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> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. HN guidelines[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.co

> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. HN guidelines[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

acdha 3y ago
This feels like a challenge moving with the times. I strongly agree with the guidelines – paywalls are becoming pervasive entirely due to people not compensating journalists for their work – but the number of different subscriptions needed to follow more than a handful of writers is starting to cost as much as a cable TV plan. Previously I thought that the subscriber share mechanisms would offer a bit of a balance here but with the entire industry worried about AI training I’m not sure that’ll help since they’re going to be worried about even a single retrieval not gated behind a login system where you agree to pay them more for training.
- amne 3y ago
  Is it possible we're reaching a world where we get our news from AI bots exclusively because the companies behind said AI bots are the only ones willing to pay for access to "The News (TM)" ?
  - acdha 3y ago
    It won’t be that simple but it’ll have some nasty effects: for example, media sites which are funded to support political viewpoints with a lot of money behind them are less likely to have paywalls because they can rely on sponsorship. That’s likely to make the AI summaries even less trustworthy because training will only be so successful at correcting for the selection bias of training data which is freely available or cheaply licensed. Most people know to some extent that this needs to be controlled for on really big issues like climate change but there are tons of smaller issues where someone working on an ML system won’t have any idea of the scale of the problem because they don’t know about issues which are largely only known within a particular regional, business, linguistic, etc. community.
saberience 3y ago
What's the point in submitting a source which cannot be read? It makes no sense at all. If people can't read it, don't post it.

acdha 3y ago

This feels like a challenge moving with the times. I strongly agree with the guidelines – paywalls are becoming pervasive entirely due to people not compensating journalists for their work – but the number of different subscriptions needed to follow more than a handful of writers is starting to cost as much as a cable TV plan. Previously I thought that the subscriber share mechanisms would offer a bit of a balance here but with the entire industry worried about AI training I’m not sure that’ll help since they’re going to be worried about even a single retrieval not gated behind a login system where you agree to pay them more for training.

amne 3y ago
Is it possible we're reaching a world where we get our news from AI bots exclusively because the companies behind said AI bots are the only ones willing to pay for access to "The News (TM)" ?
- acdha 3y ago
  It won’t be that simple but it’ll have some nasty effects: for example, media sites which are funded to support political viewpoints with a lot of money behind them are less likely to have paywalls because they can rely on sponsorship. That’s likely to make the AI summaries even less trustworthy because training will only be so successful at correcting for the selection bias of training data which is freely available or cheaply licensed. Most people know to some extent that this needs to be controlled for on really big issues like climate change but there are tons of smaller issues where someone working on an ML system won’t have any idea of the scale of the problem because they don’t know about issues which are largely only known within a particular regional, business, linguistic, etc. community.

saberience 3y ago

What's the point in submitting a source which cannot be read? It makes no sense at all. If people can't read it, don't post it.