If I'm being honest, I've never related to that notion of remuneration and credit being the primary reason to write something. I don't claim to be some great writer or anything, but I do have a blog I write quite often on (though I'm traveling in my wife's Taiwan now and haven't updated it in a while). But for me, I write because it feels good to do so. Sometimes there's a group utility in things like I edit a Google Maps listing to be correct even though "a faceless corporation is going to hoover up my work and profit off it without paying me for my work" and I might pick up a Lime bike someone's dropped into the sidewalk even though "a faceless corporation is externalizing the work of organizing the proper storage of their property on public land without paying the workers" or so on.

I just think it's nice to contribute to the human commons and it's fine if some subset of my fellow organism uses it in whatever way. Realistically, the fact that Brewster Kahle is paid whatever few hundred thousand he's paid for managing a non-profit that only exists because it aggregates other people's work isn't a problem for me. Or that Larry Page and Sergey Brin became ultra-rich around providing a search interface into other people's work. Or that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei did the same through a different interface.

This particular notion doesn't seem to be a post-AI trend. It seems to have happened prior to the big GPTs coming out where people started doing a lot of this accounting for contribution stuff. One day it'll be interesting to read why it started happening because I don't recall it from the past. Perhaps I just wasn't super plugged in to the communities that were complaining about Red Hat, Inc.

It's not that I don't understand if I sold my Subaru to a guy who immediately managed to sell it to another guy for a million times the money. I get that. I'd feel cheated. But if I contributed a little to it, like I did so Google would have a site to list for certain keywords so that they could show ads next to it in their search results, I just find it so hard to be like "That's my money you're using. Pay me!".

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wat10000 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You do it as a hobby, that's fine. Some people do it for a living. And while they aren't owed a living doing that specific thing, it is going to be a big problem for them if they can't make money at it anymore.

I'm sure plenty of people feel the same way about software. They make software as a hobby and don't care about remuneration or credit. Meanwhile I write software for my day job and losing the ability to make money from it would be devastating.

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arjie 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah, I see. It’s just straightforward protectionism like dockworkers opposing automation and so on. That I do comprehend, in fact.

I write software too and I may no longer be able to just do it in the old way. Pretty scary world but also exciting. I can’t imagine trying to restrict LLM software writers on that basis but I can comprehend it as simply self-interest.

Fair enough.

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wat10000 an hour ago | parent [-]

Do you make money writing software? I bet you either try to restrict LLM usage or assign your rights to an employer who does. Putting code in the public domain is pretty rare, and extremely rare for paid work.

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arjie an hour ago | parent [-]

I allow them to train on my work as described here (for example) https://code.claude.com/docs/en/data-usage

And I do paste code into CC. I’m not super concerned that they’ll see it.

That’s fine by me. It doesn’t require putting code in the public domain which is something else entirely.

I make money off hosted software so in some sense there is writing involved at one end. But I’m not paid by output tokens.

	▲	wat10000 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If your code isn't in the public domain, then anything you haven't explicitly allowed them to train on is restricted for them. They've been ignoring that for anything they can actually get their hands on, but it's there.