5 ms·

> Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM who would steal their competitive ad

> Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM who would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on. I'm not sure of any way I can share it with humans and only humans. If I let the LLMs have the UI patterns and libraries I've developed it would dilute my IP, like it has Studio Ghibli's art style.

TeMPOraL 6mo ago
It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.
- davebren 6mo ago
  I'm not seeing how the benefits have outweighed the positives at this point. Spam, scams, porn, being inundated with slop, people losing their skills and getting dumber, mass surveillance... Is that worth possibly maybe saving some time programming, but then not gaining the knowledge you would have if you did it yourself, that can be built on in the future? I don't see technological advancement as good in itself if morality is in decline.
  - hirako2000 6mo ago
    I reached the same conclusion. It also made me realised how most technologies degraded our lives. Before the TV people would go to the theatre. It's becoming hard to find a theatre these days. Artificial light is convenient, it made billion or people develop sleep disorder and we can't see stars at at night. Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.
    - dasil003 6mo ago
      I think it's more fair to say that with every technology there are tradeoffs. Consider the wheel, before the wheel people probably were more physically fit, but they couldn't move as large of loads. Well, except in the Andes where they figured out how to move gigantic stones well beyond the weight that any wooden wheel would have been able to carry anyway and cut and place them into configurations that were earthquake resistant. Technology and civilization is path dependent, and I think it's silly to make blanket statements about the merit of technological progress overall. Everything choice (including the choice to do nothing) has unintended consequences. I would never condemn anyone for inventing a new technological solution to a problem, but once the systematic effects are understood then we do need the collective ability to course correct (eg. social media, AI, etc).
      - hirako2000 6mo ago
        Everything has tradeoffs. I imply technology rarely yields a net positive. I could call out the positive, those are so obvious. It's the subtle cost of the benefits that almost never gets discussed.
        dasil003 6mo ago
        > technology rarely yields a net positive This is a super bold statement that I guest most people would disagree with, and I suspect if you somehow brought people forward from the past, even fewer would agree with. I do agree with you the subtle cost is rarely discussed. I also would say that the unintended consequences of technology are sometimes very very bad in unforeseeable ways, but that's very different from the "net negative" framing which I think is too reductive to be useful. Technology is not a zero sum game, effects are multifaceted, so any quantitative comparison relies on extremely subjective value judgements.
    - azan_ 6mo ago
      > Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on. I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.
- shimman 6mo ago
  Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.
  - altruios 6mo ago
    Gemma4 is apache2 licensed. I am unsure about the openness of the training data itself. That too should be required for a LLM to be considered 'open'. Open source is the only way forward, I agree.
  - rubslopes 6mo ago
    > Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Honest question: how is this different from traditional Open Source? Linux powers most of the internet, yet the biggest beneficiaries are cloud providers, not individual users. Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally. The gap between "open" and "everyone benefits equally" has always been there...
    - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
      Same is true about science as well. Taxpayer money is spent on research, but the outcomes of that research primarily benefits the corporate interests. I'm the last person to cheer for unrestrained capitalism, but this anti-billionaire / anti-AI narrative is getting ridiculous even for general population standards, much less for HN. It's like people think their food or medicine or LLMs grow on fucking trees. No. Companies and corporations is how adults do stuff for other adults, at scale. Everyone understands that, except of a part of software industry, that by accidental confluence of factors, works by different rules than literally the rest of the world.
    - watwut 6mo ago
      Because opposite is true for open source? It is actually for free, whether you contribute to it or not. Anyone can legally use it for free. Torwalds can not just wake up one day and decide to charge more. If you feel like linux is a too much of a monopoly, you can actually fork it and compete.
- balamatom 6mo ago
  > seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset. I have tried being generous to enemies. It only turns them them into... bigger, hungrier enemies. I'm happy with never getting "credit" for anything I "accomplish" (whatever those notions even mean under a system where thoughts can be property). I mean: as long as my labor output cannot be subverted to benefit hostiles even the tiniest bit. > It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs The set of "all humans" includes that power-hungry majority who find nothing wrong with subjecting other sentient beings to sadistic treatment. Those who, as soon as they take notice of me - or my kind, or our speech, or our trail - more often than not become terrified into outright aggression. So far we had been protected from their stupidity and lack of imagination, by their stupidity and lack of imagination. Now they've had brain prostheses developed for 'em, and... well I can't really do much for those who haven't already begun to reevaluate their baseline safety, now can I?
- cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
  Corporations are not humans. And while sociopaths - who benefit the most from corporations - technically are humans, I don't consider them parts of humanity, more like a cancer tissue on top of it. So whatever benefit humanity gets is more than cancelled by the growing cancer.
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    So I am to assume you're not using LLMs yourself, or any technology employing those models in the pipeline (which at this point includes many features in smartphones made in the last 3 years)? If that's not the case, then you are a beneficiary too.
    - cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
      There are some local benefits, there are some local and global costs. My point is that we are in a strongly net negative situation, mr Jack.
    - balamatom 6mo ago
      "Samantha Altgirl and the Involuntary Beneficiaries" (Russian doomer band)
    - card_zero 6mo ago
      Is the argument "LLMs must be greatly beneficial because they get everywhere"?
  - balamatom 6mo ago
    The concept of "sociopaths" is more of a cop-out than anything. It amounts to a (vaguely pseudoscientific) dehumanization of those whose modus operandi transgresses our values most severely. Imagining a subset of the population as literal cancer cells does not help us understand better the systemic issue which makes those people benefit disproportionately from metahuman entities (such as corporations or political agglomerations).
    - 6mo ago
- watwut 6mo ago
  > It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs This is not true tho. The moment LLM will be necessary, we will all have to pay to the monopoly owners, as much as they can extract. But, they will never pay to us.
reaperducer 6mo ago
I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on. Same here. I no longer post photos, code, or pretty much anything other than short comments on the internet. I'm not going to do free work for trillion-dollar AI companies. I do, however, find it interesting to watch AI destroy the whole "content creation" industry. All of the "creators" and "influencers" and "I wanna be a YouTube star when I grow up" people are all going to have to look for real jobs soon. I've seen in the newspaper that there are real companies paying real money for fake AI-generated "influencers" to flog their products. Why pay dollars to a wannabe, when you can pay pennies to an AI corp?
- 2dfdxf 6mo ago
  Im of the view that I think slop is a force for good if it gets people back into engaging in the real world. If that means destroying the web as we know then frankly so be it. THere are serious problems that have prevailed into society because of the side costs of the web. I also see sovreign centralisation of the web emerging in the future with identity being a key theme.
fsflover 6mo ago
> there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on Could you publish under AGPLv3, so any AI users with recognizable patterns from your code can get in trouble?
- davebren 6mo ago
  I always did apache, I think AGPL would make it less useful for the honest people and the AI companies would find a way around it. Companies in foreign countries would still get it and then the companies here could get it from them, or something like that. They're probably already trying to figure out a way to obfuscate when the LLM directly copies from a licensed codebase. And there's that site that rewrites GPL repos so they can be used commercially. On top of all that I don't know if it would be possible to sue companies that have been given de facto legal immunity to steal IP.
  - fsflover 6mo ago
    > I think AGPL would make it less useful for the honest people I don't understand what you mean here. AGPLv3 guarantees the four essential freedoms to all users. It only restricts developers from removing users' rights, like the GPL family. > On top of all that I don't know if it would be possible to sue companies that have been given de facto legal immunity to steal IP. For that we should support NGOs fighting for users' rights like https://eff.org https://eff.org.

TeMPOraL 6mo ago

It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.

davebren 6mo ago
I'm not seeing how the benefits have outweighed the positives at this point. Spam, scams, porn, being inundated with slop, people losing their skills and getting dumber, mass surveillance... Is that worth possibly maybe saving some time programming, but then not gaining the knowledge you would have if you did it yourself, that can be built on in the future? I don't see technological advancement as good in itself if morality is in decline.
- hirako2000 6mo ago
  I reached the same conclusion. It also made me realised how most technologies degraded our lives. Before the TV people would go to the theatre. It's becoming hard to find a theatre these days. Artificial light is convenient, it made billion or people develop sleep disorder and we can't see stars at at night. Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.
  - dasil003 6mo ago
    I think it's more fair to say that with every technology there are tradeoffs. Consider the wheel, before the wheel people probably were more physically fit, but they couldn't move as large of loads. Well, except in the Andes where they figured out how to move gigantic stones well beyond the weight that any wooden wheel would have been able to carry anyway and cut and place them into configurations that were earthquake resistant. Technology and civilization is path dependent, and I think it's silly to make blanket statements about the merit of technological progress overall. Everything choice (including the choice to do nothing) has unintended consequences. I would never condemn anyone for inventing a new technological solution to a problem, but once the systematic effects are understood then we do need the collective ability to course correct (eg. social media, AI, etc).
    - hirako2000 6mo ago
      Everything has tradeoffs. I imply technology rarely yields a net positive. I could call out the positive, those are so obvious. It's the subtle cost of the benefits that almost never gets discussed.
      - dasil003 6mo ago
        > technology rarely yields a net positive This is a super bold statement that I guest most people would disagree with, and I suspect if you somehow brought people forward from the past, even fewer would agree with. I do agree with you the subtle cost is rarely discussed. I also would say that the unintended consequences of technology are sometimes very very bad in unforeseeable ways, but that's very different from the "net negative" framing which I think is too reductive to be useful. Technology is not a zero sum game, effects are multifaceted, so any quantitative comparison relies on extremely subjective value judgements.
  - azan_ 6mo ago
    > Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on. I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.
shimman 6mo ago
Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.
- altruios 6mo ago
  Gemma4 is apache2 licensed. I am unsure about the openness of the training data itself. That too should be required for a LLM to be considered 'open'. Open source is the only way forward, I agree.
- rubslopes 6mo ago
  > Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Honest question: how is this different from traditional Open Source? Linux powers most of the internet, yet the biggest beneficiaries are cloud providers, not individual users. Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally. The gap between "open" and "everyone benefits equally" has always been there...
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    Same is true about science as well. Taxpayer money is spent on research, but the outcomes of that research primarily benefits the corporate interests. I'm the last person to cheer for unrestrained capitalism, but this anti-billionaire / anti-AI narrative is getting ridiculous even for general population standards, much less for HN. It's like people think their food or medicine or LLMs grow on fucking trees. No. Companies and corporations is how adults do stuff for other adults, at scale. Everyone understands that, except of a part of software industry, that by accidental confluence of factors, works by different rules than literally the rest of the world.
  - watwut 6mo ago
    Because opposite is true for open source? It is actually for free, whether you contribute to it or not. Anyone can legally use it for free. Torwalds can not just wake up one day and decide to charge more. If you feel like linux is a too much of a monopoly, you can actually fork it and compete.
balamatom 6mo ago
> seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset. I have tried being generous to enemies. It only turns them them into... bigger, hungrier enemies. I'm happy with never getting "credit" for anything I "accomplish" (whatever those notions even mean under a system where thoughts can be property). I mean: as long as my labor output cannot be subverted to benefit hostiles even the tiniest bit. > It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs The set of "all humans" includes that power-hungry majority who find nothing wrong with subjecting other sentient beings to sadistic treatment. Those who, as soon as they take notice of me - or my kind, or our speech, or our trail - more often than not become terrified into outright aggression. So far we had been protected from their stupidity and lack of imagination, by their stupidity and lack of imagination. Now they've had brain prostheses developed for 'em, and... well I can't really do much for those who haven't already begun to reevaluate their baseline safety, now can I?
cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
Corporations are not humans. And while sociopaths - who benefit the most from corporations - technically are humans, I don't consider them parts of humanity, more like a cancer tissue on top of it. So whatever benefit humanity gets is more than cancelled by the growing cancer.
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  So I am to assume you're not using LLMs yourself, or any technology employing those models in the pipeline (which at this point includes many features in smartphones made in the last 3 years)? If that's not the case, then you are a beneficiary too.
  - cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
    There are some local benefits, there are some local and global costs. My point is that we are in a strongly net negative situation, mr Jack.
  - balamatom 6mo ago
    "Samantha Altgirl and the Involuntary Beneficiaries" (Russian doomer band)
  - card_zero 6mo ago
    Is the argument "LLMs must be greatly beneficial because they get everywhere"?
- balamatom 6mo ago
  The concept of "sociopaths" is more of a cop-out than anything. It amounts to a (vaguely pseudoscientific) dehumanization of those whose modus operandi transgresses our values most severely. Imagining a subset of the population as literal cancer cells does not help us understand better the systemic issue which makes those people benefit disproportionately from metahuman entities (such as corporations or political agglomerations).
  - 6mo ago
watwut 6mo ago
> It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs This is not true tho. The moment LLM will be necessary, we will all have to pay to the monopoly owners, as much as they can extract. But, they will never pay to us.

reaperducer 6mo ago

I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on. Same here. I no longer post photos, code, or pretty much anything other than short comments on the internet. I'm not going to do free work for trillion-dollar AI companies. I do, however, find it interesting to watch AI destroy the whole "content creation" industry. All of the "creators" and "influencers" and "I wanna be a YouTube star when I grow up" people are all going to have to look for real jobs soon. I've seen in the newspaper that there are real companies paying real money for fake AI-generated "influencers" to flog their products. Why pay dollars to a wannabe, when you can pay pennies to an AI corp?

2dfdxf 6mo ago
Im of the view that I think slop is a force for good if it gets people back into engaging in the real world. If that means destroying the web as we know then frankly so be it. THere are serious problems that have prevailed into society because of the side costs of the web. I also see sovreign centralisation of the web emerging in the future with identity being a key theme.

fsflover 6mo ago

> there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on Could you publish under AGPLv3, so any AI users with recognizable patterns from your code can get in trouble?

davebren 6mo ago
I always did apache, I think AGPL would make it less useful for the honest people and the AI companies would find a way around it. Companies in foreign countries would still get it and then the companies here could get it from them, or something like that. They're probably already trying to figure out a way to obfuscate when the LLM directly copies from a licensed codebase. And there's that site that rewrites GPL repos so they can be used commercially. On top of all that I don't know if it would be possible to sue companies that have been given de facto legal immunity to steal IP.
- fsflover 6mo ago
  > I think AGPL would make it less useful for the honest people I don't understand what you mean here. AGPLv3 guarantees the four essential freedoms to all users. It only restricts developers from removing users' rights, like the GPL family. > On top of all that I don't know if it would be possible to sue companies that have been given de facto legal immunity to steal IP. For that we should support NGOs fighting for users' rights like https://eff.org https://eff.org.