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I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic - I'm pretty sure OpenAI trained GPT-3+ on every single bit of data they could find, s

I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic - I'm pretty sure OpenAI trained GPT-3+ on every single bit of data they could find, so they probably included a bunch of stuff I've written here already (though it is minuscule fraction of their vast corpus of course). Losing anonymity is something I'd be much more worried about overall (not that it's entirely separate I don't think it's the same).

JohnFen 2y ago
> I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic For me, the problem is almost entirely that doing so requires me to have a great deal of trust in entities that I consider untrustworthy.
rpgwaiter 2y ago
There’s many good reasons, but for me it’s that I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts that have no intention of profit sharing. When I make a Youtube video and companies run ads on it, I get a piece of that pie (assuming I meet the requirements, etc.). That same video fed into Gemini so google can charge for AI video generation? I get nothing, Google makes bank. As a user I can pay for YouTube premium and not see ads, but as a creator there’s no amount I can pay to not feed Gemini.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure for antitrust reasons Google is (ironically) about the only AI company who is not training generative AI on youtube content. So when you make a youtube video and people train AI on your video and generate stuff using it you only get 1 click of benefit out of it from their first download.
- gruez 2y ago
  >That same video fed into Gemini so google can charge for AI video generation? I get nothing, Google makes bank. How do you feel about commenting on this site for free, which probably provides some benefit to ycombinator?
  - rpgwaiter 2y ago
    I would happily pay a reasonable monthly subscription to this site or similar. No problem paying for a service that treats users with respect. Also using this site has taught me all sorts of things that likely made me some money indirectly. It seems mutually beneficial without selling my data or paying for HN. That said, if YC made a deal with some tech company to give them the firehose of data to train AI, I’d probably stop using HN. I stopped using reddit for a similar reason despite being a very frequent redditor with like 60k karma. I know it’s all pretty open and getting fed into many different LLMs anyways, but thats not necessarily YC’s fault. My ideal would be strong government regulations regarding AI training, requiring explicit opt-in that isn’t buried in a ToS or EULA. Ideally companies would require a “non-AI feeding” version of their website to legally run in my country. I can’t imagine a scenario where this happens in the current system, but I sure can fantasize.
    - gruez 2y ago
      Right, but are you objecting to AI training because companies are benefiting while you're being uncompensated, or think AI training is fundamentally bad? Your previous comment suggests it's the former, but by the same logic you shouldn't comment online either, because that also benefits the company and is uncompensated.
      - afiori 2y ago
        They already said that they believe commenting here has been mutually beneficial but anyway this is a false dichothomy, one could be neutral on AI in general but feel negative towards training proprietary privacy-invasive AI models that will for sure be used to make their content creation less relevant.
      - shprd 2y ago
        Users are here because they want to, they chose to participate in this community. You can stop using HN at any minute and Ycombinator will not chase you. But AI companies on the other hand took the internet hostage. They stole any creative work, code, art, and literally any data they could their hands on with no regard to license or consent from users. No one actively opted-in to let AI companies have their personal data, they just silently grapped everything they could. Maybe there's some obscure website where you shared something private and lost access to the account or the website even went down? Congrats, it's now revived in OpenAI dataset where you've absolutely no control or details about how it's being used, not even a way to request and pursue legal action because the training data is a "secret". It's not about compensation, it's that fact you have no option or say even if you don't use their services. You can't escape or opt-out, unless you go off the grid, and even then they still retain your old data and use it as they see fit.
- recursive 2y ago
  > for me it’s that I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts that have no intention of profit sharing I won't argue with your position, but most people would be hurting themselves more than they would hurt the companies, even in absolute terms.
- csallen 2y ago
  > I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts I despise this attitude. It's so entitled. Our history of forever extending copyrights and protecting "intellectual property" has run amok, to the point where the average person thinks their scribbles, utterings, and ideas are valuable enough on their own to be worthy of a pay day. It's the culture of "My cut, my cut, my cut!" Someone else profiting is not a tragedy to get up in arms about. The fact that you were somehow, tangentially, kinda sorta in the vicinity of that profit does not and should not mean you are owed money. If you want to talk about privacy, sure, that's an issue worth bringing up. But, "I'm only mad because someone else made money and I didn't get paid," has nothing to do with privacy. It's pure greed, entitlement, and envy. You know what? If you want to profit, do something to create value. Write a book. Start a paid newsletter. Create a startup. Put on a show and charge admission. Nobody is stopping you. But if someone else figured out how to use a snippet of a comment you made 10 years ago as one-quadrillionth of the training data for a powerful LLM… if someone else figured out how to use your publicly-shared social media posts to attract advertisers to a platform they built… if someone else used 6 notes from a song you once sang to create a smash hit… kudos to them. They created something of value. You should've and could've done it yourself. Hell, you still can. But nobody should owe you money. We should not have a society where people who actually create stuff are subject to endless friction and threats from do-nothings and patent trolls demanding "my cut" if the metadata from their words or actions contributes to 0.0001% of someone else's idea that they turned into profit with hard work.
  - OvbiousError 2y ago
    OP is not saying they want money. They say they don't want companies profiting from their work. The two are unrelated here.
    - csallen 2y ago
      Even worse. It's not that they want to make things better for themselves, but that they want to make things worse for others. Why?
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > You know what? If you want to profit, do something to create value. Write a book. Start a paid newsletter. Create a startup. Put on a show and charge admission. Nobody is stopping you. I believe that the GP's complaint is that their content online is actually being scraped and turned into value for companies, they would want compensation for it. I'm personally of two minds on this, posting public content online includes no guard rails for how its used. I also disagree strongly with LLM companies throwing mountains of resources at scraping the web though, if nothing else it feels very much like a monopolistic play leveraging massive power in those resources to create a competitive edge that other players couldn't compete with.
quantified 2y ago
I was served a youtube ad for a service that will let you pick a topic to write an ebook on, write the book for you, give it a layout design and a cover, then you can market it. A bunch of topics available. I find this to be gross. Look for an explosion of crap on Amazon bookshelves. Do you want me to publish 12-15 different ebooks containing the content you actually worked to create, and it just found permutations for?
- _huayra_ 2y ago
  > Do you want me to publish 12-15 different ebooks Just make sure you spread it out over a few days and you're all good: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-generated-books-force-amazon-to-cap-ebook-publications-to-3-per-day/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-ge...

JohnFen 2y ago

> I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic For me, the problem is almost entirely that doing so requires me to have a great deal of trust in entities that I consider untrustworthy.

rpgwaiter 2y ago

There’s many good reasons, but for me it’s that I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts that have no intention of profit sharing. When I make a Youtube video and companies run ads on it, I get a piece of that pie (assuming I meet the requirements, etc.). That same video fed into Gemini so google can charge for AI video generation? I get nothing, Google makes bank. As a user I can pay for YouTube premium and not see ads, but as a creator there’s no amount I can pay to not feed Gemini.

seanhunter 2y ago
I'm pretty sure for antitrust reasons Google is (ironically) about the only AI company who is not training generative AI on youtube content. So when you make a youtube video and people train AI on your video and generate stuff using it you only get 1 click of benefit out of it from their first download.
gruez 2y ago
>That same video fed into Gemini so google can charge for AI video generation? I get nothing, Google makes bank. How do you feel about commenting on this site for free, which probably provides some benefit to ycombinator?
- rpgwaiter 2y ago
  I would happily pay a reasonable monthly subscription to this site or similar. No problem paying for a service that treats users with respect. Also using this site has taught me all sorts of things that likely made me some money indirectly. It seems mutually beneficial without selling my data or paying for HN. That said, if YC made a deal with some tech company to give them the firehose of data to train AI, I’d probably stop using HN. I stopped using reddit for a similar reason despite being a very frequent redditor with like 60k karma. I know it’s all pretty open and getting fed into many different LLMs anyways, but thats not necessarily YC’s fault. My ideal would be strong government regulations regarding AI training, requiring explicit opt-in that isn’t buried in a ToS or EULA. Ideally companies would require a “non-AI feeding” version of their website to legally run in my country. I can’t imagine a scenario where this happens in the current system, but I sure can fantasize.
  - gruez 2y ago
    Right, but are you objecting to AI training because companies are benefiting while you're being uncompensated, or think AI training is fundamentally bad? Your previous comment suggests it's the former, but by the same logic you shouldn't comment online either, because that also benefits the company and is uncompensated.
    - afiori 2y ago
      They already said that they believe commenting here has been mutually beneficial but anyway this is a false dichothomy, one could be neutral on AI in general but feel negative towards training proprietary privacy-invasive AI models that will for sure be used to make their content creation less relevant.
    - shprd 2y ago
      Users are here because they want to, they chose to participate in this community. You can stop using HN at any minute and Ycombinator will not chase you. But AI companies on the other hand took the internet hostage. They stole any creative work, code, art, and literally any data they could their hands on with no regard to license or consent from users. No one actively opted-in to let AI companies have their personal data, they just silently grapped everything they could. Maybe there's some obscure website where you shared something private and lost access to the account or the website even went down? Congrats, it's now revived in OpenAI dataset where you've absolutely no control or details about how it's being used, not even a way to request and pursue legal action because the training data is a "secret". It's not about compensation, it's that fact you have no option or say even if you don't use their services. You can't escape or opt-out, unless you go off the grid, and even then they still retain your old data and use it as they see fit.
recursive 2y ago
> for me it’s that I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts that have no intention of profit sharing I won't argue with your position, but most people would be hurting themselves more than they would hurt the companies, even in absolute terms.
csallen 2y ago
> I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts I despise this attitude. It's so entitled. Our history of forever extending copyrights and protecting "intellectual property" has run amok, to the point where the average person thinks their scribbles, utterings, and ideas are valuable enough on their own to be worthy of a pay day. It's the culture of "My cut, my cut, my cut!" Someone else profiting is not a tragedy to get up in arms about. The fact that you were somehow, tangentially, kinda sorta in the vicinity of that profit does not and should not mean you are owed money. If you want to talk about privacy, sure, that's an issue worth bringing up. But, "I'm only mad because someone else made money and I didn't get paid," has nothing to do with privacy. It's pure greed, entitlement, and envy. You know what? If you want to profit, do something to create value. Write a book. Start a paid newsletter. Create a startup. Put on a show and charge admission. Nobody is stopping you. But if someone else figured out how to use a snippet of a comment you made 10 years ago as one-quadrillionth of the training data for a powerful LLM… if someone else figured out how to use your publicly-shared social media posts to attract advertisers to a platform they built… if someone else used 6 notes from a song you once sang to create a smash hit… kudos to them. They created something of value. You should've and could've done it yourself. Hell, you still can. But nobody should owe you money. We should not have a society where people who actually create stuff are subject to endless friction and threats from do-nothings and patent trolls demanding "my cut" if the metadata from their words or actions contributes to 0.0001% of someone else's idea that they turned into profit with hard work.
- OvbiousError 2y ago
  OP is not saying they want money. They say they don't want companies profiting from their work. The two are unrelated here.
  - csallen 2y ago
    Even worse. It's not that they want to make things better for themselves, but that they want to make things worse for others. Why?
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > You know what? If you want to profit, do something to create value. Write a book. Start a paid newsletter. Create a startup. Put on a show and charge admission. Nobody is stopping you. I believe that the GP's complaint is that their content online is actually being scraped and turned into value for companies, they would want compensation for it. I'm personally of two minds on this, posting public content online includes no guard rails for how its used. I also disagree strongly with LLM companies throwing mountains of resources at scraping the web though, if nothing else it feels very much like a monopolistic play leveraging massive power in those resources to create a competitive edge that other players couldn't compete with.

quantified 2y ago

I was served a youtube ad for a service that will let you pick a topic to write an ebook on, write the book for you, give it a layout design and a cover, then you can market it. A bunch of topics available. I find this to be gross. Look for an explosion of crap on Amazon bookshelves. Do you want me to publish 12-15 different ebooks containing the content you actually worked to create, and it just found permutations for?

_huayra_ 2y ago
> Do you want me to publish 12-15 different ebooks Just make sure you spread it out over a few days and you're all good: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-generated-books-force-amazon-to-cap-ebook-publications-to-3-per-day/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-ge...