9 ms·

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still goi

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transformed" to basically launder it via "AI", I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted. I'd honestly rather see and think more about how to segment communities locally, and go back to the "fragmented" way things once were. It's easier to want to share with other real people than inadvertently working for free to enrich companies.

dend 2y ago
Nothing to disagree in this statement, for sure. If it's on the open internet, it will almost surely be used for AI training, consent be damned. But it feels like even at a rudimentary level, if I post a picture on my site that is then used by a large publisher for ads, I would (at least in theory) have some recourse to pursue the matter and prevent them from using my content. In contrast, if I uploaded something to a social media site like Instagram, and then Meta "sublicensed" my image to someone else, I wouldn't have much to say there. Would love someone with actual legal knowledge to chime in here.
- chii 2y ago
  > Meta "sublicensed" my image to someone else, I wouldn't have much to say there. but you agreed to this, when agreeing to the TOS. > I post a picture on my site that is then used by a large publisher for ads, I would (at least in theory) have some recourse which you didn't sign any contract, and therefore it is a violation of copyright. But the new AI training methods are currently, at least imho, not a violation of copyright - not any more than a human eye viewing it (which you've implicitly given permission to do so, by putting it up on the internet). On the other hand, if you put it behind a gate (no matter how trivial), then you could've at least legally protected yourself.
  - immibis 2y ago
    > but you agreed to this Yes, that was the point? You agree to this by using Meta. So don't.
  - ehnto 2y ago
    Strong disagree on the last paragraph. It's data online, your data, and it was used for commercial purposes without your consent. In fact, I never consented for anyone to access my server. Just because it has an IP address, does not make it a public service. Obviously in a practical sense that is a silly position to take, and in prior cases there is usually an extenuating factor that got the person charged, eg breaking through access controls, violating ToS, or intellectual property violations. But I don't rescind the prior statement. Just because I have an address doesn't mean you can come in through any unlocked doors.
    - ahtihn 2y ago
      > In fact, I never consented for anyone to access my server. Just because it has an IP address, does not make it a public service. If you don't take any steps to make it clear that it's not public, like an auth wall or putting pages on unguessable paths, then it is public, because that is what everyone expects. Just like you if you have a storefront, if the door is unlocked you'd expect people to just come in and no one would take you seriously if you complain that people keep coming in if you don't somehow make it clear that they're not supposed to.
      - DrScientist 2y ago
        Your shop might be open sure - but aren't we talking about people coming in and taking whatever they like for free? ie if you were an art gallery, the expectation would be people could come in and look, but you don't expect them to come in, photograph everything and then sell prints of everything online.
        chii 2y ago
        That's not what's happening. Instead, it's that there's some people coming into your gallery, studying the art and its style, and leaving with the learned information. They then replicate that style in their own gallery. Of course, none of the images are copies, or would be judged to be copies by a reasonable person. So now you, the gallery owner, want to forbid just those people who would come to learn the style. But you still want people to come and admire the art, and may be buy a print.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
panarky 2y ago
> how to segment communities locally So it's not about owning vs. renting property on the internet, it's about controlling the roads that connect the properties so you can keep the world out of your community.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago
  Ha, I have the same feeling on the recent good_social_network vs. bad_social_network debate that kinda goes on in the US. Looking from outside, it always felt that the main problem is control, and wanting more of it. The details, principles and "politics" don't matter in the grand scheme of things, it's control that people want, even tho they paint it differently. bad_social_network was good 10 years ago, because it was controlled by "a friend of ours". Now it's controlled by someone who's perceived as "a friend of theirs" and it's therefore bad. So the politik aktivists move to good_social_network, and rave about the good there. Echo chambers be damned, we have control. Until the next "friend of theirs" buys it out, and rinse and repeat. So silly.
  - frabcus 2y ago
    One of those social networks has a protocol and lets end users make their own feed algorithm and moderation system. The other never has. There can be technical differences between networks as well as social.
CamperBob2 2y ago
You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. So? What do I care? If some stuff I posted to my website (with no requirement for attribution or remuneration, and also no guarantee that the information is true or valid) can improve the AI services that I use, great.
- liontwist 2y ago
  Even if no attribution etc is your personal policy that’s not everyone else’s. The end result is that any authors who care about copyright protection will become less accessible. It’s a gold rush for AI bots to capture the good will of early internet creators before the well runs dry,
  - dend 2y ago
    +1 My content is still MY content, and I'd prefer that if an entity is going to make money off of it directly (i.e., it's not a person learning how to code from something I wrote but rather a well-funded company pulling my content for their gain), that I at least have some semblance of consent to it. That being said, I think there is no longer a point of crying over spilled milk. The LLM technology is out of the bag, and for every company that attempts to ethically manage content (are there any?) there will be ten that will disregard any kind of license/copyright notices and pull that content to train their models anyway. I write because I want to be a better writer, and I enjoy sharing my knowledge with others. That's the motivation. If it helps at least one person, that's a win in my book, especially in the modern internet where there's so much junk scattered around.
    - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
      Pretty much all of my work has been published on the internet over the last twenty years. Some of it has been commercial, some open source and some that is just for myself. I’m pretty much done with that now, I doubt I will publish anything online again.
  - 2y ago
matheusmoreira 2y ago
> I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted. I've reached the same conclusion. All data is just bits. Numbers. Once it's out there, trying to control their spread and use is just delusional. People should just stop sharing things publicly. Even things like AGPLv3 are proving to be ineffective against their exploitation. I really didn't expect to live in this "copyright for me, not for thee" world. The same corporations that compare us mere mortals to high seas pirates when we infringe their copyrights are now getting caught shamelessly AI laundering the copyrights of others on an industrial scale. It's so demoralizing. I feel like giving up and just going private. Problem is I also want to share the things I made. To talk about my projects with real people. Programming is lonely enough as it is. Without sharing I'm not sure what the point even is. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do from now on. I just know I don't want to end up working for free to enrich trillion dollar corporations.
- dend 2y ago
  I can relate to the sentiment. For what it's worth, I also know that if someone's personal site/repos/pictures are used to train AI, they have no recourse short of said person having TONS of money to go and fight the legal battles similar to how media companies do. But you know what, I grew up in a family of educators whose whole life mission was to help others by sharing their knowledge. That's what I am doing through my blog. I learned something? Blog about it. I built a reverse-engineered wrapper over some API? Share it openly. For every AI ingress job over this content there will be a few people that will read my code or blog post and either learn from it, be inspired, ignore it, or unblock themselves from a problem that they tried to solve. I think that makes the effort worth it to me. For what it's worth, even before AI emerged, I've seen sites that would shamelessly rip off my content and re-publish it on their own domains under a different author. One even tried charging people for it. On several occasions I fought it and won with the help of Google/Bing. Other times, nothing happened. And that's fine. Such is the fate of online content. If my content helped at least one person, it was worth sharing it in the open.
- bulatb 2y ago
  Yeah, I hear this. Anything I put online is feeding the machine that will replace me. Maybe I can carve myself a niche if I can find an audience, and maybe turn that into something kind of reward-shaped, but that's not happening without me feeding the machine. And almost certainly I won't succeed, and I'll just make it harder for myself and everyone like me to succeed in the future. It seems the only thing to do is do it anyway and try to be unique enough to make it work. And somehow just be fine with pulling up the ladder behind you.
Terr_ 2y ago
IANAL, but lately I've had this quixotic daydream of a combination accept-cookies / agree-to-TOS page that comes up, and the Terms of Service says by proceeding they agree to give the site-owner an perpetual, irrevocable, and royalty-free to use and re-license any future content that they create using any generative AI that was trained using the website contents. Then you carefully log what LLM user-agents/IPs go past that agree, along with some very distinctive secretly crawlable pages which have contents that can be distinctively reproduced back out of the model if needed. Then whenever SomeShittyLLM posts "articles", everybody with that TOS that was crawled gets to duplicate it without ads for free. :P
- spiritplumber 2y ago
  I love this, I did something like that with made-up-italian-sounding words a while ago (you used to be able to find my site if you looked for FANTACHIAVE). It's a bit like fake roads on map databases)
- w4 2y ago
  This idea is reminiscent of the opening scene of Accelerando by Charlie Stross: Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?" "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials." … "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" "Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right?” - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... Amusing to also note that this excerpt predicted the current LLM training methodology quite well, in 2005.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Also amusing: > patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists This perfectly captures how both patent trolls and MAFIAA look like in my mind.
dehrmann 2y ago
> used/exploited by things like AI training bots How is this worse than a human reading your blog/code, remembering the key parts of it, and creating something transformative from it?
- moron4hire 2y ago
  Seriously? How is rule utilitarianism different from act utilitarianism?
- dend 2y ago
  In the grand scheme of things and at this point, it probably doesn't matter. I know for me it certainly is not in any shape a discouragement to continue writing on my blog and contributing code to open source communities (my own and others). But if we're going to dig into this a bit, one person reading my code, internalizing it, processing it themselves, tweaking it and experimenting with it, and then shipping something transformative means that I've enhanced the knowledge of some individual with my work. It's a win. They got my content for free, as I intended it to be, and their life got a tiny bit better because of it (I hope). The opposite of that is some massively funded company taking my content, training a model off of it, and then reaping profits while the authors don't even get as much as an acknowledgement. You could theoretically argue that in the long-run, a LLM would likely help other people through my content that it trained on, but ethically this is most definitely a more-than-gray area. The (good/bad) news is that this ship has sailed and we now need to adjust to this new mode of operation.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    > The opposite of that is some massively funded company taking my content, training a model off of it, and then reaping profits while the authors don't even get as much as an acknowledgement. Taking out the "training a model" part, the same thing could happen with a human at the company.
    - dend 2y ago
      Oh, 100%. I mentioned this in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42582518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42582518) - I've dealt with a fair share of stolen content (thankfully nothing too important, just a random blog post here and there), and it definitely stings. The difference is that this is now done at a massive scale. But again - this doesn't stop me from continuing to write and publish in the open. I am writing for other people reading my content, and as a bouncing board for myself. There will always be some shape or form of actors that try to piggyback off of that effort, but that's the trade-off of the open web. I am certainly not planning to lock all my writing behind a paywall to stop that.
ehnto 2y ago
I have decided not to put text online if I feel it has IP or personal ideas in it. Some exceptions, like posting here, and including stuff I want to get out there for commercial reasons eg: marketing of services. The one I struggle with is discord, but I am not too personal on discord servers so I suppose I'll just mesh into the soup of barely worthwhile chatter. I also started self hosting my git repos and knowledge base, both were trivial to set up.
immibis 2y ago
For images, there's Nightshade, which imperceptibly alters your images but makes them poison for AI (does anyone understand why?) I don't know if there's something similar for text. You could try writing nonsense with a color that doesn't contrast with the background. The evidence Nightshade works is that AI companies want to make it illegal.
- kelseydh 2y ago
  Link to Nightshade: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html This is fascinating. Would be great to have a web interface artists can use that doesn't require them to install the software locally.
- rcxdude 2y ago
  Nightshade and glaze are basically adversarial attacks on various commonly used subcomponents of image generators, most notably the CLIP image captioner, which is both used to generate training data and as part of the generation process. Like most adversarial attacks, they get more perceptible as they try to be robust to more transformations of the data (both in practice, i.e. applied to a level that's non-trivially removable, tend to make images look like slightly janky AI, ironically), and they are specific to the net(s) they are targeting, so it's more of a temporary defense against the current generation then a long-term protection.
baxtr 2y ago
Part of me viscerally agrees because large corporations have monetized UGC. Another part of me though thinks differently. We are a species that builds knowledge from generation to generation. From one person to another. Over years, over centuries. Philosophically this part tends to think that your thoughts and ideas belong to humanity and thus need to be shared with all of us.
- yowayb 2y ago
  Great take. Also agree with parent. I feel like some form of provenance would take us to the next level.
- Salgat 2y ago
  There's two decades worth of countless conversations on Reddit alone that would be buried into nothingness but instead ML has revived all that activity as useful data. ML is definitely a great way to bring back utility for a lot of old and unused data.
  - tempestn 2y ago
    This seems like a reasonable take to me. I wish those downvoting you would explain where they disagree.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > revived that activity as useful data Revived as compressed text associations, it is potentially useful data, but also potentially totally wrong in non-obvious ways. (Or, to riff on Futurama, "The worst kind of incorrect.")
    - Salgat 2y ago
      It is used to help train the LLMs on how to "talk" like normal people, even if the topic they're discussing isn't that useful or valuable.
- friendzis 2y ago
  If you recall high school history, rapid, exponential "progress" happened once the knowledge was 1) written down (printing press) 2) archived for the future (libraries) 3) systematized (textbook/encyclopaedia) 4) proactively shared (public education), all on a massive scale. The fact that some knowledge exists and is even accessible does not really matter if takes a highly trained in a very narrow field scholar to find that piece of information. You need a well established knowledge creation and distribution funnel in operation for humanity as a whole to reap the benefits of knowledge. There is undoubtedly a lot of useful knowledge on internet platforms, however, most of that knowledge remains unsystematized and largely undiscoverable, meaning that contribution to the totality of human knowledge by these platforms is infinitesimal, which is further drowned by cat and porn videos.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transformed" to basically launder it via "AI", I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion (...) > (...) share with other real people than inadvertently working for free to enrich companies. That attitude, quite commonly expressed on HN these days, strikes me as a peculiar form of selfishness - the same kind we routinely accuse companies of and attribute the sad state of society to. A person is not entitled to 100% of the value of everything they do, much less to secondary value this subsequently generated. A person is not entitled to receive rent for any of their ideas just because they wrote them down and put on display somewhere. Just because they touched something, and it exists, doesn't mean everyone else touching it owes them money. The society works best when people don't capture all the fruits of their labor for themselves. Conversely, striving to capture 100% (or more) of the value generated is a hallmark of the late stage capitalism and everything that's bad and wrong and Scrooge-y. Self-censoring on principle because some company (gasp!) will train an LLM model on it (gasp!!) and won't share the profit from it? That's just feeling entitled to way over 100% of the value of one's hypothetical output, and feeling offended the society hasn't already sent advance royalty cheques. Chill out. No matter what you do, someone else will somehow make money out of it, that's how it supposed to work - and AI in particular is, for better or worse, one of the most fundamentally transformative things to happen to humanity, somewhere between the Internet and the Industrial Revolution if it's just a bubble that pops, much more if it isn't. Assuming it all doesn't go to shit (let's entertain something more than maximum pessimism for a moment), everyone will benefit much more from it than from whatever they imagine they could get from their Internet comments. (Speaking of Industrial Revolution - I can understand this attitude from people who actually earn a living from the kind of IP that AI is trained on, only to turn around and compete with them. They're the modern Luddites, and I respect their struggle and that they have a real point. Everyone else, those complaining about "AI theft" the most, especially here? Are not them.)
- johnklos 2y ago
  > The society works best when people don't capture all the fruits of their labor for themselves. Sure, but it sounds like you think people shouldn't be upset about businesses trying to capture all the fruits of people's labor, too. Capitalism is evil, and people thinking that normalizing exploitation is OK is either shortsighted or it's also evil. Are you simply unaware that this is what's happening and what people are upset about? Have you never thought about it? Or do you want businesses to succeed in exploiting people's work? It sounds like it, because you wrote, "that's how it supposed to work". I truly wonder if you're self-aware, or if you just think that you'll one day be on the side of the exploiters.
blahblah23 2y ago
There's a neat little thing some discords I've seen use, where they honeypot spam bots into a channel-- if someone posts into it, their messages in the last 5 minutes get deleted and their account gets kicked. Is there a meaningful way to make it so a website shares a resource that automatically updates their blacklist to block the IP address? Knowing that you will lose X but hopefully you'll retain everyone who can read?
- notpushkin 2y ago
  Most scrapers use residential IPs nowadays. They will just rotate their IP and go on, while the IP you banned would get assigned to an innocent user that won’t be able to access your site now.
- atribecalledqst 2y ago
  I saw a Discord server use this but it never actually caught anything. Turns out all the spammers were just human idiots!
alibarber 2y ago
Based on my experience, I've found that I like using AI (GitHub copilot) to do things like answer questions about a language that I could easily verify in the documentation. Almost basically 'yes/no' questions. To be honest if I were writing such documentation for a product/feature, I wouldn't mind the AI hoovering it up. I've found it to be pretty crap at doing things like actual algorithms or explaining 'science' - the kind of interesting work that I find on websites or blogs. It just throws out sensible looking code and nice sounding words that just don't quite work or misses out huge chunks of understanding / reasoning. Despite not having done it in ages, I enjoy writing and publishing online info that I would have found useful when I was trying to build / learn something. If people want to pay a company to mash that up and serve them garbage instead, then more fool them.
- namaria 2y ago
  I've argued years ago based on how LLMs are built that they would only ever amount to lossy and very memory inefficient compression algorithms. The whole 'hallucination' thing misses the mark. LLMs are not 'occasionally' wrong/hallucinating sometimes. They can only ever return lower resolution versions of what was on their training data. I was mocked then but I feel vindicated now.
  - richardwhiuk 2y ago
    They can combine two things in a way that never appeared together in the source material.
    - namaria 2y ago
      Youtube compression algorithm also produces lots of artifacts that were never filmed by the video producers
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        And datamoshing lets you produce effects that weren't in the source clips.
cxr 2y ago
It'd be great if you folks would stop showing up and derailing the comments with threads like this.
sneak 2y ago
Copying data isn’t exploitation.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pixelmonkey 2y ago
I think you're right, and I don't think it's just about public content being "exploited" to train AI models and the like. Rather, even before LLMs, there was a growing sense that publishing ideas or essays publicly is "risky" with very little reward for the very real risks. I wrote about this a little in "The Blog Chill": https://amontalenti.com/2023/12/28/the-blog-chill https://amontalenti.com/2023/12/28/the-blog-chill Speaking personally, among my social circle of "normie" college-educated millennials working in fields like finance, sales, hospitality, retail, IT, medicine, civil engineering, and law -- I am one of the few who runs a semi-active personal site. Thinking about it for a moment, out of a group of 50-or-so people like this, spread across several US states, I might be the only one who has a public essay archive or blog. Yet among this same group you'll find Instagram posters, TikTok'ers, and prolific DM authors in more private spaces like WhatsApp and Signal groups. A handful of them have admitted to being lurkers on Reddit or Twitter/X, but not one is a poster. It isn't just due to a lack of technical ability, although that's a (minor) contributing factor. If that were all, they'd all be publishing to Substack, but they're not. It's that engaging with "the public" via writing is seen as an exhausting proposition at odds with everyday middle class life. Why? My guesses: a) smartphones aren't designed for writing and editing, hardware-wise; b) long-form writing/editing is hard and most people aren't built for it; c) the dynamics of modern internet aggregation and agglomeration makes it hard to find independent sites/publishers anyway; and d) the risk of your developed view on anything being "out there" (whether professional risk or friendship risk) seems higher than any sort of potential reward. On the bright side, for people who fancy themselves public intellectuals or public writers, hosting your own censorship-resistant publishing infrastructure has never been easier or cheaper. And for amateur writers like me, I can take advantage of the same. But I think everyday internet users are falling into a lull of treating the modern internet as little more than a source of short-form video entertainment, streams for music/podcasts, and a personal assistant for the sundries of daily life. Aside from placating boredom, they just use their smartphones to make appointment reminders, send texts to a partner/spouse, place e-commerce orders, and check off family todo lists, etc. I expect LLMs will make this worse as a younger generation may view long-form writing not as a form of expression but instead as a chore to automate away.
couscouspie 2y ago
The low adoption rate is another big plus of the Gemini protocol and similar solutions for a Javascript-free and open internet.
foxglacier 2y ago
What is your purpose of publishing where having the content used to train AI is a problem? Are you trying to gatekeep information that's not even protected by copyright anyway? Are you worried your potential audience will get the same thing (including your personal creativity) from AI that just copied your work so they don't recognize your name and develop some brand awareness? Or do you just not like AI and don't want to help it? Maybe you could build your own paywall or other technical access restriction instead of making it freely available? Even just a captcha should block AI training scrapers, shouldn't it?
- asdff 2y ago
  No attribution with ai
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    But also no direct copying, typically. Would OP really be happy with an AI that reliably rewords everything so that attribution is not required but still reproduces the information?
    - rchaud 2y ago
      Human educational systems penalize you for not citing sources (i.e. not showing your work, not crediting referenced works). Why should an AI system be exempt?
      - foxglacier 2y ago
        Because it's not a student at school, obviously. You didn't cite the source for the claim you just made there and you didn't need to.
hulitu 2y ago
> your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. Firewall ?

dend 2y ago

Nothing to disagree in this statement, for sure. If it's on the open internet, it will almost surely be used for AI training, consent be damned. But it feels like even at a rudimentary level, if I post a picture on my site that is then used by a large publisher for ads, I would (at least in theory) have some recourse to pursue the matter and prevent them from using my content. In contrast, if I uploaded something to a social media site like Instagram, and then Meta "sublicensed" my image to someone else, I wouldn't have much to say there. Would love someone with actual legal knowledge to chime in here.

chii 2y ago
> Meta "sublicensed" my image to someone else, I wouldn't have much to say there. but you agreed to this, when agreeing to the TOS. > I post a picture on my site that is then used by a large publisher for ads, I would (at least in theory) have some recourse which you didn't sign any contract, and therefore it is a violation of copyright. But the new AI training methods are currently, at least imho, not a violation of copyright - not any more than a human eye viewing it (which you've implicitly given permission to do so, by putting it up on the internet). On the other hand, if you put it behind a gate (no matter how trivial), then you could've at least legally protected yourself.
- immibis 2y ago
  > but you agreed to this Yes, that was the point? You agree to this by using Meta. So don't.
- ehnto 2y ago
  Strong disagree on the last paragraph. It's data online, your data, and it was used for commercial purposes without your consent. In fact, I never consented for anyone to access my server. Just because it has an IP address, does not make it a public service. Obviously in a practical sense that is a silly position to take, and in prior cases there is usually an extenuating factor that got the person charged, eg breaking through access controls, violating ToS, or intellectual property violations. But I don't rescind the prior statement. Just because I have an address doesn't mean you can come in through any unlocked doors.
  - ahtihn 2y ago
    > In fact, I never consented for anyone to access my server. Just because it has an IP address, does not make it a public service. If you don't take any steps to make it clear that it's not public, like an auth wall or putting pages on unguessable paths, then it is public, because that is what everyone expects. Just like you if you have a storefront, if the door is unlocked you'd expect people to just come in and no one would take you seriously if you complain that people keep coming in if you don't somehow make it clear that they're not supposed to.
    - DrScientist 2y ago
      Your shop might be open sure - but aren't we talking about people coming in and taking whatever they like for free? ie if you were an art gallery, the expectation would be people could come in and look, but you don't expect them to come in, photograph everything and then sell prints of everything online.
      - chii 2y ago
        That's not what's happening. Instead, it's that there's some people coming into your gallery, studying the art and its style, and leaving with the learned information. They then replicate that style in their own gallery. Of course, none of the images are copies, or would be judged to be copies by a reasonable person. So now you, the gallery owner, want to forbid just those people who would come to learn the style. But you still want people to come and admire the art, and may be buy a print.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

panarky 2y ago

> how to segment communities locally So it's not about owning vs. renting property on the internet, it's about controlling the roads that connect the properties so you can keep the world out of your community.

NitpickLawyer 2y ago
Ha, I have the same feeling on the recent good_social_network vs. bad_social_network debate that kinda goes on in the US. Looking from outside, it always felt that the main problem is control, and wanting more of it. The details, principles and "politics" don't matter in the grand scheme of things, it's control that people want, even tho they paint it differently. bad_social_network was good 10 years ago, because it was controlled by "a friend of ours". Now it's controlled by someone who's perceived as "a friend of theirs" and it's therefore bad. So the politik aktivists move to good_social_network, and rave about the good there. Echo chambers be damned, we have control. Until the next "friend of theirs" buys it out, and rinse and repeat. So silly.
- frabcus 2y ago
  One of those social networks has a protocol and lets end users make their own feed algorithm and moderation system. The other never has. There can be technical differences between networks as well as social.

CamperBob2 2y ago

You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. So? What do I care? If some stuff I posted to my website (with no requirement for attribution or remuneration, and also no guarantee that the information is true or valid) can improve the AI services that I use, great.

liontwist 2y ago
Even if no attribution etc is your personal policy that’s not everyone else’s. The end result is that any authors who care about copyright protection will become less accessible. It’s a gold rush for AI bots to capture the good will of early internet creators before the well runs dry,
- dend 2y ago
  +1 My content is still MY content, and I'd prefer that if an entity is going to make money off of it directly (i.e., it's not a person learning how to code from something I wrote but rather a well-funded company pulling my content for their gain), that I at least have some semblance of consent to it. That being said, I think there is no longer a point of crying over spilled milk. The LLM technology is out of the bag, and for every company that attempts to ethically manage content (are there any?) there will be ten that will disregard any kind of license/copyright notices and pull that content to train their models anyway. I write because I want to be a better writer, and I enjoy sharing my knowledge with others. That's the motivation. If it helps at least one person, that's a win in my book, especially in the modern internet where there's so much junk scattered around.
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    Pretty much all of my work has been published on the internet over the last twenty years. Some of it has been commercial, some open source and some that is just for myself. I’m pretty much done with that now, I doubt I will publish anything online again.
- 2y ago

matheusmoreira 2y ago

> I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted. I've reached the same conclusion. All data is just bits. Numbers. Once it's out there, trying to control their spread and use is just delusional. People should just stop sharing things publicly. Even things like AGPLv3 are proving to be ineffective against their exploitation. I really didn't expect to live in this "copyright for me, not for thee" world. The same corporations that compare us mere mortals to high seas pirates when we infringe their copyrights are now getting caught shamelessly AI laundering the copyrights of others on an industrial scale. It's so demoralizing. I feel like giving up and just going private. Problem is I also want to share the things I made. To talk about my projects with real people. Programming is lonely enough as it is. Without sharing I'm not sure what the point even is. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do from now on. I just know I don't want to end up working for free to enrich trillion dollar corporations.

dend 2y ago
I can relate to the sentiment. For what it's worth, I also know that if someone's personal site/repos/pictures are used to train AI, they have no recourse short of said person having TONS of money to go and fight the legal battles similar to how media companies do. But you know what, I grew up in a family of educators whose whole life mission was to help others by sharing their knowledge. That's what I am doing through my blog. I learned something? Blog about it. I built a reverse-engineered wrapper over some API? Share it openly. For every AI ingress job over this content there will be a few people that will read my code or blog post and either learn from it, be inspired, ignore it, or unblock themselves from a problem that they tried to solve. I think that makes the effort worth it to me. For what it's worth, even before AI emerged, I've seen sites that would shamelessly rip off my content and re-publish it on their own domains under a different author. One even tried charging people for it. On several occasions I fought it and won with the help of Google/Bing. Other times, nothing happened. And that's fine. Such is the fate of online content. If my content helped at least one person, it was worth sharing it in the open.
bulatb 2y ago
Yeah, I hear this. Anything I put online is feeding the machine that will replace me. Maybe I can carve myself a niche if I can find an audience, and maybe turn that into something kind of reward-shaped, but that's not happening without me feeding the machine. And almost certainly I won't succeed, and I'll just make it harder for myself and everyone like me to succeed in the future. It seems the only thing to do is do it anyway and try to be unique enough to make it work. And somehow just be fine with pulling up the ladder behind you.

Terr_ 2y ago

IANAL, but lately I've had this quixotic daydream of a combination accept-cookies / agree-to-TOS page that comes up, and the Terms of Service says by proceeding they agree to give the site-owner an perpetual, irrevocable, and royalty-free to use and re-license any future content that they create using any generative AI that was trained using the website contents. Then you carefully log what LLM user-agents/IPs go past that agree, along with some very distinctive secretly crawlable pages which have contents that can be distinctively reproduced back out of the model if needed. Then whenever SomeShittyLLM posts "articles", everybody with that TOS that was crawled gets to duplicate it without ads for free. :P

spiritplumber 2y ago
I love this, I did something like that with made-up-italian-sounding words a while ago (you used to be able to find my site if you looked for FANTACHIAVE). It's a bit like fake roads on map databases)
w4 2y ago
This idea is reminiscent of the opening scene of Accelerando by Charlie Stross: Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?" "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials." … "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" "Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right?” - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... Amusing to also note that this excerpt predicted the current LLM training methodology quite well, in 2005.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Also amusing: > patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists This perfectly captures how both patent trolls and MAFIAA look like in my mind.

dehrmann 2y ago

> used/exploited by things like AI training bots How is this worse than a human reading your blog/code, remembering the key parts of it, and creating something transformative from it?

moron4hire 2y ago
Seriously? How is rule utilitarianism different from act utilitarianism?
dend 2y ago
In the grand scheme of things and at this point, it probably doesn't matter. I know for me it certainly is not in any shape a discouragement to continue writing on my blog and contributing code to open source communities (my own and others). But if we're going to dig into this a bit, one person reading my code, internalizing it, processing it themselves, tweaking it and experimenting with it, and then shipping something transformative means that I've enhanced the knowledge of some individual with my work. It's a win. They got my content for free, as I intended it to be, and their life got a tiny bit better because of it (I hope). The opposite of that is some massively funded company taking my content, training a model off of it, and then reaping profits while the authors don't even get as much as an acknowledgement. You could theoretically argue that in the long-run, a LLM would likely help other people through my content that it trained on, but ethically this is most definitely a more-than-gray area. The (good/bad) news is that this ship has sailed and we now need to adjust to this new mode of operation.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > The opposite of that is some massively funded company taking my content, training a model off of it, and then reaping profits while the authors don't even get as much as an acknowledgement. Taking out the "training a model" part, the same thing could happen with a human at the company.
  - dend 2y ago
    Oh, 100%. I mentioned this in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42582518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42582518) - I've dealt with a fair share of stolen content (thankfully nothing too important, just a random blog post here and there), and it definitely stings. The difference is that this is now done at a massive scale. But again - this doesn't stop me from continuing to write and publish in the open. I am writing for other people reading my content, and as a bouncing board for myself. There will always be some shape or form of actors that try to piggyback off of that effort, but that's the trade-off of the open web. I am certainly not planning to lock all my writing behind a paywall to stop that.

ehnto 2y ago

I have decided not to put text online if I feel it has IP or personal ideas in it. Some exceptions, like posting here, and including stuff I want to get out there for commercial reasons eg: marketing of services. The one I struggle with is discord, but I am not too personal on discord servers so I suppose I'll just mesh into the soup of barely worthwhile chatter. I also started self hosting my git repos and knowledge base, both were trivial to set up.

immibis 2y ago

For images, there's Nightshade, which imperceptibly alters your images but makes them poison for AI (does anyone understand why?) I don't know if there's something similar for text. You could try writing nonsense with a color that doesn't contrast with the background. The evidence Nightshade works is that AI companies want to make it illegal.

kelseydh 2y ago
Link to Nightshade: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html This is fascinating. Would be great to have a web interface artists can use that doesn't require them to install the software locally.
rcxdude 2y ago
Nightshade and glaze are basically adversarial attacks on various commonly used subcomponents of image generators, most notably the CLIP image captioner, which is both used to generate training data and as part of the generation process. Like most adversarial attacks, they get more perceptible as they try to be robust to more transformations of the data (both in practice, i.e. applied to a level that's non-trivially removable, tend to make images look like slightly janky AI, ironically), and they are specific to the net(s) they are targeting, so it's more of a temporary defense against the current generation then a long-term protection.

baxtr 2y ago

Part of me viscerally agrees because large corporations have monetized UGC. Another part of me though thinks differently. We are a species that builds knowledge from generation to generation. From one person to another. Over years, over centuries. Philosophically this part tends to think that your thoughts and ideas belong to humanity and thus need to be shared with all of us.

yowayb 2y ago
Great take. Also agree with parent. I feel like some form of provenance would take us to the next level.
Salgat 2y ago
There's two decades worth of countless conversations on Reddit alone that would be buried into nothingness but instead ML has revived all that activity as useful data. ML is definitely a great way to bring back utility for a lot of old and unused data.
- tempestn 2y ago
  This seems like a reasonable take to me. I wish those downvoting you would explain where they disagree.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > revived that activity as useful data Revived as compressed text associations, it is potentially useful data, but also potentially totally wrong in non-obvious ways. (Or, to riff on Futurama, "The worst kind of incorrect.")
  - Salgat 2y ago
    It is used to help train the LLMs on how to "talk" like normal people, even if the topic they're discussing isn't that useful or valuable.
friendzis 2y ago
If you recall high school history, rapid, exponential "progress" happened once the knowledge was 1) written down (printing press) 2) archived for the future (libraries) 3) systematized (textbook/encyclopaedia) 4) proactively shared (public education), all on a massive scale. The fact that some knowledge exists and is even accessible does not really matter if takes a highly trained in a very narrow field scholar to find that piece of information. You need a well established knowledge creation and distribution funnel in operation for humanity as a whole to reap the benefits of knowledge. There is undoubtedly a lot of useful knowledge on internet platforms, however, most of that knowledge remains unsystematized and largely undiscoverable, meaning that contribution to the totality of human knowledge by these platforms is infinitesimal, which is further drowned by cat and porn videos.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transformed" to basically launder it via "AI", I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion (...) > (...) share with other real people than inadvertently working for free to enrich companies. That attitude, quite commonly expressed on HN these days, strikes me as a peculiar form of selfishness - the same kind we routinely accuse companies of and attribute the sad state of society to. A person is not entitled to 100% of the value of everything they do, much less to secondary value this subsequently generated. A person is not entitled to receive rent for any of their ideas just because they wrote them down and put on display somewhere. Just because they touched something, and it exists, doesn't mean everyone else touching it owes them money. The society works best when people don't capture all the fruits of their labor for themselves. Conversely, striving to capture 100% (or more) of the value generated is a hallmark of the late stage capitalism and everything that's bad and wrong and Scrooge-y. Self-censoring on principle because some company (gasp!) will train an LLM model on it (gasp!!) and won't share the profit from it? That's just feeling entitled to way over 100% of the value of one's hypothetical output, and feeling offended the society hasn't already sent advance royalty cheques. Chill out. No matter what you do, someone else will somehow make money out of it, that's how it supposed to work - and AI in particular is, for better or worse, one of the most fundamentally transformative things to happen to humanity, somewhere between the Internet and the Industrial Revolution if it's just a bubble that pops, much more if it isn't. Assuming it all doesn't go to shit (let's entertain something more than maximum pessimism for a moment), everyone will benefit much more from it than from whatever they imagine they could get from their Internet comments. (Speaking of Industrial Revolution - I can understand this attitude from people who actually earn a living from the kind of IP that AI is trained on, only to turn around and compete with them. They're the modern Luddites, and I respect their struggle and that they have a real point. Everyone else, those complaining about "AI theft" the most, especially here? Are not them.)

johnklos 2y ago
> The society works best when people don't capture all the fruits of their labor for themselves. Sure, but it sounds like you think people shouldn't be upset about businesses trying to capture all the fruits of people's labor, too. Capitalism is evil, and people thinking that normalizing exploitation is OK is either shortsighted or it's also evil. Are you simply unaware that this is what's happening and what people are upset about? Have you never thought about it? Or do you want businesses to succeed in exploiting people's work? It sounds like it, because you wrote, "that's how it supposed to work". I truly wonder if you're self-aware, or if you just think that you'll one day be on the side of the exploiters.

blahblah23 2y ago

There's a neat little thing some discords I've seen use, where they honeypot spam bots into a channel-- if someone posts into it, their messages in the last 5 minutes get deleted and their account gets kicked. Is there a meaningful way to make it so a website shares a resource that automatically updates their blacklist to block the IP address? Knowing that you will lose X but hopefully you'll retain everyone who can read?

notpushkin 2y ago
Most scrapers use residential IPs nowadays. They will just rotate their IP and go on, while the IP you banned would get assigned to an innocent user that won’t be able to access your site now.
atribecalledqst 2y ago
I saw a Discord server use this but it never actually caught anything. Turns out all the spammers were just human idiots!

alibarber 2y ago

Based on my experience, I've found that I like using AI (GitHub copilot) to do things like answer questions about a language that I could easily verify in the documentation. Almost basically 'yes/no' questions. To be honest if I were writing such documentation for a product/feature, I wouldn't mind the AI hoovering it up. I've found it to be pretty crap at doing things like actual algorithms or explaining 'science' - the kind of interesting work that I find on websites or blogs. It just throws out sensible looking code and nice sounding words that just don't quite work or misses out huge chunks of understanding / reasoning. Despite not having done it in ages, I enjoy writing and publishing online info that I would have found useful when I was trying to build / learn something. If people want to pay a company to mash that up and serve them garbage instead, then more fool them.

namaria 2y ago
I've argued years ago based on how LLMs are built that they would only ever amount to lossy and very memory inefficient compression algorithms. The whole 'hallucination' thing misses the mark. LLMs are not 'occasionally' wrong/hallucinating sometimes. They can only ever return lower resolution versions of what was on their training data. I was mocked then but I feel vindicated now.
- richardwhiuk 2y ago
  They can combine two things in a way that never appeared together in the source material.
  - namaria 2y ago
    Youtube compression algorithm also produces lots of artifacts that were never filmed by the video producers
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      And datamoshing lets you produce effects that weren't in the source clips.

cxr 2y ago

It'd be great if you folks would stop showing up and derailing the comments with threads like this.

sneak 2y ago

Copying data isn’t exploitation.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

pixelmonkey 2y ago

I think you're right, and I don't think it's just about public content being "exploited" to train AI models and the like. Rather, even before LLMs, there was a growing sense that publishing ideas or essays publicly is "risky" with very little reward for the very real risks. I wrote about this a little in "The Blog Chill": https://amontalenti.com/2023/12/28/the-blog-chill https://amontalenti.com/2023/12/28/the-blog-chill Speaking personally, among my social circle of "normie" college-educated millennials working in fields like finance, sales, hospitality, retail, IT, medicine, civil engineering, and law -- I am one of the few who runs a semi-active personal site. Thinking about it for a moment, out of a group of 50-or-so people like this, spread across several US states, I might be the only one who has a public essay archive or blog. Yet among this same group you'll find Instagram posters, TikTok'ers, and prolific DM authors in more private spaces like WhatsApp and Signal groups. A handful of them have admitted to being lurkers on Reddit or Twitter/X, but not one is a poster. It isn't just due to a lack of technical ability, although that's a (minor) contributing factor. If that were all, they'd all be publishing to Substack, but they're not. It's that engaging with "the public" via writing is seen as an exhausting proposition at odds with everyday middle class life. Why? My guesses: a) smartphones aren't designed for writing and editing, hardware-wise; b) long-form writing/editing is hard and most people aren't built for it; c) the dynamics of modern internet aggregation and agglomeration makes it hard to find independent sites/publishers anyway; and d) the risk of your developed view on anything being "out there" (whether professional risk or friendship risk) seems higher than any sort of potential reward. On the bright side, for people who fancy themselves public intellectuals or public writers, hosting your own censorship-resistant publishing infrastructure has never been easier or cheaper. And for amateur writers like me, I can take advantage of the same. But I think everyday internet users are falling into a lull of treating the modern internet as little more than a source of short-form video entertainment, streams for music/podcasts, and a personal assistant for the sundries of daily life. Aside from placating boredom, they just use their smartphones to make appointment reminders, send texts to a partner/spouse, place e-commerce orders, and check off family todo lists, etc. I expect LLMs will make this worse as a younger generation may view long-form writing not as a form of expression but instead as a chore to automate away.

couscouspie 2y ago

The low adoption rate is another big plus of the Gemini protocol and similar solutions for a Javascript-free and open internet.

foxglacier 2y ago

What is your purpose of publishing where having the content used to train AI is a problem? Are you trying to gatekeep information that's not even protected by copyright anyway? Are you worried your potential audience will get the same thing (including your personal creativity) from AI that just copied your work so they don't recognize your name and develop some brand awareness? Or do you just not like AI and don't want to help it? Maybe you could build your own paywall or other technical access restriction instead of making it freely available? Even just a captcha should block AI training scrapers, shouldn't it?

asdff 2y ago
No attribution with ai
- foxglacier 2y ago
  But also no direct copying, typically. Would OP really be happy with an AI that reliably rewords everything so that attribution is not required but still reproduces the information?
  - rchaud 2y ago
    Human educational systems penalize you for not citing sources (i.e. not showing your work, not crediting referenced works). Why should an AI system be exempt?
    - foxglacier 2y ago
      Because it's not a student at school, obviously. You didn't cite the source for the claim you just made there and you didn't need to.

hulitu 2y ago

> your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. Firewall ?