10 ms·

Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans-

Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop. It might be too little, too late, at this juncture, and this particular solution doesn't seem too innovative. However, it is directionally 100% correct, and let's hope for massively more innovation in defending against AI parasitism.

risyachka 1y ago
Maybe so, but I'll take Cloudflare over OpenAI and Meta every time.
k__ 1y ago
Is anyone suing to make the models and their weights open source?
jefftk 1y ago
I write online (comments here, open source software, blogging, etc) because I have ideas I want to share. Whether it's "I did a thing and here's how" or "we should change policy in this specific way" or "does anyone know how to X" I'm happy for this to go into training models just like I'm happy for it to go into humans reading.
- dolebirchwood 1y ago
  Thank you for having this attitude. I have never attempted any blogging because I always figured no one is actually going to read it. With LLMs, however, I know they will. I actually see this as a motivation to blog, as we are in a position to shape this emerging knowledge base. I don't find it discouraging that others may be profiting off our freely published work, just as I myself have benefited tremendously from open source and the freely published works of others.
  - arkmm 1y ago
    This is an interesting take, thanks for sharing. I wonder how someone should adjust their blogging if they believe their primary audience will be LLMs.
    - lawlessone 1y ago
      SEO -> LLMEO
    - trollbridge 1y ago
      There’s a few instances of things I stated (about historical topics or very narrow topics in sociology) that were incorrect. LLMs scraped these off of web forums or other places, and now these bogus “facts” are permanently embedded into LLM models, because nobody else ever really talked about the specific topic. Most amusingly, someone cited LLM generated output about this telling me how this “fact” is true when I was telling them it’s not true.
- godelski 1y ago
  Tbh, that content I'm mostly fine with. My only real issue is that people are making trillions off the free labor of people like you and me, giving less time to create that OSS and blogs. But this isn't new to AI, it is just scaled. What I do care about is the theft of my identity. A person may learn from the words I write but that person doesn't end up mimicking the way I write. They are still uniquely themselves. I'm concerned that the more I write the more my text becomes my identifier. I use a handle so I can talk more openly about some issues. We write OSS and blog because information should be free. But that information is then being locked behinds paywalls and becoming more difficult to be found through search. Frankly, that's not okay
  - bob1029 1y ago
    > OSS > people are making trillions off the free labor of people like you and me I read "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" to also include LLMs and especially the cases that we most deeply disagree with. Either we believe in the principles of OSS or we do not. If you do not like the idea of your intellectual property being used for commercial purposes then this model is definitely not for you. There is no shame in keeping your source code and other IP a secret. If you have strong expectations of being compensated for your work, then perhaps a different licensing and distribution model is what you are after. > that information is then being locked behinds paywalls and becoming more difficult to be found through search Sure - If you give up and delete everything. No one is forcing you to put your blog and GH repos behind a paywall.
    - mattl 1y ago
      Open source software typically has a license. People not following the license isn’t tolerated. This is what AI scrapers are doing. They’re taking your code, your artwork and your writing without any consideration for the license.
      - jefftk 1y ago
        Weather training on code is fair use is still an open legal question, and it may well be fair use. The way a license works is by saying "you have my permission to use this code as long as you follow these conditions", but if no license is required than the conditions are irrelevant. There is an active case on this, where Microsoft has been sued over GitHub copilot, and it has been slowly moving through the court system since 2022. Most of the claims have been dismissed, and the prediction market is at 11%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot-litigation https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...
andy99 1y ago
It's cloudflare and parasites like them that will make the internet un-free. It's already happening, I'm either blocked or back to 1998 load times be cause of "checking your browser". They are destroying the internet and will make it so only people who do approved things on approved browsers (meaning let advertising companies monetize their online activity) will get real access. Cloudflare isn't solving a problem, they are just inserting themselves as an intermediary to extract a profit, and making everything worse.
- lillecarl 1y ago
  I use Firefox with adblocking and some fingerprinting anti-measurements and I rarely hit their challenges. Your IP reputation must be bad. They have an addon [1] that helps you bypass Cloudflare challenges anonymously somehow, but it feels wrong to install a plugin to your browser from the ones who make your web experience worse 1: https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/privacy-pass/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/privacy-pass/
  - godelski 1y ago
    I'm in a pretty similar boat except I frequently hit challenges. Especially if I use a VPN (which is more trustworthy than my ISP). Ironically, I'm using Cloudflare for DoH
    - lxgr 1y ago
      I'd be surprised if Cloudflare were actually correlating DoH requests to HTTP requests following them, so I don't think that's a signal they are likely to use.
      - godelski 1y ago
        Probably not. In fact, it's probably a good sign that they are being accurate about that traffic being encrypted. But I did find it ironic
  - chrismorgan 1y ago
rramon 1y ago
Isn't there a possibility that model makers retaliate by erasing them and their frameworks from memory, hurting CF adoption by devs?
cmeacham98 1y ago
Cutting humans out of what loop? What jobs or opportunities were people posting Reddit comments or whatever getting that are now going to AI?
- Larrikin 1y ago
  People who used to post gained knowledge from their profession or hobby. I don't bother posting any of that information on large sites like Reddit anymore, for various reasons but AI scraping solidified. I'll still post on the increasingly fewer hobby message boards that are out there.
- kamarg 1y ago
  > What jobs or opportunities were people posting Reddit comments or whatever getting that are now going to AI? Content writing, product reviews (real & fake), creative writing, customer support, photography/art to name a few off the top of my head.
  - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
    Now the astroturfing is done by AI agents instead of hard working serfs in a call center, you hate to see it
godelski 1y ago
Including your comment, including this comment. HN itself is routinely scraped. What makes me most uncomfortable is deanonymization via speech analysis. It's something we can already do but is hard to do at scale. This is the ultimate tool for authoritarians. There's no hidden identities because your speech is your identifier. It is without borders. It doesn't matter if your government is good, a bad acting government (or even large corporate entity) has the power to blackmail individuals in other countries. We really are quickly headed towards a dystopia. It could result in the entire destruction of the internet or an unprecedented level of self censorship. We already have algospeak because platform censorship[0]. But this would be a different type of censorship. Much more invasive, much more personal. There are things worse than the dark forest [0] literally yesterday YouTube gave me, a person in the 25-60 age bracket, a content warning because there was a video about a person that got removed from a plane because they wore a shirt saying "End veteran suicide". [0.1] Even as I type this I'm censored! Apple will allow me to swipe the word suicidal but not suicide! Jesus fuck guys! You don't reduce the mental health crisis by preventing people from even being able to discuss their problems, you only make it worse!
- trollbridge 1y ago
  The degree to which people say “self-delete” and “unalive” is absurd these days and I now hear it in real life. It’s Orwellian in the truest sense of the word.
  - baq 1y ago
    Orwell was the optimist. It’s Huxley’s vision we should be really worried about. Brave new world indeed.
Kostic 1y ago
This would be true if not for open-weights (and even some open source) LLMs that exist today. Not everything should be done for profit.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
There's a reason reddit started charging for API usage.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
  It surely wasn't to force users into their shitty app where they can't block ads and definitely had nothing to do with their IPO. It was the AI.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Ah yes, its only because of ONE singular reason they started charging for API usage. Are you okay? I'm listing one reason out of many as to why reddit started charging for API usage. After all, reddit is a for profit website.
    - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
      > There's *A* reason this u chief?
      - giancarlostoro 1y ago
        Does "a" not mean, one out of many in this context? I know English is not my first language, but I've always taken "a reason" to mean one of many.
        fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
        You said: > there is a reason What's in the garage? There's a car. I wouldn't expect to walk in and find many cars. Had you said: > this is a reason that would convey it was one among potentially many. Either way my comment wasn't even about you, it was about Reddit, so idk why you got riled up.
dwoldrich 1y ago
I think the parasitism goes quite a bit further than AI. We're being digested not parasitized.
Dig1t 1y ago
That was always the cost of free and open exchange of ideas though. The idea of the internet in the first place was to allow people to communicate in the open and publish ideas freely. There was never any stipulation that using the published ideas to make money was off limits. Technology has advanced and now reading the sum total of the freely exchanged ideas has become particularly valuable. But who cares? The internet still exists and is still usable to freely exchange ideas the way it’s always been. The value that one website provides is a minuscule amount, the value of one individual poster on Reddit is minuscule. Are we asking that each poster on Reddit be paid 1 penny (that’s probably what your posts are worth) for their individual contribution? My websites were used to train these models probably, but the value that each contributed is so small that I wouldn’t even expect a few cents for it. The person who’s going to profit here is Cloudflare or the owners of Reddit, or any other gatekeeper site that is already profiting from other people’s contributions. The “parasitism” here just feels like normal competition between giant companies who have special access to information.
tcdent 1y ago
[flagged]
- friedtofu 1y ago
  What the hell... Even if you're directing this at the user's blog posts specifically; this is a ridiculously pessimistic, sad way to view things. I hope you're just having a bad day because if you sincerely have this greedy, cynical mindset day to day(towards blogging, software, offline/real life activities, whatever) I feel sorry for you.
  - lxgr 1y ago
    GP's comment might be provocatively phrased, but I don't think it's an invalid point to have: When I publish something online for free, i.e. without requiring authentication or payment, be it a Reddit comment, a blog post, a Stackoverflow answer or anything else, I do so hoping that it will be useful to somebody somehow, without any illusions about being able to gatekeep some types of current or future consumers.
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
Cyberpunk aged well. "You better not be on the unprotected internet". Too many hazards out there. Rogue AIs and other shit... Cloudflare is here to protecc you from all those evils. Just come under our umbrella.
bawolff 1y ago
I think its 100% ok to freely train on public internet data. What is absolutely not ok is to crawl at such an excessive speed that it makes it difficult to host small scale websites. Truly a tragedy of the commons.
- tedd4u 1y ago
  Agree. The problem lately is that even if each single scraper is doing so “reasonably,” there are so many individuals and groups doing this that it’s still too onerous for many sites. And of course many are not “reasonable.”
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  This is the attitude that's going to kill the public internet. Because you're right, it is a free for all right now with the only way to opt out being putting content behind restricted platforms.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jowea 1y ago
Is it even possible that Cloudfare could manage to block all AI data scrapping? I think this measure is just going to make it harder and more expensive, which will stop AI scrappers from hitting every single page every single day and creating expenses for publishers, but not actually stop their data from ending up in a few datasets.
mathiaspoint 1y ago
This has been going on even since early social media. I think most of the users actually prefer it.
nektro 1y ago
it brings me so much joy that this is the top comment on this post
visarga 1y ago
> everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop I think on the contrary, who sets the prompts stands to get benefits, the AI provider gets a flat fee, and authors get nothing except the same AI tools as anyone else. That is natural since the users are bringing the problem to the AI, of course they have the lion share here. AI is useless until applied to a specific task owned by a person or company. Within such a task there is opportunity for AI to generate value. AI does not generate its own opportunities, users do. Because users are distributed across society benefits follow the same curve. They don't flow to the center but mainly remain at the edge. In this sense LLMs are like Linux, they serve every user in their specific way, but the contributors to the open source code don't get directly compensated.
- qskousen 1y ago
  That's a really interesting way to think about it, thank you! I've always had a kind of "gut feeling" that AI training on our data is fine with me, but without really thinking too much about why. I think this explains what I've been feeling.
az226 1y ago
That’s the irony. Doing it now is just hampering competition and making it better for the incumbents.

risyachka 1y ago

Maybe so, but I'll take Cloudflare over OpenAI and Meta every time.

k__ 1y ago

Is anyone suing to make the models and their weights open source?

jefftk 1y ago

I write online (comments here, open source software, blogging, etc) because I have ideas I want to share. Whether it's "I did a thing and here's how" or "we should change policy in this specific way" or "does anyone know how to X" I'm happy for this to go into training models just like I'm happy for it to go into humans reading.

dolebirchwood 1y ago
Thank you for having this attitude. I have never attempted any blogging because I always figured no one is actually going to read it. With LLMs, however, I know they will. I actually see this as a motivation to blog, as we are in a position to shape this emerging knowledge base. I don't find it discouraging that others may be profiting off our freely published work, just as I myself have benefited tremendously from open source and the freely published works of others.
- arkmm 1y ago
  This is an interesting take, thanks for sharing. I wonder how someone should adjust their blogging if they believe their primary audience will be LLMs.
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    SEO -> LLMEO
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    There’s a few instances of things I stated (about historical topics or very narrow topics in sociology) that were incorrect. LLMs scraped these off of web forums or other places, and now these bogus “facts” are permanently embedded into LLM models, because nobody else ever really talked about the specific topic. Most amusingly, someone cited LLM generated output about this telling me how this “fact” is true when I was telling them it’s not true.
godelski 1y ago
Tbh, that content I'm mostly fine with. My only real issue is that people are making trillions off the free labor of people like you and me, giving less time to create that OSS and blogs. But this isn't new to AI, it is just scaled. What I do care about is the theft of my identity. A person may learn from the words I write but that person doesn't end up mimicking the way I write. They are still uniquely themselves. I'm concerned that the more I write the more my text becomes my identifier. I use a handle so I can talk more openly about some issues. We write OSS and blog because information should be free. But that information is then being locked behinds paywalls and becoming more difficult to be found through search. Frankly, that's not okay
- bob1029 1y ago
  > OSS > people are making trillions off the free labor of people like you and me I read "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" to also include LLMs and especially the cases that we most deeply disagree with. Either we believe in the principles of OSS or we do not. If you do not like the idea of your intellectual property being used for commercial purposes then this model is definitely not for you. There is no shame in keeping your source code and other IP a secret. If you have strong expectations of being compensated for your work, then perhaps a different licensing and distribution model is what you are after. > that information is then being locked behinds paywalls and becoming more difficult to be found through search Sure - If you give up and delete everything. No one is forcing you to put your blog and GH repos behind a paywall.
  - mattl 1y ago
    Open source software typically has a license. People not following the license isn’t tolerated. This is what AI scrapers are doing. They’re taking your code, your artwork and your writing without any consideration for the license.
    - jefftk 1y ago
      Weather training on code is fair use is still an open legal question, and it may well be fair use. The way a license works is by saying "you have my permission to use this code as long as you follow these conditions", but if no license is required than the conditions are irrelevant. There is an active case on this, where Microsoft has been sued over GitHub copilot, and it has been slowly moving through the court system since 2022. Most of the claims have been dismissed, and the prediction market is at 11%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot-litigation https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...

andy99 1y ago

It's cloudflare and parasites like them that will make the internet un-free. It's already happening, I'm either blocked or back to 1998 load times be cause of "checking your browser". They are destroying the internet and will make it so only people who do approved things on approved browsers (meaning let advertising companies monetize their online activity) will get real access. Cloudflare isn't solving a problem, they are just inserting themselves as an intermediary to extract a profit, and making everything worse.

lillecarl 1y ago
I use Firefox with adblocking and some fingerprinting anti-measurements and I rarely hit their challenges. Your IP reputation must be bad. They have an addon [1] that helps you bypass Cloudflare challenges anonymously somehow, but it feels wrong to install a plugin to your browser from the ones who make your web experience worse 1: https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/privacy-pass/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/privacy-pass/
- godelski 1y ago
  I'm in a pretty similar boat except I frequently hit challenges. Especially if I use a VPN (which is more trustworthy than my ISP). Ironically, I'm using Cloudflare for DoH
  - lxgr 1y ago
    I'd be surprised if Cloudflare were actually correlating DoH requests to HTTP requests following them, so I don't think that's a signal they are likely to use.
    - godelski 1y ago
      Probably not. In fact, it's probably a good sign that they are being accurate about that traffic being encrypted. But I did find it ironic
- chrismorgan 1y ago

rramon 1y ago

Isn't there a possibility that model makers retaliate by erasing them and their frameworks from memory, hurting CF adoption by devs?

cmeacham98 1y ago

Cutting humans out of what loop? What jobs or opportunities were people posting Reddit comments or whatever getting that are now going to AI?

Larrikin 1y ago
People who used to post gained knowledge from their profession or hobby. I don't bother posting any of that information on large sites like Reddit anymore, for various reasons but AI scraping solidified. I'll still post on the increasingly fewer hobby message boards that are out there.
kamarg 1y ago
> What jobs or opportunities were people posting Reddit comments or whatever getting that are now going to AI? Content writing, product reviews (real & fake), creative writing, customer support, photography/art to name a few off the top of my head.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
  Now the astroturfing is done by AI agents instead of hard working serfs in a call center, you hate to see it

godelski 1y ago

Including your comment, including this comment. HN itself is routinely scraped. What makes me most uncomfortable is deanonymization via speech analysis. It's something we can already do but is hard to do at scale. This is the ultimate tool for authoritarians. There's no hidden identities because your speech is your identifier. It is without borders. It doesn't matter if your government is good, a bad acting government (or even large corporate entity) has the power to blackmail individuals in other countries. We really are quickly headed towards a dystopia. It could result in the entire destruction of the internet or an unprecedented level of self censorship. We already have algospeak because platform censorship[0]. But this would be a different type of censorship. Much more invasive, much more personal. There are things worse than the dark forest [0] literally yesterday YouTube gave me, a person in the 25-60 age bracket, a content warning because there was a video about a person that got removed from a plane because they wore a shirt saying "End veteran suicide". [0.1] Even as I type this I'm censored! Apple will allow me to swipe the word suicidal but not suicide! Jesus fuck guys! You don't reduce the mental health crisis by preventing people from even being able to discuss their problems, you only make it worse!

trollbridge 1y ago
The degree to which people say “self-delete” and “unalive” is absurd these days and I now hear it in real life. It’s Orwellian in the truest sense of the word.
- baq 1y ago
  Orwell was the optimist. It’s Huxley’s vision we should be really worried about. Brave new world indeed.

Kostic 1y ago

This would be true if not for open-weights (and even some open source) LLMs that exist today. Not everything should be done for profit.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

There's a reason reddit started charging for API usage.

fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
It surely wasn't to force users into their shitty app where they can't block ads and definitely had nothing to do with their IPO. It was the AI.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  Ah yes, its only because of ONE singular reason they started charging for API usage. Are you okay? I'm listing one reason out of many as to why reddit started charging for API usage. After all, reddit is a for profit website.
  - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
    > There's *A* reason this u chief?
    - giancarlostoro 1y ago
      Does "a" not mean, one out of many in this context? I know English is not my first language, but I've always taken "a reason" to mean one of many.
      - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
        You said: > there is a reason What's in the garage? There's a car. I wouldn't expect to walk in and find many cars. Had you said: > this is a reason that would convey it was one among potentially many. Either way my comment wasn't even about you, it was about Reddit, so idk why you got riled up.

dwoldrich 1y ago

I think the parasitism goes quite a bit further than AI. We're being digested not parasitized.

Dig1t 1y ago

That was always the cost of free and open exchange of ideas though. The idea of the internet in the first place was to allow people to communicate in the open and publish ideas freely. There was never any stipulation that using the published ideas to make money was off limits. Technology has advanced and now reading the sum total of the freely exchanged ideas has become particularly valuable. But who cares? The internet still exists and is still usable to freely exchange ideas the way it’s always been. The value that one website provides is a minuscule amount, the value of one individual poster on Reddit is minuscule. Are we asking that each poster on Reddit be paid 1 penny (that’s probably what your posts are worth) for their individual contribution? My websites were used to train these models probably, but the value that each contributed is so small that I wouldn’t even expect a few cents for it. The person who’s going to profit here is Cloudflare or the owners of Reddit, or any other gatekeeper site that is already profiting from other people’s contributions. The “parasitism” here just feels like normal competition between giant companies who have special access to information.

tcdent 1y ago

[flagged]

friedtofu 1y ago
What the hell... Even if you're directing this at the user's blog posts specifically; this is a ridiculously pessimistic, sad way to view things. I hope you're just having a bad day because if you sincerely have this greedy, cynical mindset day to day(towards blogging, software, offline/real life activities, whatever) I feel sorry for you.
- lxgr 1y ago
  GP's comment might be provocatively phrased, but I don't think it's an invalid point to have: When I publish something online for free, i.e. without requiring authentication or payment, be it a Reddit comment, a blog post, a Stackoverflow answer or anything else, I do so hoping that it will be useful to somebody somehow, without any illusions about being able to gatekeep some types of current or future consumers.

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

Cyberpunk aged well. "You better not be on the unprotected internet". Too many hazards out there. Rogue AIs and other shit... Cloudflare is here to protecc you from all those evils. Just come under our umbrella.

bawolff 1y ago

I think its 100% ok to freely train on public internet data. What is absolutely not ok is to crawl at such an excessive speed that it makes it difficult to host small scale websites. Truly a tragedy of the commons.

tedd4u 1y ago
Agree. The problem lately is that even if each single scraper is doing so “reasonably,” there are so many individuals and groups doing this that it’s still too onerous for many sites. And of course many are not “reasonable.”
SchemaLoad 1y ago
This is the attitude that's going to kill the public internet. Because you're right, it is a free for all right now with the only way to opt out being putting content behind restricted platforms.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jowea 1y ago

Is it even possible that Cloudfare could manage to block all AI data scrapping? I think this measure is just going to make it harder and more expensive, which will stop AI scrappers from hitting every single page every single day and creating expenses for publishers, but not actually stop their data from ending up in a few datasets.

mathiaspoint 1y ago

This has been going on even since early social media. I think most of the users actually prefer it.

nektro 1y ago

it brings me so much joy that this is the top comment on this post

visarga 1y ago

> everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop I think on the contrary, who sets the prompts stands to get benefits, the AI provider gets a flat fee, and authors get nothing except the same AI tools as anyone else. That is natural since the users are bringing the problem to the AI, of course they have the lion share here. AI is useless until applied to a specific task owned by a person or company. Within such a task there is opportunity for AI to generate value. AI does not generate its own opportunities, users do. Because users are distributed across society benefits follow the same curve. They don't flow to the center but mainly remain at the edge. In this sense LLMs are like Linux, they serve every user in their specific way, but the contributors to the open source code don't get directly compensated.

qskousen 1y ago
That's a really interesting way to think about it, thank you! I've always had a kind of "gut feeling" that AI training on our data is fine with me, but without really thinking too much about why. I think this explains what I've been feeling.

az226 1y ago

That’s the irony. Doing it now is just hampering competition and making it better for the incumbents.