6 ms·

I have actually cut back on blogging (partly) because I don't want my hard work to be slurped up and regurgitated by an AI. I write for other people. Not for AI

by aprilthird2021 2y ago

dwg 2y ago
Makes me wonder, how about changing your blog to a mailing list?
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Yeah maybe that's the move. I don't really have a following though, lol
  - chefandy 2y ago
    I don’t think there has to be some practical economic business justification to a) feel bummed out by your creative output getting munged up into something that, for all its better uses, will feed the great fire hoses spraying trillions of gallons of bullshit all over our information landscape, or b) reduce your creative output because of it. It’s weird how entitled people feel to other people’s creative work and get mad when people don’t freely create for and share with them, while simultaneously minimizing the value that work and its authors bring to our society. Despite what many say, the way people receive and interact with your work mentally/emotionally is really important, and all your work being sucked up into these models— often to create commercial products that are openly antagonistic to the people that created the work that made it possible— changes that. It’s sad that AI has devalued creative processes even to the creators themselves.
  - 6510 2y ago
    You could hack the email addresses out of a website, make disposable email addresses and send your writings to everyone including the replies from the previous newsletter with your response to them.
- kmoser 2y ago
  That's no guarantee it won't get slurped up by an AI at some point. Anything that goes into, say, GMail is ripe for plucking. And there's always a good chance your newsletters will get publicly archived on some web page somewhere, whether intentional or not.
  - dwg 2y ago
    I had the same thought. Still, perfect or not, I bet it'll be an attractive option for some. I guess our gmail content has been fed into an AI of sorts since many years ago. I would surely hope, however, that Google would not use it for any sort of non-private LLM training data.
sanex 2y ago
What about the idea that writing for the AI is your best opportunity to help contribute to it's direction?
- Hamuko 2y ago
  Where's my cut of the AI profits?
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    Nice retort, but serious question: Except for NVidia (and maybe AMD's GPU division), is anyone making any money from AI/LLMs yet? I think no.
    - watwut 2y ago
      SV companies have that cycle where they give things for free until peoppe get dependent or until they killed competition. Then they switch to using every trick in a book to make you pay.
HKH2 2y ago
People had been stealing ideas long before computers started doing it.
- chefandy 2y ago
  > People had been stealing ideas long before computers started doing it. So it’s not ok to be bothered by it because it’s been happening a long time?
  - HKH2 2y ago
    I can't imagine how culture could exist without ideas being taken without permission.
    - chefandy 2y ago
      Straw man. I can’t imagine how culture could exist without some people being thrown in prison. That doesn’t mean that criticizing a law or law enforcement practice is equivalent to arguing for abolishing prisons.
      - HKH2 2y ago
        We can agree that prison and appropriation are both necessary for culture, regardless of their negative effects. Your problem is the scale at which knowledge and ideas are being appropriated, but my point is that it was already happening a lot but it was far more implicit; now it's just explicit that it's happening because we see the process laid bare.
        chefandy 2y ago
        No, that is not “my problem” with it. It is one facet of it, there are lots of sucky ways to take ideas that have nothing to do with scale, and there are lots of ways that fundamentally mechanically harvesting “ideas” as data is different than just learning quickly, but I’m not interested in re-arguing any of this for the 500th time on HN.
protocolture 2y ago
I am a person (allegedly) and I would benefit from AI regurgitating your content. Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.
- adra 2y ago
  Google gives attribution and maybe provenance, while AI gives you smoke and mirrors. I guess we'll decide if copyright has any legs left to stand on in the modern world, or if it falls as collateral. It's so sad that commercial piracy has hit such an incredible tipping point that even I feel bad for creative people and their bleak economically dead future ahead.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    I want to be optimistic, but I suspect what we'll end up with is a legal interpretation which allows LLMs to steal content from creators without the cool side benefit of being permitted to steal content ourselves. It will become legal for an LLM to turn your blog into a part of its library, but you won't be able to apply the same logic to read out-of-print books.
- blululu 2y ago
  Reading and writing are both intimate activities. The reader holds the writer's thoughts in mind, and the writer knows this and acts accordingly. Personally, I don't particularly enjoy reading material that was made by an LLM. The fact that so little effort was applied suggests that there is not much reason for this to exist beyond a chance to serve a few quick links. Since the llm is also running this as a business, I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").
serial_dev 2y ago
AI doesn’t care, the people using AI care. If you really write for other people, I’d recommend you reconsider blogging again. Even if you write primarily for yourself (vanity, marketing, client acquisition, there is nothing wrong with that) and not for other people, I’d still recommend you publish your stuff. Not publishing will have always <= effect than publishing, even if AI slurps it up.
- antonchekhov 2y ago
  JD Salinger took a lot of heat over his reticence to publish any more of his writings after Catcher In the Rye and the Glass family stories. In 1974, he responded to the NY Times, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work."
sgt 2y ago
Isn't there a robots.txt equivalent for AI?
- simianparrot 2y ago
  It’s not respected, there’s a lot of posts on HN about this. Just one quick reference: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/several-ai-companies-said-to-be-ignoring-robots-dot-txt-exclusion-scraping-content-without-permission-report https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
- Hamuko 2y ago
  You'd probably have a better time using something like Cloudflare to block known scrapers than trust companies that pirate terabytes of books to train their models to obey a "please don't" text file. https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...
sim7c00 2y ago
what will happen if it was? some kind of end of the universe event? i really dont think its such a big deal. If you enjoy blogging, then enjoy it. Maybe its an excuse, AI, for something that was already in the making.

I have actually cut back on blogging (partly) because I don't want my hard work to be slurped up and regurgitated by an AI. I write for other people. Not for AI

dwg 2y ago

Makes me wonder, how about changing your blog to a mailing list?

aprilthird2021 2y ago
Yeah maybe that's the move. I don't really have a following though, lol
- chefandy 2y ago
  I don’t think there has to be some practical economic business justification to a) feel bummed out by your creative output getting munged up into something that, for all its better uses, will feed the great fire hoses spraying trillions of gallons of bullshit all over our information landscape, or b) reduce your creative output because of it. It’s weird how entitled people feel to other people’s creative work and get mad when people don’t freely create for and share with them, while simultaneously minimizing the value that work and its authors bring to our society. Despite what many say, the way people receive and interact with your work mentally/emotionally is really important, and all your work being sucked up into these models— often to create commercial products that are openly antagonistic to the people that created the work that made it possible— changes that. It’s sad that AI has devalued creative processes even to the creators themselves.
- 6510 2y ago
  You could hack the email addresses out of a website, make disposable email addresses and send your writings to everyone including the replies from the previous newsletter with your response to them.
kmoser 2y ago
That's no guarantee it won't get slurped up by an AI at some point. Anything that goes into, say, GMail is ripe for plucking. And there's always a good chance your newsletters will get publicly archived on some web page somewhere, whether intentional or not.
- dwg 2y ago
  I had the same thought. Still, perfect or not, I bet it'll be an attractive option for some. I guess our gmail content has been fed into an AI of sorts since many years ago. I would surely hope, however, that Google would not use it for any sort of non-private LLM training data.

sanex 2y ago

What about the idea that writing for the AI is your best opportunity to help contribute to it's direction?

Hamuko 2y ago
Where's my cut of the AI profits?
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  Nice retort, but serious question: Except for NVidia (and maybe AMD's GPU division), is anyone making any money from AI/LLMs yet? I think no.
  - watwut 2y ago
    SV companies have that cycle where they give things for free until peoppe get dependent or until they killed competition. Then they switch to using every trick in a book to make you pay.

HKH2 2y ago

People had been stealing ideas long before computers started doing it.

chefandy 2y ago
> People had been stealing ideas long before computers started doing it. So it’s not ok to be bothered by it because it’s been happening a long time?
- HKH2 2y ago
  I can't imagine how culture could exist without ideas being taken without permission.
  - chefandy 2y ago
    Straw man. I can’t imagine how culture could exist without some people being thrown in prison. That doesn’t mean that criticizing a law or law enforcement practice is equivalent to arguing for abolishing prisons.
    - HKH2 2y ago
      We can agree that prison and appropriation are both necessary for culture, regardless of their negative effects. Your problem is the scale at which knowledge and ideas are being appropriated, but my point is that it was already happening a lot but it was far more implicit; now it's just explicit that it's happening because we see the process laid bare.
      - chefandy 2y ago
        No, that is not “my problem” with it. It is one facet of it, there are lots of sucky ways to take ideas that have nothing to do with scale, and there are lots of ways that fundamentally mechanically harvesting “ideas” as data is different than just learning quickly, but I’m not interested in re-arguing any of this for the 500th time on HN.

protocolture 2y ago

I am a person (allegedly) and I would benefit from AI regurgitating your content. Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.

adra 2y ago
Google gives attribution and maybe provenance, while AI gives you smoke and mirrors. I guess we'll decide if copyright has any legs left to stand on in the modern world, or if it falls as collateral. It's so sad that commercial piracy has hit such an incredible tipping point that even I feel bad for creative people and their bleak economically dead future ahead.
- lurk2 2y ago
  I want to be optimistic, but I suspect what we'll end up with is a legal interpretation which allows LLMs to steal content from creators without the cool side benefit of being permitted to steal content ourselves. It will become legal for an LLM to turn your blog into a part of its library, but you won't be able to apply the same logic to read out-of-print books.
blululu 2y ago
Reading and writing are both intimate activities. The reader holds the writer's thoughts in mind, and the writer knows this and acts accordingly. Personally, I don't particularly enjoy reading material that was made by an LLM. The fact that so little effort was applied suggests that there is not much reason for this to exist beyond a chance to serve a few quick links. Since the llm is also running this as a business, I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").

serial_dev 2y ago

AI doesn’t care, the people using AI care. If you really write for other people, I’d recommend you reconsider blogging again. Even if you write primarily for yourself (vanity, marketing, client acquisition, there is nothing wrong with that) and not for other people, I’d still recommend you publish your stuff. Not publishing will have always <= effect than publishing, even if AI slurps it up.

antonchekhov 2y ago
JD Salinger took a lot of heat over his reticence to publish any more of his writings after Catcher In the Rye and the Glass family stories. In 1974, he responded to the NY Times, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work."

sgt 2y ago

Isn't there a robots.txt equivalent for AI?

simianparrot 2y ago
It’s not respected, there’s a lot of posts on HN about this. Just one quick reference: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/several-ai-companies-said-to-be-ignoring-robots-dot-txt-exclusion-scraping-content-without-permission-report https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Hamuko 2y ago
You'd probably have a better time using something like Cloudflare to block known scrapers than trust companies that pirate terabytes of books to train their models to obey a "please don't" text file. https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...

sim7c00 2y ago

what will happen if it was? some kind of end of the universe event? i really dont think its such a big deal. If you enjoy blogging, then enjoy it. Maybe its an excuse, AI, for something that was already in the making.