5 ms·

It's not an excuse, it is a reality. Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your wor

It's not an excuse, it is a reality. Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your work. There is certainly a line where if you're popular enough and have significant google juice you'll still get organic traffic, many small bloggers can go their entire posting history without getting more than a smattering of hits and now chatgpt is taking away that.

simonw 2y ago
"Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your work." That's the exact attitude I'm talking about. Because creating things is good! Because it's good to put value out there into the world, even if someone else might also use it.
- creata 2y ago
  I think it can significantly change the harm-benefit calculus. (But I'd love to be wrong.) In the past, I could be fairly confident that if someone else uses my work (and I want them to do that! that's the point of sharing!) the good that it causes will outweigh the bad that it causes. It's not like I'm helping people make missiles. But now it's entirely possible (especially if my content is unpopular, such that LLMs make a larger proportion of its readers) that the bad outweighs the good, given the negative effects that LLMs have had and continue to have on our world.
  - mikrotikker 2y ago
    Missiles save lives too.
petercooper 2y ago
Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your work. People releasing their code under MIT or BSD licenses might be able to give good answers to this.
- ndarray 2y ago
  Good answers like "it looks cool in my CV that big company XYZ uses my MIT licensed script"
- throw10920 2y ago
  It's extremely dishonest to compare someone voluntarily releasing their work under a permissive license with someone who is involuntarily having their content and effort stolen by an organization training an AI.
  - petercooper 2y ago
    And I think it's erroneous to say having publicly disseminated content being read in an LLM training process is "stealing." If I read a publicly distributed, copyrighted blog post of yours, learn something, then use that knowledge later on, did I steal your content? If an author distributes something in public, the public is allowed to read it and learn from it, whether with their eyes, a screen reader, AI agent, or whatever. Any copyright violation occurs if they attempt to republish your content, not in the reading of it. However, scraping illegally obtained non-public material - such as books an author is trying to sell or blog posts behind a paywall - could well be a violation unless access is obtained legally.
    - throw10920 2y ago
      > And I think it's erroneous to say having publicly disseminated content being read in an LLM training process is "stealing." It's clearly theft-adjacent. You're free to use "piracy" if you want, as long as it's clear that it's illegal and morally on the level of theft. > If I read a publicly distributed, copyrighted blog post of yours, learn something, then use that knowledge later on, did I steal your content? It's also extremely dishonest to compare AI to humans like this. AI are not people - morally, socially, biologically, or legally. What a human does with a piece of content is utterly irrelevant to the process of training an AI. > If an author distributes something in public, the public is allowed to read it and learn from it, whether with their eyes, a screen reader, AI agent, or whatever. Again - very dishonest to conflate a pre-trained AI agent (such as OpenAI's Operator) with the training process. > Any copyright violation occurs if they attempt to republish your content, not in the reading of it. OK, this is just factually incorrect. It is a violation of copyright law to make copies of copyrighted content, with very limited and case-by-case fair use exceptions - the claim that violation only happens in the republishing case is completely false. This entire defense is a mix between deceptive and flat-out factually incorrect statements.

simonw 2y ago

"Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your work." That's the exact attitude I'm talking about. Because creating things is good! Because it's good to put value out there into the world, even if someone else might also use it.

creata 2y ago
I think it can significantly change the harm-benefit calculus. (But I'd love to be wrong.) In the past, I could be fairly confident that if someone else uses my work (and I want them to do that! that's the point of sharing!) the good that it causes will outweigh the bad that it causes. It's not like I'm helping people make missiles. But now it's entirely possible (especially if my content is unpopular, such that LLMs make a larger proportion of its readers) that the bad outweighs the good, given the negative effects that LLMs have had and continue to have on our world.
- mikrotikker 2y ago
  Missiles save lives too.

petercooper 2y ago

Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your work. People releasing their code under MIT or BSD licenses might be able to give good answers to this.

ndarray 2y ago
Good answers like "it looks cool in my CV that big company XYZ uses my MIT licensed script"
throw10920 2y ago
It's extremely dishonest to compare someone voluntarily releasing their work under a permissive license with someone who is involuntarily having their content and effort stolen by an organization training an AI.
- petercooper 2y ago
  And I think it's erroneous to say having publicly disseminated content being read in an LLM training process is "stealing." If I read a publicly distributed, copyrighted blog post of yours, learn something, then use that knowledge later on, did I steal your content? If an author distributes something in public, the public is allowed to read it and learn from it, whether with their eyes, a screen reader, AI agent, or whatever. Any copyright violation occurs if they attempt to republish your content, not in the reading of it. However, scraping illegally obtained non-public material - such as books an author is trying to sell or blog posts behind a paywall - could well be a violation unless access is obtained legally.
  - throw10920 2y ago
    > And I think it's erroneous to say having publicly disseminated content being read in an LLM training process is "stealing." It's clearly theft-adjacent. You're free to use "piracy" if you want, as long as it's clear that it's illegal and morally on the level of theft. > If I read a publicly distributed, copyrighted blog post of yours, learn something, then use that knowledge later on, did I steal your content? It's also extremely dishonest to compare AI to humans like this. AI are not people - morally, socially, biologically, or legally. What a human does with a piece of content is utterly irrelevant to the process of training an AI. > If an author distributes something in public, the public is allowed to read it and learn from it, whether with their eyes, a screen reader, AI agent, or whatever. Again - very dishonest to conflate a pre-trained AI agent (such as OpenAI's Operator) with the training process. > Any copyright violation occurs if they attempt to republish your content, not in the reading of it. OK, this is just factually incorrect. It is a violation of copyright law to make copies of copyrighted content, with very limited and case-by-case fair use exceptions - the claim that violation only happens in the republishing case is completely false. This entire defense is a mix between deceptive and flat-out factually incorrect statements.