3 ms·

You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge. The for-profit co

by Alupis 3y ago

You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge. The for-profit company is helping people, in exchange for direct and/or indirect monetization. Your blog post's knowledge-dump ends up never being seen. This is why StackOverflow reacted so poorly to Stack Exchange's announcement they would be using all of your hard work to train a for-profit model. It might not be illegal - but it sure does feel weird, at a minimum.

jefftk 3y ago
I feel similarly to prepend: I often write things up because I want to help people by sharing knowledge. I don't care whether people get that knowledge via directly seeing it on my site vs hearing it second hand from a friend vs reading it in LLM output. It's not important that my contribution go directly from me to the other person; what matters is that they get the information they're looking for.
- Alupis 3y ago
  How do you know anyone ever gets this information?
  - jefftk 3y ago
    I don't have a strong feedback loop here, but I generally figure that if I make it public then search engines (or now LLMs) will give it to people who want it.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      A lot like shouting into the wind. With a blog post - you get feedback via comments. With SO, you get feedback via votes and comments. With HN, you get feedback the same way. We have feedback on all of these systems so that humans can more readily discern correctness. An AI model is not going to be able to readily understand what solution is correct, lest it wouldn't need to crawl the page in the first place.
      - jefftk 3y ago
        Almost all of my feedback today is via comments immediately after I post something, but I suspect more of the readers are people who come in via search. That's not that different from a future in which the searchers are intermediated by an LLM.
edmundsauto 3y ago
> Your blog post's knowledge-dump ends up never being seen. I don't think this is true - it ends up being added to a soup of knowledge that is ladled out as people ask about it. It might not directly be seen, but it may contribute more to the overall knowledge about the space since OP's knowledge is now able to be sliced, diced, and recombined. It sucks for the individual who wants to be credited, and it is annoying that megacorps will benefit directly. But for someone who wants to increase the knowledge in the world, it's not so bad...
- Alupis 3y ago
  > But for someone who wants to increase the knowledge in the world, it's not so bad... You may actually be decreasing the knowledge of the world. It's not difficult to imagine a future where people do not know how to effectively communicate, and instead rely on ChatGPT (or whatever) to communicate for them. Or a future where nobody knows anything, and instead blindly trusts the output of AI models. There's already dating services that let your ChatGPT bot woo someone else's ChatGPT bot...
  - kajaktum 3y ago
    I think you are just hating on LLMs because its a new thing. You can similarly argue that internet will ruin our social life because we no longer have to go to the library and meet with strangers researching up similar topics. But I don’t see anyone arguing against internet? Progress is here, old man. Thinking that people will deliberately go out of their way to grok through pages of PDF documentations hoping to find that one line of relevant information instead of just asking is stupid and misguided.
    - wwweston 3y ago
      > think you are just hating on LLMs because its a new thing. Along with your "old man" dig, the fact that you have to attribute hidden motives to someone who's got specific concerns elaborated in their comment doesn't do you any favors. > You can similarly argue that internet will ruin our social life because we no longer have to go to the library and meet with strangers researching up similar topics. But I don’t see anyone arguing against internet? I know smart people who argue that paper maps reduce social ties because they remove the necessity to ask for directions. They're not wrong. It doesn't mean maps aren't really useful, or that they even want maps gone. It means they're paying attention to dynamics and maybe even better prepared to fine-tune them by introducing something else to the system. People do argue against "the internet", btw -- the problem of determining authority/reliability of an internet source, hidden incentives of search or feed algorithms, sand castles, and yes the capacity for isolation or echo chambers from virtual interaction. They're not wrong either. > Progress is here Change is here. Thoughtful people can recognize that comes with potential advantages and look with concern on hazards and disadvantages.
8note 3y ago
Sure you're helping people. The ai gets trained and thens tells people the stuff you learned The billion dollar company was already profiting off that goodwill by putting ads beside people looking for it As far as the blog is self advertising for your resume or company, it's just as good since you're linking it directly. Maybe even better since the ai will have opinions about you
- twelve40 3y ago
  > Maybe even better since the ai will have opinions about you what does that even mean?? and how in the world is it better than receiving direct visitors from Google as a reward for posting??
mensetmanusman 3y ago
“You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge.“ No. He is helping people and he is helping for profit companies. Both are true at the same time. You can’t help people without also helping the companies. Wealth generation is not zero sum.
concordDance 3y ago
> You aren't helping people This seems trivially false. Even if the info just gets sucked into an LLM there will still be people helped.
prepend 3y ago
> You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge. This has all been played out before. I’m cool helping companies along with people. Imagine you discover free energy. Would you not give it away because you don’t want billion dollar companies to benefit? I have a choice to give away info or keep it. Id rather give it away than not. I’m not going to sell info. It’s not worth the time for whatever negligible gains it would make. Even if there was a magic way to only allow “good people” and not companies to use my info, I’d still allow companies because I think information should be freely given and exchanged and hope that others feel the same. Imagine where we would be if Linux wasn’t used by billion dollar companies. The world would be way worse. Amazon would be poorer but the world would be much poorer.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  If you discovered free energy then you and your family are probably getting whacked rather than disrupt the billionaire-class who depend on scarcity, artificial or otherwise.
  - com2kid 3y ago
    Governments have basically subsidized energy so that it is as close as possible to free for generations now. Tons of industrial processes rely on super cheap energy, one reason China has such a powerful steel industry is because of how cheap energy is over there. Energy is one of many inputs into industrial systems, and it is a fairly commoditized one at that. Free energy doesn't mean you don't need tons of infrastructure still in place, tons of parts and labor to install that infrastructure, factories to make the parts of that infrastructure. And then when it comes to using that energy, large capital expenditures are still needed to get up and running, which means the rich will keep getting richer. Or to put it another way, electric cars + solar panels are totally a thing you can do right now, and at no point was anyone's life put at risk to bring these about. Odds are the first country to get free energy would see obscene economic growth, all sorts of absurd things become possible. For start, salt water + energy => fresh water, solving the droughts that our farmlands are facing. All metal processing uses tons of energy. Meanwhile, my local electric co, Puget Sound Energy doesn't even make a billion a year in profits. The nation's largest energy company, Exelon, barely clears 2 billion in profits per year. Microsoft makes more profit in a week than the nation's largest energy company does in a year.
scarface74 3y ago
They were upset when StackOverFlow, a for profit company announced using their answers to train a model. But they added content to the same for profit site for free? Especially when they knew it was allowed by the CCL?

by Alupis 3y ago

jefftk 3y ago

I feel similarly to prepend: I often write things up because I want to help people by sharing knowledge. I don't care whether people get that knowledge via directly seeing it on my site vs hearing it second hand from a friend vs reading it in LLM output. It's not important that my contribution go directly from me to the other person; what matters is that they get the information they're looking for.

Alupis 3y ago
How do you know anyone ever gets this information?
- jefftk 3y ago
  I don't have a strong feedback loop here, but I generally figure that if I make it public then search engines (or now LLMs) will give it to people who want it.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    A lot like shouting into the wind. With a blog post - you get feedback via comments. With SO, you get feedback via votes and comments. With HN, you get feedback the same way. We have feedback on all of these systems so that humans can more readily discern correctness. An AI model is not going to be able to readily understand what solution is correct, lest it wouldn't need to crawl the page in the first place.
    - jefftk 3y ago
      Almost all of my feedback today is via comments immediately after I post something, but I suspect more of the readers are people who come in via search. That's not that different from a future in which the searchers are intermediated by an LLM.

edmundsauto 3y ago

> Your blog post's knowledge-dump ends up never being seen. I don't think this is true - it ends up being added to a soup of knowledge that is ladled out as people ask about it. It might not directly be seen, but it may contribute more to the overall knowledge about the space since OP's knowledge is now able to be sliced, diced, and recombined. It sucks for the individual who wants to be credited, and it is annoying that megacorps will benefit directly. But for someone who wants to increase the knowledge in the world, it's not so bad...

Alupis 3y ago
> But for someone who wants to increase the knowledge in the world, it's not so bad... You may actually be decreasing the knowledge of the world. It's not difficult to imagine a future where people do not know how to effectively communicate, and instead rely on ChatGPT (or whatever) to communicate for them. Or a future where nobody knows anything, and instead blindly trusts the output of AI models. There's already dating services that let your ChatGPT bot woo someone else's ChatGPT bot...
- kajaktum 3y ago
  I think you are just hating on LLMs because its a new thing. You can similarly argue that internet will ruin our social life because we no longer have to go to the library and meet with strangers researching up similar topics. But I don’t see anyone arguing against internet? Progress is here, old man. Thinking that people will deliberately go out of their way to grok through pages of PDF documentations hoping to find that one line of relevant information instead of just asking is stupid and misguided.
  - wwweston 3y ago
    > think you are just hating on LLMs because its a new thing. Along with your "old man" dig, the fact that you have to attribute hidden motives to someone who's got specific concerns elaborated in their comment doesn't do you any favors. > You can similarly argue that internet will ruin our social life because we no longer have to go to the library and meet with strangers researching up similar topics. But I don’t see anyone arguing against internet? I know smart people who argue that paper maps reduce social ties because they remove the necessity to ask for directions. They're not wrong. It doesn't mean maps aren't really useful, or that they even want maps gone. It means they're paying attention to dynamics and maybe even better prepared to fine-tune them by introducing something else to the system. People do argue against "the internet", btw -- the problem of determining authority/reliability of an internet source, hidden incentives of search or feed algorithms, sand castles, and yes the capacity for isolation or echo chambers from virtual interaction. They're not wrong either. > Progress is here Change is here. Thoughtful people can recognize that comes with potential advantages and look with concern on hazards and disadvantages.

8note 3y ago

Sure you're helping people. The ai gets trained and thens tells people the stuff you learned The billion dollar company was already profiting off that goodwill by putting ads beside people looking for it As far as the blog is self advertising for your resume or company, it's just as good since you're linking it directly. Maybe even better since the ai will have opinions about you

twelve40 3y ago
> Maybe even better since the ai will have opinions about you what does that even mean?? and how in the world is it better than receiving direct visitors from Google as a reward for posting??

mensetmanusman 3y ago

“You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge.“ No. He is helping people and he is helping for profit companies. Both are true at the same time. You can’t help people without also helping the companies. Wealth generation is not zero sum.

concordDance 3y ago

> You aren't helping people This seems trivially false. Even if the info just gets sucked into an LLM there will still be people helped.

prepend 3y ago

> You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge. This has all been played out before. I’m cool helping companies along with people. Imagine you discover free energy. Would you not give it away because you don’t want billion dollar companies to benefit? I have a choice to give away info or keep it. Id rather give it away than not. I’m not going to sell info. It’s not worth the time for whatever negligible gains it would make. Even if there was a magic way to only allow “good people” and not companies to use my info, I’d still allow companies because I think information should be freely given and exchanged and hope that others feel the same. Imagine where we would be if Linux wasn’t used by billion dollar companies. The world would be way worse. Amazon would be poorer but the world would be much poorer.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
If you discovered free energy then you and your family are probably getting whacked rather than disrupt the billionaire-class who depend on scarcity, artificial or otherwise.
- com2kid 3y ago
  Governments have basically subsidized energy so that it is as close as possible to free for generations now. Tons of industrial processes rely on super cheap energy, one reason China has such a powerful steel industry is because of how cheap energy is over there. Energy is one of many inputs into industrial systems, and it is a fairly commoditized one at that. Free energy doesn't mean you don't need tons of infrastructure still in place, tons of parts and labor to install that infrastructure, factories to make the parts of that infrastructure. And then when it comes to using that energy, large capital expenditures are still needed to get up and running, which means the rich will keep getting richer. Or to put it another way, electric cars + solar panels are totally a thing you can do right now, and at no point was anyone's life put at risk to bring these about. Odds are the first country to get free energy would see obscene economic growth, all sorts of absurd things become possible. For start, salt water + energy => fresh water, solving the droughts that our farmlands are facing. All metal processing uses tons of energy. Meanwhile, my local electric co, Puget Sound Energy doesn't even make a billion a year in profits. The nation's largest energy company, Exelon, barely clears 2 billion in profits per year. Microsoft makes more profit in a week than the nation's largest energy company does in a year.

scarface74 3y ago

They were upset when StackOverFlow, a for profit company announced using their answers to train a model. But they added content to the same for profit site for free? Especially when they knew it was allowed by the CCL?