| ▲ | steveklabnik 3 hours ago |
| As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective: > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that already, with private things.) But secondly, to get my ideas out there and try to change the world. To improve our collective understanding of things. A lot of people read things, it changes their life, and their life is better. They may not even remember where they read these things. They don't produce citations all of the time. That's totally fine, and normal. I don't see LLMs as being any different. If I write an article about making code better, and ChatGPT trains on it, and someone, somewhere, needs help, and ChatGPT helps them? Win, as far as I'm concerned. Even if I never know that it's happened. I already do not hear from every single person who reads my writing. I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own. |
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| ▲ | munificent 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Agreed, totally! I still write and put stuff online. But it definitely feels different now. It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time. It's not enough to dissuade me from contributing to the public sphere, but the vibe is definitely different. Honestly, it reminds me a lot about the early days of Amazon. It's hard to remember how optimistic the world felt back then, but I remember a time when writing reviews felt like a public good because you were helping other people find good products. It was like we all wanted honest product information and Amazon provided a neutral venue for us to build it. Like Wikipedia for stuff. But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire. And as the reviews got more and more gamed by shady companies, they became less of a useful public good. The whole commons collapsed. I worry that the larger web and digital knowledge environment is going that way. I still intend to create and share my stuff with the world because that's who I want to be. But I'll always miss the early days of the web where it felt like a healthier environment to be that kind of person in. |
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| ▲ | ryandrake an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire. The Internet-circulating quote comes to mind: Planet Earth is pretty much a vacation resort for around 500 rich people, and the remaining 8 billion of us are just their staff. The Relative Few have got the system set up perfectly so that whatever we do, we're probably serving/enriching them. AI doesn't really change this, but it does further it. | |
| ▲ | steveklabnik 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll have to chew on this. I certainly felt some shock on the IP questions when all of this came up. I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old. Also I'm not a fan of billionaires, obviously, but I think that given I've worked on open source and tools for so long, I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think. (Also, I didn't say this in the first comment, but I'm gonna be thinking about the industrial revolution thing a lot, I think you're on to something there. Scale meaningfully changes things.) | | |
| ▲ | rafterydj 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I feel the future includes the sentiments you describe. It was a little before my time professionally, but I grew up reading that kind of thinking. I do think that the open web stuff, decentralized, or at least more decentralized than currently, is the path forward. I've been reading about the AT protocol and it recently becoming an official working group with the IETF. I feel a second order effect of making decentralized social networking easier, is making individuals more empowered to separate from what they don't believe in. The third order effect is then building separate infrastructure entirely. As sad as that can be - in my personal opinion it runs the risk of ending the "world wide" part of the web - it appears to be the only way society can avoid enriching the few beyond reason. | |
| ▲ | munificent 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old. Me too, 100%. But that was during a moment in time when that information was more likely to be enabling a person who otherwise didn't have as many resources than enabling a billionaire to make their torment nexus 0.1% more powerful. > I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think. Yeah, I've mostly made peace with that too. The way I think about it is that when I make some digital thing and share it with the world, I'm (hopefully!) adding value to a bunch of people. I'm happiest if the distribution of that value lifts up people on the bottom end more than people on the top. I think inequality is one of the biggest problems in the world today and I aspire to have the web and the stuff I make chip away at it. If my stuff ends up helping the rich and poor equally and doesn't really effect inequality one way or the other, I guess it's fine. But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it. | |
| ▲ | throwanem an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating. |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | If raw resources (tree cutting) and manufacturing (book binding) is saturated, a fully-realized economy has just one step left: financialization. You have to start finding ways to keep people hooked on books and make it a part of their regular lifestyle. One book can't be enough, and after a while you have to convince them to replace the books they already bought. New editions, Author's Footnotes, limited run release, all of the stops have to be pulled out to get consumers to show up en-masse. Because that's what they are - consumers, not readers - wallets to be squeezed until they're bled of all the trust they had in media. I think about the publications I liked reading as a kid, like Joystiq and Polygon. Some of the best games journalism the industry produced, but inevitably doomed to fail as their competitors monetized further. The rest of traditional media has followed the same path, converging on some mercurial social network marketing tactic as the placeholder for big-picture brand strategy. |
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| ▲ | computably 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > A lot of people read things, it changes their life, and their life is better. They may not even remember where they read these things. They don't produce citations all of the time. That's totally fine, and normal. I don't see LLMs as being any different. If I write an article about making code better, and ChatGPT trains on it, and someone, somewhere, needs help, and ChatGPT helps them? Win, as far as I'm concerned. Even if I never know that it's happened. I already do not hear from every single person who reads my writing. Not a contradiction but an addendum: plenty of creative pursuits are not about functional value, or at least not primarily. If somebody writes a seemingly genuine blog post about their family trauma, and I as the reader find out it's made-up bullshit, that's abhorrent to me, whether or not AI is involved. And I think it would be perfectly fair for writers who do create similar but genuine content to find it abhorrent that they must compete with genAI, that genAI will slurp up their words, and that genAI's mere existence casts doubt on their own authenticity. It's not about money or social utility, it's about human connection. |
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| ▲ | lelanthran 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own. I think you are walking all around the word "consent" and trying very hard to avoid it altogether. Your perspective, because it refuses to include any sort of consent, is invalid. No perspective that refuses consent can be valid. |
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| ▲ | steveklabnik 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Consent is absolutely important, but that does not mean that every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. That does not mean you're a bad person. Free use is an important part of intellectual property law. If it did not exist, the powerful could, for example, stifle public criticism by declaring that they do not consent to you using their words or likeness. The ability to do that is important for society. It is also just generally important for creating works inspired by others, which is virtually every work. There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not. | | |
| ▲ | lelanthran 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. I am not representing your words as mine. I am not using your words to profit off. I am not making a gain by attributing your words to you. > There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not. You are blurring the lines between "using a quote or likeness" and "giving credit to". I am skeptical that you don't know the difference between the two. Regardless, any "perspective" that disregards the need to acquire consent is invalid. Even if you are going to ignore it, you have to acknowledge that you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from. This whole "silence is consent" attitude is baffling. | | |
| ▲ | steveklabnik 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You made an incredibly strong statement that is much broader than what we are talking about. I am pointing out various cases where I think that broadness is incorrect, I am not equating the two. I do not think that, if you read, say, https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... , and then later, a friend asks you "hey, should I use String or &str here?" that you need my consent to go "at the start, just use String" instead of "at the start, just use String, like Steve Klabnik says in https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... ". And if they say "hey that's a great idea, thank you" I don't think you're a bad person if you say "you're welcome" without "you should really be saying welcome to Steve Klabnik." It is of course nice if you happen to do so, but I think framing it as a consent issue is the wrong way to think about it. We recognize that this is different than simply publishing the exact contents of the blog post on your blog and calling it yours, because it is! To me, an LLM is a transformative derivative work, not an exact copy. Because my words are not in there, they are not being copied. But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output. | | |
| ▲ | lelanthran 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output. Look, I'm not saying that you are doing that, I'm pointing out that "Silence is consent" is not as strong an argument that many think it is. | |
| ▲ | sillysaurusx an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just wanted to compliment you on your classy attitude and style, along with your solid points. It’s not easy to take that side of the debate. Cheers. |
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| ▲ | altruios an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | refuse consent? You may need to clarify that thought. I don't think the poster has a viewpoint that 'refuses consent', their viewpoint is their writing they put for others to view is for others to view, regardless of how it is viewed. They seem to be giving consent, not refusing it, no? | | |
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