further degradation of LLM-written text. Eventually LLMs will be useless and human-written text will not be discoverable. I pray that the answer is that people seek out spaces which are not monetized (such as the gemini protocol) so that there's no economic incentive to waste computing resources on it.