5 ms·

What incentive do people have to publish work if their work is going to primarily be consumed by a LLM and spat out without attribution at people who are using

What incentive do people have to publish work if their work is going to primarily be consumed by a LLM and spat out without attribution at people who are using the LLM?

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
I would guess the monetisation is going to be limited to either subscriptions or advertising if your reputation allows people to especially value your curation of facts/reporting etc. The big issue with LLMs is the lack of reliability - it might be accurate or it might be an hallucination. Personally, I think it would be a lot simpler if the internet was declared a non-copyright zone for sites that aren't paywalled as there's already a legal grey area as viewing a site invariably involves copying it. Maybe we'll end up with publishers introducing traps/paper towns like mapmakers are prone to do. That way, if an LLM reproduces the false "fact", it'll be obvious where they got it from.
asvitkine 3y ago
To have a positive impact on the world? Also, presumably NYT still has a business model unrelated to whatever OpenAI is doing with their data and everyone working there is still getting paid for their work...
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Oh thank goodness we can rely on charity for our information economy > Also, presumably NYT still has a business model unrelated to whatever OpenAI is doing with [NYT’s] data… That’s exactly the question. They are claiming it is destroying their business, which is pretty much self-evident given all the people in here defending the convenience of OpenAI’s product: they’re getting the fruits of NYTimes’ labor without paying for it in eyeballs or dollars. That’s the entire value prop of putting this particular data into the LLMs.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    > Oh thank goodness we can rely on charity for our information economy You seem to be assuming an "information economy" should exist at all. Can you justify that?
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Yep! I like having access to high-quality information and producing, collecting, editing, and publishing that is not free. Much of it is only cost-effective to produce if you can share it with a massive audience, I.e. sure if I want to read a great investigative piece on the corruption of a Supreme Court Justice I can hypothetically commission one, but in practice it seems much much better to allow people to have businesses that undertake such matters and publish their findings to a large audience at a low unit price. Now what’s your argument for removing such an incentive?
      - denton-scratch 3y ago
        > that is not free Why did you specify that this stuff you like, you only like if it's "not free"? The hidden assumption is that the information you like wouldn't be made available unless someone was paying for it. But that's not in evidence; a lot of information and content is provided to the public due to other incentives: self-promotion, marketing, or just plain interest. Would you prefer not to have access to Wikipedia?
        ethanbond 3y ago
        I’ll restate it for clarity: I like high-quality information. Producing and publishing high-quality information is not free. There are ways to make it free to the consumer, yes. One way is charity (Wikipedia) and another way is advertising. Neither is free to produce; the advertising incentive is also nuked by LLMs; and I’m not comfortable depending on charity for all of my information. It is a lot cheaper to produce low-quality than high-quality information. This is doubly so in a world of LLMs. There is ONE Wikipedia, and it is surely one of mankind’s crowning achievements. You’re pointing to that to say, “see look, it’s possible!”?
politician 3y ago
Without 200 years of copyright protection, how will any author be able to afford food?
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  The fact that copyright protection is far too long is entirely separate from the need for some kind of copyright protection to exist at all. All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period, with the possible exception of performance art (music, theater, ballet). A writer or journalist just can't make money if any huge company can package their writing and market it without paying them a cent. This is not comparable to piracy, by the way, since huge companies don't move into piracy. But you try to compete with both Disney and Fox for selling your new script/movie, as an individual. This experiment has also been tried to some extent in software: no company has been able to live off selling open source software. RedHat is the one that came closest, and they actually live by selling support for the free software they sell. Others like MySQL or Mongo lived by selling the non-GPL version of their software. And the GPL itself depends critically on copyright existing. Not to mention, software is still a best case scenario, since just having a binary version is often not enough, you need the original sources which are easy to guard even without copyright - no one cares so much for the "sources" of a movie or book.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period Which evidence?
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      The fact that it has never been done successfully outside performance arts.
      - CaptainFever 3y ago
repelsteeltje 3y ago
I think you're making a profound point here. I believe you equate incentive to monetary rewards. And while that it probably true for the majority of news outlets, money isn't always necessarily what motivates journalists. So considering the hypothetical situation where journalists (or more generally, people that might publish stuff) were somehow compensated. But in this hypothetical, they would not be attributed (or only to very limited extent) because LLMs are just bad at attribution. Shouldn't in that case the fact that information distribution by the LLM were "better" be enough to satisfy the deeper goal of wanting to publish stuff? Ie.: reach as many people looking for that information as possible, without blasting it out or targeting and tracking audiences?
footy 3y ago
I notice this in myself, even though I've never particularly made money from published prose on the internet. But (under different accounts) I used to be very active on both HN and reddit. I just don't want to be anymore now for LLM reasons. I still comment on HN, but more like every couple of weeks than every day. And I have made exactly one (1) comment on reddit in all of 2023. I'm not the only one, and a lot of smaller reddit communities I used to be active on have basically been destroyed by either LLMs, or by API pricing meant to reflect the value of LLM training data.

What incentive do people have to publish work if their work is going to primarily be consumed by a LLM and spat out without attribution at people who are using the LLM?

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago

I would guess the monetisation is going to be limited to either subscriptions or advertising if your reputation allows people to especially value your curation of facts/reporting etc. The big issue with LLMs is the lack of reliability - it might be accurate or it might be an hallucination. Personally, I think it would be a lot simpler if the internet was declared a non-copyright zone for sites that aren't paywalled as there's already a legal grey area as viewing a site invariably involves copying it. Maybe we'll end up with publishers introducing traps/paper towns like mapmakers are prone to do. That way, if an LLM reproduces the false "fact", it'll be obvious where they got it from.

asvitkine 3y ago

To have a positive impact on the world? Also, presumably NYT still has a business model unrelated to whatever OpenAI is doing with their data and everyone working there is still getting paid for their work...

ethanbond 3y ago
Oh thank goodness we can rely on charity for our information economy > Also, presumably NYT still has a business model unrelated to whatever OpenAI is doing with [NYT’s] data… That’s exactly the question. They are claiming it is destroying their business, which is pretty much self-evident given all the people in here defending the convenience of OpenAI’s product: they’re getting the fruits of NYTimes’ labor without paying for it in eyeballs or dollars. That’s the entire value prop of putting this particular data into the LLMs.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  > Oh thank goodness we can rely on charity for our information economy You seem to be assuming an "information economy" should exist at all. Can you justify that?
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Yep! I like having access to high-quality information and producing, collecting, editing, and publishing that is not free. Much of it is only cost-effective to produce if you can share it with a massive audience, I.e. sure if I want to read a great investigative piece on the corruption of a Supreme Court Justice I can hypothetically commission one, but in practice it seems much much better to allow people to have businesses that undertake such matters and publish their findings to a large audience at a low unit price. Now what’s your argument for removing such an incentive?
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      > that is not free Why did you specify that this stuff you like, you only like if it's "not free"? The hidden assumption is that the information you like wouldn't be made available unless someone was paying for it. But that's not in evidence; a lot of information and content is provided to the public due to other incentives: self-promotion, marketing, or just plain interest. Would you prefer not to have access to Wikipedia?
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        I’ll restate it for clarity: I like high-quality information. Producing and publishing high-quality information is not free. There are ways to make it free to the consumer, yes. One way is charity (Wikipedia) and another way is advertising. Neither is free to produce; the advertising incentive is also nuked by LLMs; and I’m not comfortable depending on charity for all of my information. It is a lot cheaper to produce low-quality than high-quality information. This is doubly so in a world of LLMs. There is ONE Wikipedia, and it is surely one of mankind’s crowning achievements. You’re pointing to that to say, “see look, it’s possible!”?

politician 3y ago

Without 200 years of copyright protection, how will any author be able to afford food?

tsimionescu 3y ago
The fact that copyright protection is far too long is entirely separate from the need for some kind of copyright protection to exist at all. All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period, with the possible exception of performance art (music, theater, ballet). A writer or journalist just can't make money if any huge company can package their writing and market it without paying them a cent. This is not comparable to piracy, by the way, since huge companies don't move into piracy. But you try to compete with both Disney and Fox for selling your new script/movie, as an individual. This experiment has also been tried to some extent in software: no company has been able to live off selling open source software. RedHat is the one that came closest, and they actually live by selling support for the free software they sell. Others like MySQL or Mongo lived by selling the non-GPL version of their software. And the GPL itself depends critically on copyright existing. Not to mention, software is still a best case scenario, since just having a binary version is often not enough, you need the original sources which are easy to guard even without copyright - no one cares so much for the "sources" of a movie or book.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period Which evidence?
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    The fact that it has never been done successfully outside performance arts.
    - CaptainFever 3y ago

repelsteeltje 3y ago

I think you're making a profound point here. I believe you equate incentive to monetary rewards. And while that it probably true for the majority of news outlets, money isn't always necessarily what motivates journalists. So considering the hypothetical situation where journalists (or more generally, people that might publish stuff) were somehow compensated. But in this hypothetical, they would not be attributed (or only to very limited extent) because LLMs are just bad at attribution. Shouldn't in that case the fact that information distribution by the LLM were "better" be enough to satisfy the deeper goal of wanting to publish stuff? Ie.: reach as many people looking for that information as possible, without blasting it out or targeting and tracking audiences?

footy 3y ago

I notice this in myself, even though I've never particularly made money from published prose on the internet. But (under different accounts) I used to be very active on both HN and reddit. I just don't want to be anymore now for LLM reasons. I still comment on HN, but more like every couple of weeks than every day. And I have made exactly one (1) comment on reddit in all of 2023. I'm not the only one, and a lot of smaller reddit communities I used to be active on have basically been destroyed by either LLMs, or by API pricing meant to reflect the value of LLM training data.