7 ms·

Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it

Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.

mattmanser 1y ago
And then governments are mysteriously rolling over and saying of course it's not infringement and even if it is we'll legislate against it. Just all stinks of corruption.
sam_lowry_ 1y ago
Publishers ≠ authors.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
blibble 1y ago
> It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again. isn't this the entire AI playbook? artists, software developers, writers, musicians, everyone total parasitism always kills the host
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  I think the problem is that government/companies don't see that we are eating the seed corn and completely hollowing out society.
AstroBen 1y ago
Yeah and then what happens in 2026 onwards? No one's going to put in the work to create high quality original content when they can't monetize it..
- beej71 1y ago
  A few of us will. :) I give my stuff away for free with no ads. Maybe the web will get small again.
  - xboxnolifes 1y ago
    It will be small again. Less high quality content in the future is the current path.
    - beej71 1y ago
      I think there will be less high quality content, but a greater density of high quality content.
- Ferret7446 1y ago
  Why not? If high quality original content is valuable, then people will pay for it. If no one will pay for it, then is it really valuable? And in any case, your hypothesis is disproved by the existence of free software, to say nothing of amateurs [1] in all fields. Clearly, people are willing to make valuable things without monetary incentive. [1]: a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid rather than a professional basis.
rybosworld 1y ago
In some sense I agree. But I also think publishers have been complicit in providing a gradually worse experience, usually through SEO, for 10+ years. This has drowned out what most people would call "good/original content" - think small, independent bloggers. That big publishers might lose their shirts sounds like a good thing to me.
- billllll 1y ago
  At the end of the day, they're subject to the same market forces. If the big publishers lose their shirts, that means small bloggers don't have any chance of making it big. The same market forces that make big publishers worse are going to squeeze smaller outfits and writers. And I know some people are going to say how writers and news "don't deserve" to make money because they haven't sacrificed enough upon the altar of tech, hustle, and Silicon Valley - I don't really care. I think newspapers and writing in general losing out is a blow to society.
karaterobot 1y ago
Let's not forget that online publishing was dead on its feet before ChatGPT ever showed up. What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Every publisher fighting for smaller and smaller shares of attention with more and more outlets, leading to a race to the bottom.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Well, and intentional efforts by the major tech companies. Like Facebook lying about video stats to push "pivot to video". https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-the-news-video-on-facebook-coffin/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t... "It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, massively overestimating the amount of time that users spent consuming video ads. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with those advertisers, paying them $40 million (while admitting no wrongdoing). But it was too late for the publishers who’d already pivoted to Facebook video and then either made big cuts or shut down completely when it turned out people weren’t actually watching."
  - csallen 1y ago
    I think this had <1% of the effect compared to what the parent stated. The web has led to 10x more content being published in the past 30 years than was published in all of human kind's history before. And that's not including short-form posts/comments/reviews/chats/etc on social media and forums and communities. The amount of increased competition and commoditization of content is insane.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      > I think this had <1% of the effect compared to what the parent stated. I worked at a newspaper for years, during the early days of social media (I made our Twitter account, even... and once dropped an accidental f-bomb on it). I remember the video push; it was a huge change to workflows, hiring patterns, technology needs, etc. It was built on lies and bad data, and media outlets really haven't recovered since.
csallen 1y ago
I'll be the voice of dissent. I don't think it's unfair. 1. I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains. I'm not a big fan of IP law in general (I think it's largely a crime against the people's freedom to share and riff on ideas and expression), but to the extent that we need to bring IP law into this, I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song. 2. Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation. This is a good thing for consumers, as things generally tend to get better and better over time (look at cars, clothing, medicine, food choices, etc). The cost comes to business owners, who are endlessly forced to compete on cost/speed/availability/value at the risk of being disrupted. As a business owner myself, I am okay with this cost and do not find it morally wrong, unfair, or reprehensible. It's for the greater good, and business owners imo are the societal group least in need of charity or prioritization. And, again, the rules help consumers. When a business is being outcompeted, that's because consumers are voting with their feet for what they think is the better option. 3. Pure artists are unaffected. If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love. If you make a great burger for yourself or your friends and family, it does not matter that McDonald's has sold a billion burgers. However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair. 4. Trying to skirt the rules of the market to avoid competition or disruption, imo, is not cool. It generally amounts to rent-seeking "I got here first" behavior, which benefits no one in society except for business owners who don't want to innovate. "My profession/industry was here first, and this is how it's always been since I got into it, and I like making money this way, and it's unfair for anything to happen in the market that disrupts my flow of money or causes me to change, and I'm going to use my incumbency/popularity/authority to try to change the law to stop newcomers from out-competing me or to force them to give me a cut, consumers be damned." It is not a tragedy for a business model that used to thrive to decline. It's a natural process that has happened many tens of thousands of times, and it's the flip side of the coin called progress.
azemetre 1y ago
Yes it's unfair. It's digital colonialism. What's sad is that other companies keep falling for the false narrative that big tech monopolies act as partners and not the blood sucking leeches they've become to represent.
- csallen 1y ago
  Competition in the free market is not colonialism. The capitalistic marketplace is meant to involve disruption. That's the entire point: new companies come along and out-compete and out-innovate older companies and business models. The consumer wins. This is not the same as invading countries and subjugating the inhabitants, who have a human right to a peaceful life. No business in a capitalistic marketplace has a "right" to continue enjoying profits and resist innovation.
  - Ecstatify 1y ago
    What new companies? Google is a monopoly, along with most other major tech platforms. When a handful of corporations control entire market sectors and actively acquire or crush potential competitors, that's not free market competition, that's market consolidation that prevents the very disruption you're describing. The "creative destruction" of capitalism requires actual competition to exist, not just the theoretical possibility of it.
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    Violating/changing the meaning of copyright law and demanding special carvouts AFTER THE FACT is not 'competition'. (AI) Breaking hospitality/zoning laws is not 'competition'. (AirBnb) Breaking taxi/transportations laws and regulation is not 'competition'. (Uber/Lyft) Misclassifying workers to bypass employment laws is not 'competition'. (All 'gig' companies) Operating unlicensed financial services is not 'competition'. (fintech) Being given special content liability carveouts only to your platform is not 'competition'. (social media) Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent) Flooding the market with illegal or gray-area imports is not 'competition'. (Amazon) Exploiting data without consent is not 'competition'. (all tech at this point) Using investor capital to subsidize predatory pricing is not 'competition'. (almost all tech) Every industry 'new' tech has gone after they have cheated, broken laws and/or had/pushed for (normally after the fact) special carveouts from the law so that they are the only ones in their field that get to operate a different way, used and harvested data in bad faith, used predatory unsustainable pricing practices. Show me where tech has 'outcompeted' without doing any of the above. Where the product didn't need special protections/carvouts to existing law, didn't exploit data/peoples trust, didn't use investment capital to artificially lower prices, didn't utilize 'grey areas' to skirt barriers that ACTUAL competing companies obeyed, where the product delivered, on it's own, created a unicorn. Edit: Responding as edit because I've been timed out. Apple is doing rent-seeking enforced through ecosystem control. This is traditionally seen as a monopolistic practice and historically/based on capitalist philosophy companies that did this were seen as a threat to capitalism and broken up/punished for this behavior. Rent seeking is explicitly anti-capitalist in classical economic thought.
xixixao 1y ago
It's kinda an obvious solution: If people do get used to paying for ChatGPT like AIs (big "if"), then AI providers will start paying from their revenue for fresh new quality content. This would be great (if you don't like ads).
- brokencode 1y ago
  Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    They should! They won't.
  - slg 1y ago
    I downvoted because it is naive childlike logic that excuses current bad behavior on the possibility of future good behavior. OP's original comment called this stealing and this response is that the "obvious solution" is that the thief will pay their victim back after turning their stealing operation into a successful business. That is silly. Do people think that if the Pirate Bay is allowed to exist long enough that they will eventually start paying Hollywood Studios for new movies? If you want to argue against OP in defense of these AI companies, argue why what they're doing isn't stealing or why what they're doing in the moment is justified. Don't say the stealing can be excused by some hypothetical and implied promise of future reparations. EDIT: It's funny to respond to a comment asking for explanation of the downvotes only to be downvoted without explanation.
    - brokencode 1y ago
      I didn’t downvote you, but I do disagree. Yes, the AI companies are stealing. This is an area where the legal system needs to catch up. Once it does, AI companies should have to negotiate contracts with publishers in order to legally use their content. Otherwise they should be open to lawsuits for copyright violations. This is quite different from Pirate Bay, which is not run by a law abiding company with customers. Unless OpenAI wants to go underground and sell their services on the black market, they will have to play by the rules.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pier25 1y ago
It's not unfair it's content theft at an industrial scale. Edit: Those how are downvoting me probably haver never spent a week writing an article or blog post.
tomjen3 1y ago
Most of them were so shit in the first place. Click bait and listicle upon listicle.
notsydonia 1y ago
It IS incredibly unfair and it's also unethical, given that they're already scraping publisher content to feed their own A.I. Unless I missed it, this article didn't have details on how the revenue - if any - would be handled but I presume there would also be some 'ticket-clipping' on the part of Google there as well. Ie: sorry about acquiring your content and then no longer linking to you but in case anyone does ever find your pathetic indie site, we're now offering an array of solutions so that you can ditch your long-standing but now no longer needed e-commerce solutions. You have made...$177 in micro payments this week minus the transaction fees of $17.77 but cannot claim it yet as you have not met our your ad revenue threshold. Need help? Go around in circles with our chat bots until you die - we'll keep your money regardless.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
It's not only you. "Big Tech" does not create anything. Even when it clearly has the budget to do so. Instead, it copies and intermediates (plays the middleman).
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  Without free use of other peoples' work as bait for luring in ad targets (so-called "content"), "Big Tech" companies have no "business model".
Ferret7446 1y ago
Not really. They created their own business by creating an artificial monopoly called copyright. The government enforced and defended their monopoly enabling them to profit. It was never sustainable, and now the forces of reality are crushing the scheme. Information wants to be free, much as gravity makes the apple fall to the ground, and RNA has created the entire ecosystem on this planet simply to sustain and replicate itself. The publishers are really no different than, say, printers with their DRM ink. Is it unfair that their business can no longer benefit from an enforced monopoly? Let me get out the world's smallest violin for this one.

mattmanser 1y ago

And then governments are mysteriously rolling over and saying of course it's not infringement and even if it is we'll legislate against it. Just all stinks of corruption.

sam_lowry_ 1y ago

Publishers ≠ authors.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

blibble 1y ago

> It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again. isn't this the entire AI playbook? artists, software developers, writers, musicians, everyone total parasitism always kills the host

_DeadFred_ 1y ago
I think the problem is that government/companies don't see that we are eating the seed corn and completely hollowing out society.

AstroBen 1y ago

Yeah and then what happens in 2026 onwards? No one's going to put in the work to create high quality original content when they can't monetize it..

beej71 1y ago
A few of us will. :) I give my stuff away for free with no ads. Maybe the web will get small again.
- xboxnolifes 1y ago
  It will be small again. Less high quality content in the future is the current path.
  - beej71 1y ago
    I think there will be less high quality content, but a greater density of high quality content.
Ferret7446 1y ago
Why not? If high quality original content is valuable, then people will pay for it. If no one will pay for it, then is it really valuable? And in any case, your hypothesis is disproved by the existence of free software, to say nothing of amateurs [1] in all fields. Clearly, people are willing to make valuable things without monetary incentive. [1]: a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid rather than a professional basis.

rybosworld 1y ago

In some sense I agree. But I also think publishers have been complicit in providing a gradually worse experience, usually through SEO, for 10+ years. This has drowned out what most people would call "good/original content" - think small, independent bloggers. That big publishers might lose their shirts sounds like a good thing to me.

billllll 1y ago
At the end of the day, they're subject to the same market forces. If the big publishers lose their shirts, that means small bloggers don't have any chance of making it big. The same market forces that make big publishers worse are going to squeeze smaller outfits and writers. And I know some people are going to say how writers and news "don't deserve" to make money because they haven't sacrificed enough upon the altar of tech, hustle, and Silicon Valley - I don't really care. I think newspapers and writing in general losing out is a blow to society.

karaterobot 1y ago

Let's not forget that online publishing was dead on its feet before ChatGPT ever showed up. What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Every publisher fighting for smaller and smaller shares of attention with more and more outlets, leading to a race to the bottom.

ceejayoz 1y ago
> What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Well, and intentional efforts by the major tech companies. Like Facebook lying about video stats to push "pivot to video". https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-the-news-video-on-facebook-coffin/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t... "It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, massively overestimating the amount of time that users spent consuming video ads. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with those advertisers, paying them $40 million (while admitting no wrongdoing). But it was too late for the publishers who’d already pivoted to Facebook video and then either made big cuts or shut down completely when it turned out people weren’t actually watching."
- csallen 1y ago
  I think this had <1% of the effect compared to what the parent stated. The web has led to 10x more content being published in the past 30 years than was published in all of human kind's history before. And that's not including short-form posts/comments/reviews/chats/etc on social media and forums and communities. The amount of increased competition and commoditization of content is insane.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    > I think this had <1% of the effect compared to what the parent stated. I worked at a newspaper for years, during the early days of social media (I made our Twitter account, even... and once dropped an accidental f-bomb on it). I remember the video push; it was a huge change to workflows, hiring patterns, technology needs, etc. It was built on lies and bad data, and media outlets really haven't recovered since.

csallen 1y ago

I'll be the voice of dissent. I don't think it's unfair. 1. I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains. I'm not a big fan of IP law in general (I think it's largely a crime against the people's freedom to share and riff on ideas and expression), but to the extent that we need to bring IP law into this, I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song. 2. Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation. This is a good thing for consumers, as things generally tend to get better and better over time (look at cars, clothing, medicine, food choices, etc). The cost comes to business owners, who are endlessly forced to compete on cost/speed/availability/value at the risk of being disrupted. As a business owner myself, I am okay with this cost and do not find it morally wrong, unfair, or reprehensible. It's for the greater good, and business owners imo are the societal group least in need of charity or prioritization. And, again, the rules help consumers. When a business is being outcompeted, that's because consumers are voting with their feet for what they think is the better option. 3. Pure artists are unaffected. If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love. If you make a great burger for yourself or your friends and family, it does not matter that McDonald's has sold a billion burgers. However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair. 4. Trying to skirt the rules of the market to avoid competition or disruption, imo, is not cool. It generally amounts to rent-seeking "I got here first" behavior, which benefits no one in society except for business owners who don't want to innovate. "My profession/industry was here first, and this is how it's always been since I got into it, and I like making money this way, and it's unfair for anything to happen in the market that disrupts my flow of money or causes me to change, and I'm going to use my incumbency/popularity/authority to try to change the law to stop newcomers from out-competing me or to force them to give me a cut, consumers be damned." It is not a tragedy for a business model that used to thrive to decline. It's a natural process that has happened many tens of thousands of times, and it's the flip side of the coin called progress.

azemetre 1y ago

Yes it's unfair. It's digital colonialism. What's sad is that other companies keep falling for the false narrative that big tech monopolies act as partners and not the blood sucking leeches they've become to represent.

csallen 1y ago
Competition in the free market is not colonialism. The capitalistic marketplace is meant to involve disruption. That's the entire point: new companies come along and out-compete and out-innovate older companies and business models. The consumer wins. This is not the same as invading countries and subjugating the inhabitants, who have a human right to a peaceful life. No business in a capitalistic marketplace has a "right" to continue enjoying profits and resist innovation.
- Ecstatify 1y ago
  What new companies? Google is a monopoly, along with most other major tech platforms. When a handful of corporations control entire market sectors and actively acquire or crush potential competitors, that's not free market competition, that's market consolidation that prevents the very disruption you're describing. The "creative destruction" of capitalism requires actual competition to exist, not just the theoretical possibility of it.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  Violating/changing the meaning of copyright law and demanding special carvouts AFTER THE FACT is not 'competition'. (AI) Breaking hospitality/zoning laws is not 'competition'. (AirBnb) Breaking taxi/transportations laws and regulation is not 'competition'. (Uber/Lyft) Misclassifying workers to bypass employment laws is not 'competition'. (All 'gig' companies) Operating unlicensed financial services is not 'competition'. (fintech) Being given special content liability carveouts only to your platform is not 'competition'. (social media) Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent) Flooding the market with illegal or gray-area imports is not 'competition'. (Amazon) Exploiting data without consent is not 'competition'. (all tech at this point) Using investor capital to subsidize predatory pricing is not 'competition'. (almost all tech) Every industry 'new' tech has gone after they have cheated, broken laws and/or had/pushed for (normally after the fact) special carveouts from the law so that they are the only ones in their field that get to operate a different way, used and harvested data in bad faith, used predatory unsustainable pricing practices. Show me where tech has 'outcompeted' without doing any of the above. Where the product didn't need special protections/carvouts to existing law, didn't exploit data/peoples trust, didn't use investment capital to artificially lower prices, didn't utilize 'grey areas' to skirt barriers that ACTUAL competing companies obeyed, where the product delivered, on it's own, created a unicorn. Edit: Responding as edit because I've been timed out. Apple is doing rent-seeking enforced through ecosystem control. This is traditionally seen as a monopolistic practice and historically/based on capitalist philosophy companies that did this were seen as a threat to capitalism and broken up/punished for this behavior. Rent seeking is explicitly anti-capitalist in classical economic thought.

xixixao 1y ago

It's kinda an obvious solution: If people do get used to paying for ChatGPT like AIs (big "if"), then AI providers will start paying from their revenue for fresh new quality content. This would be great (if you don't like ads).

brokencode 1y ago
Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  They should! They won't.
- slg 1y ago
  I downvoted because it is naive childlike logic that excuses current bad behavior on the possibility of future good behavior. OP's original comment called this stealing and this response is that the "obvious solution" is that the thief will pay their victim back after turning their stealing operation into a successful business. That is silly. Do people think that if the Pirate Bay is allowed to exist long enough that they will eventually start paying Hollywood Studios for new movies? If you want to argue against OP in defense of these AI companies, argue why what they're doing isn't stealing or why what they're doing in the moment is justified. Don't say the stealing can be excused by some hypothetical and implied promise of future reparations. EDIT: It's funny to respond to a comment asking for explanation of the downvotes only to be downvoted without explanation.
  - brokencode 1y ago
    I didn’t downvote you, but I do disagree. Yes, the AI companies are stealing. This is an area where the legal system needs to catch up. Once it does, AI companies should have to negotiate contracts with publishers in order to legally use their content. Otherwise they should be open to lawsuits for copyright violations. This is quite different from Pirate Bay, which is not run by a law abiding company with customers. Unless OpenAI wants to go underground and sell their services on the black market, they will have to play by the rules.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

pier25 1y ago

It's not unfair it's content theft at an industrial scale. Edit: Those how are downvoting me probably haver never spent a week writing an article or blog post.

tomjen3 1y ago

Most of them were so shit in the first place. Click bait and listicle upon listicle.

notsydonia 1y ago

It IS incredibly unfair and it's also unethical, given that they're already scraping publisher content to feed their own A.I. Unless I missed it, this article didn't have details on how the revenue - if any - would be handled but I presume there would also be some 'ticket-clipping' on the part of Google there as well. Ie: sorry about acquiring your content and then no longer linking to you but in case anyone does ever find your pathetic indie site, we're now offering an array of solutions so that you can ditch your long-standing but now no longer needed e-commerce solutions. You have made...$177 in micro payments this week minus the transaction fees of $17.77 but cannot claim it yet as you have not met our your ad revenue threshold. Need help? Go around in circles with our chat bots until you die - we'll keep your money regardless.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

It's not only you. "Big Tech" does not create anything. Even when it clearly has the budget to do so. Instead, it copies and intermediates (plays the middleman).

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
Without free use of other peoples' work as bait for luring in ad targets (so-called "content"), "Big Tech" companies have no "business model".

Ferret7446 1y ago

Not really. They created their own business by creating an artificial monopoly called copyright. The government enforced and defended their monopoly enabling them to profit. It was never sustainable, and now the forces of reality are crushing the scheme. Information wants to be free, much as gravity makes the apple fall to the ground, and RNA has created the entire ecosystem on this planet simply to sustain and replicate itself. The publishers are really no different than, say, printers with their DRM ink. Is it unfair that their business can no longer benefit from an enforced monopoly? Let me get out the world's smallest violin for this one.