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There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to t

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods. But with the help of machines, a small number of people were able to completely deplete parts of the earth. We had to invent giant legal systems in order to determine who has the right to do that and who doesn't. We are truly in the Information Age now, and I suspect a similar thing will play out for the digital realm. We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. With AI, we're in the industrial era of the digital world. Now a single corporation can train an AI using someone's copyrighted work and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale. This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm? It really feels like we're in the soot-covered child-coal-miner Dickensian London era of the Information Revolution and shit is gonna get real rocky before our social and legal institutions catch up.

bluefirebrand 6mo ago
> It really feels like we're in the soot-covered child-coal-miner Dickensian London era of the Information Revolution and shit is gonna get real rocky before our social and legal institutions catch up The really discouraging part of this is that it feels like our social and legal institutions don't even care if they catch up or not. Technology is speeding up and the lag time before anything is discussed from a legal standpoint is way, way too long
drob518 6mo ago
A couple thoughts… Mostly, AIs don’t recite back various works. Yes, there a couple of high profile cases where people were able to get an AI to regurgitate pieces of New York Times articles and Harry Potter books, but mostly not. Mostly, it is as if the AI is your friend who read a book and gives you a paraphrase, possibly using a couple sentences verbatim. In other words, it probably falls under a fair use rule. Secondly, given the modern world, content that doesn’t appear online isn’t consumed much, so creators who are doing it for the money will certainly continue putting content online. Much of that content will be generated by AIs, however.
- triceratops 6mo ago
  You're missing the point. This is the crux of munificent's argument IMO (and I've made variations of it as well) > We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time they have to read stuff and talk to you, and so on. Machines (and AIs) don't have any limitations.
  - drob518 6mo ago
    Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.
    - nrabulinski 6mo ago
      Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process? Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Reddit comments. An LLM can do none of those, while also doing the former. It’s a lose-lose. Also, a book nerd doesn’t take roughly ~all human created text to train to produce meaningful results. It’s just such a misplaced analogy and people have been making it ever since OpenAI announced chatgpt for the first time - why do people think “an LLM is just a human who read a lot”
steveklabnik 6mo ago
As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective: > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that already, with private things.) But secondly, to get my ideas out there and try to change the world. To improve our collective understanding of things. A lot of people read things, it changes their life, and their life is better. They may not even remember where they read these things. They don't produce citations all of the time. That's totally fine, and normal. I don't see LLMs as being any different. If I write an article about making code better, and ChatGPT trains on it, and someone, somewhere, needs help, and ChatGPT helps them? Win, as far as I'm concerned. Even if I never know that it's happened. I already do not hear from every single person who reads my writing. I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own.
- munificent 6mo ago
  Agreed, totally! I still write and put stuff online. But it definitely feels different now. It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time. It's not enough to dissuade me from contributing to the public sphere, but the vibe is definitely different. Honestly, it reminds me a lot about the early days of Amazon. It's hard to remember how optimistic the world felt back then, but I remember a time when writing reviews felt like a public good because you were helping other people find good products. It was like we all wanted honest product information and Amazon provided a neutral venue for us to build it. Like Wikipedia for stuff. But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire. And as the reviews got more and more gamed by shady companies, they became less of a useful public good. The whole commons collapsed. I worry that the larger web and digital knowledge environment is going that way. I still intend to create and share my stuff with the world because that's who I want to be. But I'll always miss the early days of the web where it felt like a healthier environment to be that kind of person in.
arjie 6mo ago
If I'm being honest, I've never related to that notion of remuneration and credit being the primary reason to write something. I don't claim to be some great writer or anything, but I do have a blog I write quite often on (though I'm traveling in my wife's Taiwan now and haven't updated it in a while). But for me, I write because it feels good to do so. Sometimes there's a group utility in things like I edit a Google Maps listing to be correct even though "a faceless corporation is going to hoover up my work and profit off it without paying me for my work" and I might pick up a Lime bike someone's dropped into the sidewalk even though "a faceless corporation is externalizing the work of organizing the proper storage of their property on public land without paying the workers" or so on. I just think it's nice to contribute to the human commons and it's fine if some subset of my fellow organism uses it in whatever way. Realistically, the fact that Brewster Kahle is paid whatever few hundred thousand he's paid for managing a non-profit that only exists because it aggregates other people's work isn't a problem for me. Or that Larry Page and Sergey Brin became ultra-rich around providing a search interface into other people's work. Or that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei did the same through a different interface. This particular notion doesn't seem to be a post-AI trend. It seems to have happened prior to the big GPTs coming out where people started doing a lot of this accounting for contribution stuff. One day it'll be interesting to read why it started happening because I don't recall it from the past. Perhaps I just wasn't super plugged in to the communities that were complaining about Red Hat, Inc. It's not that I don't understand if I sold my Subaru to a guy who immediately managed to sell it to another guy for a million times the money. I get that. I'd feel cheated. But if I contributed a little to it, like I did so Google would have a site to list for certain keywords so that they could show ads next to it in their search results, I just find it so hard to be like "That's my money you're using. Pay me!".
- wat10000 6mo ago
  You do it as a hobby, that's fine. Some people do it for a living. And while they aren't owed a living doing that specific thing, it is going to be a big problem for them if they can't make money at it anymore. I'm sure plenty of people feel the same way about software. They make software as a hobby and don't care about remuneration or credit. Meanwhile I write software for my day job and losing the ability to make money from it would be devastating.
cjcole 6mo ago
"but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution" You're not the only one. The current Pope Leo XIV explicitly named himself after the the previous Leo, Pope Leo XIII, who was pope during the Industrial Revolution (1878-1903) and issued the influential Encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) in response to the upheaval. “Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo recalled. “Today, the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.” A name, then, not only rooted in tradition, but one that looks firmly ahead to the challenges of a rapidly changing world and the perennial call to protect those most vulnerable within it.” https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum... https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/pope-leo-xiv-addresses-cardinals-10-may-2025-vatican.html https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/pope-leo-xiv...
- anal_reactor 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- salawat 6mo ago
  >RERUM NOVARUM ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR Oh hohm. Such a great mouthpiece Pope Leo XIII was for extolling and providing cover for the excesses of the worst breed of capitalist. Whilst my experience with such religious writing is used to coming away from them not wholely satisfied one way or another, this particular piece was heavily biased toward the "Captain's of Industry" and capitalist civilizations of the time. Explicitly condemning the practices by which labor can usurp the yoke of the unjustly enriched, and no consideration whatsoever against the fact that as capital centralizes, there are fewer and fewer places to actually look for employment that isn't in one way or another unconscionable to the Soul. Which, thankfully, the fellow at least had the decency to recognize that one isn't at, nor should be at liberty to give one's soul up because the only people signing cheques are those that are most conditioned to being in service not to anyone else, but merely to themselves. For instance, it places the burden of the yoke of thrift equally on all men, without recognizing that that yoke provides exactly the spiritual cover required for the pernicious greedmonger to sleep soundly after condemning thousands to a situation where in their self-preservation is not guaranteed. I see some mild concessions to the working class, which we have plenty of history from which to reason that even with a Papal acknowledgement, these words did not suffice to tilt the behavior of men away from ungodly and abusive treatment of their fellow men until such time as they were confronted with force. That the Pope of all people then doubled down by pointing out that "agitators would arise to foment violence and revolt" without taking into consideration that is the only language left that will be understood by the man whose heart has sufficiently hardened to enable him to with a stroke of a pen condemn thousands to millions, nay billions at a time to suffering. To usurp their livelihoods as his own to be rented back, ensuring that no ownership is onto his potential competitors conferred upon which could be built the means to diminish his own prosperity. No... Pope Leo XIII, your encyclical is in places valid, but woefully out of date and in need of a massive update. Even in it's time, that wording would have been fairly what we today call "milquetoast" in terms of providing the necessary spiritual force to temper the excesses of man's vices. Our current day, is evidence enough of that. Where instead of true virtue and the ability of all to live prosperously, we have a divided class of those seeking desperately to get by, and those seeking desperately to ensure no one gets by them. Whilst I'm not Catholic, I do do tend to honor the tradition of firmly worded letters nailed to their doors to keep them honest. This encyclical in it's time may have seemed fine, but with hindsight reeks of inadequacy and hedging, with excessive pandering to the already wealthy. This alone explains to me greatly why the labor movements of the late 1800's and early 1900's were not only as bad as they were, but absolutely necessary. If Leo XIV can't do any better than this, then it may once again come to bloodshed. The feedback loop is much tighter, and news travels much faster. Likely why the wealthy are doing everything they can to weight media outlets in their favor, and destroy any unregulated medium of anonymous communication. For these men are greedy, but not stupid. They know deep down the Lord dost tolerate the machinations of the Devil to test the tendencies of humankind, and they fear the inevitable outcome that will arise when the rest of mankind through privation is forced to harden their hearts as they (the wealthy) have. For in the eye's of one who has only their Soul left to bargain with, laid bare is the banal veil of Evil, and if one is to meet their Maker earlier than planned as a result of another man's artifice... Well. Justice doth favor action, whereas the banal finds fertile sustenance in the inaction of vacuous platitude debated endlessly. Perhaps I am one of the Agitators of which the Pope spoke. Yet I feel no pause at any of the words I have hitherto written. So do with them what you will. If what we have to live with is supposed to be fine, I do not agree that anything about it is what one could conscionably call just.
konschubert 6mo ago
> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. The opposite is true. Central Europe was almost devoid of trees. Food was scarce as arable land bore little fruit without fertiliser. Society was Malthusian until the Industrial Revolution.
- jsmo 6mo ago
  Can we interpret "abundant" in a Darwinian sense e.g. diversity of life? I would think the industrial farming revolution decreased crop variety over time same for animal lineages aside from the rapid increase in mixed poodle breeds.
  - Sharlin 6mo ago
    Crop variety was decreased by the original farming revolution, about 10k years before the industrial revolution. Rather than eating whatever was available, the large majority of the caloric input of an agricultural society comes from a few staple crops optimized for overwinter storability and producing large yields and thus supporting a large number of people. The industrial revolution didn’t qualitatively change farming. It just made it possible to have more of it thanks to machine labor. The same goes for the later agricultural revolutions.
    - imtringued 6mo ago
      This is particularly evident if you had been around rural villages in eastern Europe in the late 00s, particularly those inhabited by elderly people at 70 years old and above. They were still doing subsistence agriculture to supplement their own income well into the 21th century. Of course they didn't grow enough calorie heavy crops like corn, potatoes or wheat to live entirely off the land, but they had enough food that a bi-monthly shopping trip with their children was enough to get by.
      - xyzzyz 6mo ago
        No, they totally grew enough calories for themselves. My grandparents lived like that. They farmed around 15 hectares, which was actually quite a lot. You can easily grew enough calories for your family on 5 hectares, or even less if you have access to modern cultivars and artificial fertilizer. It’s just even poor people like variety, and will trade some of their crops for stuff they cannot make at home efficiently, like sugar, fish, or candy.
pocksuppet 6mo ago
Stuff gets put online when the reader isn't the customer. Someone is paying for a reader to be told certain things. So it's free at the point of reading.
trinsic2 6mo ago
>This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm? I have been thinking about this. I was pretty amendment a few months ago that AI is going to make a lot of thing worse for everyone because of the externalities of the technology (Data Center Creep, lock in of models, ect) and it probably still will. But then someone suggested to me that I use Claude Code to upgrade my SSG site to the new version because I had been sitting on my ass as the years went by, missing deadline by deadline. I just couldn't put my self into gear to upgrade it. It was massively out of date 10 years plus and I knew it was going to be a nightmare to deal with the problems. I probably was making it more harder than it really was in my head. So I purchase Claude Code pro and the thing upgrade my site pretty well. There were things it missed because I didn't know the problems existed in the first place until the upgrade was complete, but I had a working updated site in less than an hour. If I had done this myself it would have taking me days/weeks. So at that point I realized something. Its a tool that can handle good amount of tasks I throw at it as long as I am specific. I think the problem with most people is they expect it to respond like a human. Thats not going to happen, IMHO. Maybe some day it will be more than what it is but right now its just a tool. I don't care what anyone says about AGI and the likes. Its not going to happen with the current iteration (the pattern recognition type) We are going to need more than that if we want to simulate a human brain.. The point is. And I know this is not going to be received very well, mostly because this tech is in the hands of people that are gatekeeping it, is that maybe someday we might reach a point where all of humanities knowledge is put into these things and we can use them to better our lives. Maybe at some point we don't need to hold onto or hoard things as if its the only way we can make a living? And instead we can build things just for the sake of creating it and improve humanity in the process? Obviously the commercial model of these things is not great, that is going to have to be dealt with, but I can see a future where we might be able to fix a lot of humanities problems with this technology as more and more good people put it to use for things that help humanity.
- idiotsecant 6mo ago
monocasa 6mo ago
> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods. I mean, medieval Europe (speaking broadly) had pretty well defined property rights wrt hunting. In fact, the forester at the time was thought of as one of the most corrupt jobs, as they'd commonly have side hustles poaching and otherwise illegally extracting resources from the lands they enforced and kept others from utilizing in a similar way. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
gritspants 6mo ago
At what point do we look at 'Industrial Society and its Future' and go from "yeah that'll never happen", "ok some parts of it are happening", to ...? I swear tech folks are the most obtuse people on the planet.
- sweezyjeezy 6mo ago
  I think it's completely normal. Whenever automation comes knocking, people are inclined to think it's going to flatline conveniently before their job is at risk. LLMs can code now? Cool, they can't code well though can they? Oh they can code pretty well now? Cool, coding was never the hard part of SWE anyway, it's [thing we have no reason to think AI can't beat 99% of humans at at some point], etc I think SWE as a mainstream profession is much nearer to the end than the beginning, I'm curious and quite scared about what becomes of us.
  - gritspants 6mo ago
    I don't think you understand. Frankly, AI is a failure if all it does is replace coders. AI needs (given its current investment levels) to conquer all forms of knowledge work. This is an example of tech/industry needing to impose itself on society, rather than society needing it.
    - sweezyjeezy 6mo ago
      I think your numbers are off. TAM for office workers is ~20T a year, of which SWE compensation is ~3T. So if they can make 3T x 10% X 5 years = 1.5T that covers their current valuations. It's not as insane as you make out, even not taking into account the other high risk areas like legal, accounting etc
    - pnexk 6mo ago
      Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society. I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.
AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
> We are truly in the Information Age now, and I suspect a similar thing will play out for the digital realm. The analogy seems to be backwards though. It would be as if we previously had a scarcity of land and because of that divided it up into private property so markets could maximize crop yield etc. and then someone came up with a way to grow food on asteroids using robots, and that food is only at the 20th percentile of quality but it's far cheaper. Suddenly food becomes much more abundant and the people who had been selling the 20th percentile food for $5 are completely out of the market because the new thing can do that for $0.05, and the people providing the 50th percentile food for $10 are also taking a hit because the price difference between what they're providing and the 20th percentile stuff just doubled. The existing plantation owners then want to put a stop to this somehow, or find a way to tax it, but arguments like this have a problem: > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? This was already the status quo as a result of the internet. Newspapers were slowly dying for 20 years before there was ever a ChatGPT, because they had been predicated on the scarcity of printing presses. If you published a story in 1975 it would take 24 hours for relevant competitors to have it in their printed publication and in the meantime it was your exclusive. The customer who wants it today gets it from you. On top of that, there weren't that many competitors covering local news, because how many local outlets are there with a printing press? Then blogs, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter come and anyone who can set up WordPress can report the news five minutes after you do -- or five hours before, because now everyone has an internet-connected camera in their pocket so the first news of something happening now comes in seconds from whoever happened to be there at the time instead of the next morning after a media company sent a reporter there to cover it. The biggest problem we have yet to solve from this is how to trust reports from randos. The local paper had a reputation to uphold that you now can't rely on when the first reports are expected to come from people with no previous history of reporting because it's just whoever was there. But that's the same thing AI can't do either -- it's a notorious confabulist. And it's the media outlets shooting themselves in the foot with this one, because too many of them have gotten far too sloppy in the race to be first or pander to partisans that they're eroding the one advantage they would have been able to keep. Damn fools to erode the public's trust in their ability to get the facts right when it's the one thing people would otherwise still have to get from them in particular.
nick32661123 6mo ago
Our only hope is that AI in the long run is both powerful and benevolent enough to be its own "whistleblower" in cases of misuse.
- irishcoffee 6mo ago
  I struggle so hard with this anthropomorphism of LLMs. At the end of the day it's a statistical gradient descent predictor with a bunch of "shit" bolted on top to try and steer outputs in a specific way. They don't have the actual concept of "benevolent"... or a concept of anything at all. Based on an input, they regress down a path of "what is the next most probable statistical token to output next" and that's fucking it, with the bolted-on shit manipulating these outputs a bit. I don't doubt that at some point there will be some other AI leap, but I'm not even sure it'll be built on this foundation. What really needs to be developed is an actual artificial brain of sorts. Much like an infant learns language from first principals, a real AI would have a phase of continuous growth, creating actual memories and being able to reflect upon them. I daresay context windows are not that. I'd really like to encourage anyone to pump the brakes a bit on how these things actually work, and what they actually are. There is a reason sama is pivoting away from video, et. al. and into corporate software coding, much like anthropic.
EamonnMR 6mo ago
> We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. With AI, we're in the industrial era of the digital world. Now a single corporation can train an AI using someone's copyrighted work and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale. The idea that copyright simply doesn't apply to AI has more to do with AI companies deciding that they're not going to comply with those laws than the design of the laws. Also a very successful lobby against enforcement by positioning AI as a strategic necessity.
- randomNumber7 6mo ago
  It's not possible (or at least extremely hard) to prove that the final weights they come up with resulted from copyright infringement. Thats why they are evaluated so high on the stock market. Basically the will steal all the value of intellectual property in a semi legal way.
delusional 6mo ago
>Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. >We had to invent giant legal systems in order to determine who has the right to do that and who doesn't. Excuse me? The industrial revolution was like 300 years ago. We had laws before that.
randomNumber7 6mo ago
> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? I'm happy to miss all the stuff that was written just for the financial benefit of the author.
Retric 6mo ago
> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. This is just wildly incorrect. People started running out of trees during the early Iron Age. Woodlands have been a managed and often over exploited resource for a long time. Active agriculture vs passive woodlands vs animal grazing has been in constant tension for thousands of years across most of the globe.
- Quarrelsome 6mo ago
  > This is just wildly incorrect. from an global perspective it isn't. Some places sure, like Western Europe, who in some cases had completed enclosure, but remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point. Just google maps the north part of South America, even today there are large swathes of undeveloped land across it and back then it was considerably less exploited. At that time it would have appeared infinite, especially to the European industrialists.
  - squigz 6mo ago
    > remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point. By White people*
    - Quarrelsome 6mo ago
      we're talking about the fucking industrial revolution, of course this defaults to the European perspective. Unless you wanna spit some new bars about Aztec foundries and train lines connecting meso-america in the 19th century, then the point stands. At that time, the world appeared to the industrialists of the industrial revolution to be infinite. Nor had humanity discovered the terrible side effects of fossil fuels on the atmosphere. Why are you weirdly making this about race?
      - squigz 6mo ago
        Sure, of course it's convenient to ignore the native peoples and pretend that prior to the Industrial Revolution the rest of the world outside of Europe was some untapped well of resources that Europeans had a natural right to. Who might be swept underfoot in this "Information Revolution", I wonder?
slibhb 6mo ago
> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? In the brave new world we're creating, people will write specifically for AI. If you can impress models so much that they "regurgitate" your work, then your work has achieved a kind of immortality.
xyzzyz 6mo ago
Prior to Industrial Revolution, nobody could go hunt in the woods, because the woods were King’s, and poaching King’s game carried death penalty. Situation was similar on the continent: the tiny slivers of remaining wood lands were off limits. Granted, things were different in the New World, as a result of mass depopulation event following the Columbian exchange. But even there, the megafauna was hunted to extinction soon after the humans first appeared there. Anyway, the point is that no, prior to Industrial Revolution, the world was of full of scarcity, not abundance.
some_random 6mo ago
That is straightforwardly not true, land ownership was very well defined and the people who hunted in it without permission were prosecuted.
derangedHorse 6mo ago
> If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods. Property rights don't just protect natural resources, but labor as well. If I cleared out hunting ground in that forest to be the prime spot to catch animals, I would make sure I can use it when I want. > a small number of people were able to completely deplete parts of the earth A small number of people seems inaccurate when there's typically many more individuals in the pipelines for these technologies. > and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale Not off just that knowledge, there needed to be a model trained on the data of many others to utilize it. > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who's better at writing in this scenario and what are my motivations? If it's ChatGPT and I did it for money, then I would say I should recognize that I can't compete and find something AI can't do. If it's ChatGPT and I write to convey my ideas in an effort to learn regardless of the bestowment of a new perspective on the reader, I'll keep writing. > Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm? They wouldn't unless it was their own way to attain food and survive. And if it's not the only way, they can defer to those with optimal methods to get it the cheapest they can in the market.
AlexCoventry 6mo ago
> If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism
navaed01 6mo ago
The natural world was not meaningfully abundant… Way before the industrial revolution land which was once used for opening hunting was closed off by the ruling class. Even before the Industrial Revolution you had a new class of merchant and factory owners who earned riches to buy land and keep the poor from hunting on it. Much of the natural resources out of reach for the majority and only accessible by those with deep pockets
noosphr 6mo ago
>Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. The mammoths disagree.
voidhorse 6mo ago
I've been looking at things from the same lens since 2023. At the same time, the depletion/hoarding bit isn't new. Companies were already doing this with consumer data, LLMs are just finally the factory moment—now that we have all the raw material we finally have a means of automating production using it. So, in some ways, I also view LLMs as a pivotal and important wake up call. Companies were already taking the data and using it for a variety of other purposes—it was just way less evident to people when they weren't in direct competition with labor, since, under capital, labor is what we sell. Either an entire new industry needs to form, or it's finally time to move beyond capitalism. Centralized capital ends up killing itself, because it effectively shuts down its own engine if it kills off consumers, who can only exist in the first place if the wage labor structure holds.
Waterluvian 6mo ago
Maybe it’s a useless distinction but it feels like we’ve gone through overlapping ages of Communication, Data, Processing, and Information. First we conquered the ability to move matter and transmit signal, greatly shrinking the world. Next was sensor technology, especially the mobilization of it, and our ability to collect more data than we could ever imagine being able to process. Then we started going crazy with data centres and big data and the idea that maybe we can somehow correlate it all if we just process it enough. And now we’re finally turning data into information, building enormous graphs of correlation without even having to manually reason about a lot of it. Before AI, the hard part was figuring out how to go about finding the signal you needed. Now it’s getting easier at an incredible speed.
kilbey1 6mo ago
I'm halfway through Foundation on Apple TV and this piece landed hard (you had me at Asimov) because of it. Asimov's whole deal with psychohistory is that you can predict what large populations do even when individuals are unpredictable. Seldon doesn't need anyone to be honest; he needs the math to converge on something real about how people actually behave. LLMs are sort of the inverse of that. They produce text that looks like the statistical aggregate of human knowledge, but nothing underneath is converging on truth. Seldon's math worked because it modeled actual dynamics. LLMs work because they model plausible text. The "jagged competence frontier" Kingsbury describes: crushing multivariable calculus, failing a word problem, is exactly what you'd get from a system that learned the shape of correct answers without learning what makes them correct. The part of Foundation that feels prescient right now isn't the predicting-the-future stuff. It's the part where everyone can see Empire is hollowing out and the response is to just...keep going. More spectacle, more confidence, less substance holding any of it up. Hmmm, wait...
- idiotsecant 6mo ago
  how are you enjoying the live action saturday morning cartoon version of Foundation with bonus plucky protagonists?
  - kilbey1 6mo ago
    Ha! Yeah, it is not the books. That said, it's been long enough since I read them that I didn't feel too annoyed ("oh wait, I don't remember that in the books" did come up more than once, as well as "oh wait, they're mixing up a bunch of books, is this the Robot series?". It's done really well personally, but hey, this is a way to make the money come in longer.
- Setas 6mo ago
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twobiers 6mo ago
> There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. You might want to give the following Articles a read then: https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_1/ https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_1/ https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_2/ https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_2/
dogcomplex 6mo ago
>This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm? This is completely reversed. Why should anyone honour the right of some creator who was merely the first to plant their flag on a creative task that is now absolutely trivial to perform by AI? Who needs a digital commons when creation itself is now the commons and freely accessible for pennies? The seeds plant and grow by themselves now. The only question is who should be allowed to claim the farms? Answer: No one. AI companies will have their lunch eaten by open source. And if they don't - they should be nationalized and protocolized into free utilities. The entire idea of digital ownership should (and will) be abolished by the very nature of this technology. The digital world is the new infinitely-abundant nature. We're just returning it to where it should have been, before corporations clawed it into fenced off empires.
ares623 6mo ago
The silver lining in that scenario is that consumers can "choose" to just go back offline. I put choose in quotes because with so many things in life requiring online accounts nowadays, that choice is tenuous.
raincole 6mo ago
> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. Prior to the industrial revolution, people fight to death for who can use the rivers. Pre-industrial societies are societies of scarcity. [0]: People have been fighting for water for more than 4000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umma%E2%80%93Lagash_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umma%E2%80%93Lagash_war
idiotsecant 6mo ago
Absolute peak HN energy that the top reply to this very insightful point is a rambling pedantic argument about the finer points of agricultural development.

bluefirebrand 6mo ago

> It really feels like we're in the soot-covered child-coal-miner Dickensian London era of the Information Revolution and shit is gonna get real rocky before our social and legal institutions catch up The really discouraging part of this is that it feels like our social and legal institutions don't even care if they catch up or not. Technology is speeding up and the lag time before anything is discussed from a legal standpoint is way, way too long

drob518 6mo ago

A couple thoughts… Mostly, AIs don’t recite back various works. Yes, there a couple of high profile cases where people were able to get an AI to regurgitate pieces of New York Times articles and Harry Potter books, but mostly not. Mostly, it is as if the AI is your friend who read a book and gives you a paraphrase, possibly using a couple sentences verbatim. In other words, it probably falls under a fair use rule. Secondly, given the modern world, content that doesn’t appear online isn’t consumed much, so creators who are doing it for the money will certainly continue putting content online. Much of that content will be generated by AIs, however.

triceratops 6mo ago
You're missing the point. This is the crux of munificent's argument IMO (and I've made variations of it as well) > We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time they have to read stuff and talk to you, and so on. Machines (and AIs) don't have any limitations.
- drob518 6mo ago
  Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.
  - nrabulinski 6mo ago
    Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process? Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Reddit comments. An LLM can do none of those, while also doing the former. It’s a lose-lose. Also, a book nerd doesn’t take roughly ~all human created text to train to produce meaningful results. It’s just such a misplaced analogy and people have been making it ever since OpenAI announced chatgpt for the first time - why do people think “an LLM is just a human who read a lot”

steveklabnik 6mo ago

As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective: > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that already, with private things.) But secondly, to get my ideas out there and try to change the world. To improve our collective understanding of things. A lot of people read things, it changes their life, and their life is better. They may not even remember where they read these things. They don't produce citations all of the time. That's totally fine, and normal. I don't see LLMs as being any different. If I write an article about making code better, and ChatGPT trains on it, and someone, somewhere, needs help, and ChatGPT helps them? Win, as far as I'm concerned. Even if I never know that it's happened. I already do not hear from every single person who reads my writing. I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own.

munificent 6mo ago
Agreed, totally! I still write and put stuff online. But it definitely feels different now. It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time. It's not enough to dissuade me from contributing to the public sphere, but the vibe is definitely different. Honestly, it reminds me a lot about the early days of Amazon. It's hard to remember how optimistic the world felt back then, but I remember a time when writing reviews felt like a public good because you were helping other people find good products. It was like we all wanted honest product information and Amazon provided a neutral venue for us to build it. Like Wikipedia for stuff. But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire. And as the reviews got more and more gamed by shady companies, they became less of a useful public good. The whole commons collapsed. I worry that the larger web and digital knowledge environment is going that way. I still intend to create and share my stuff with the world because that's who I want to be. But I'll always miss the early days of the web where it felt like a healthier environment to be that kind of person in.

arjie 6mo ago

If I'm being honest, I've never related to that notion of remuneration and credit being the primary reason to write something. I don't claim to be some great writer or anything, but I do have a blog I write quite often on (though I'm traveling in my wife's Taiwan now and haven't updated it in a while). But for me, I write because it feels good to do so. Sometimes there's a group utility in things like I edit a Google Maps listing to be correct even though "a faceless corporation is going to hoover up my work and profit off it without paying me for my work" and I might pick up a Lime bike someone's dropped into the sidewalk even though "a faceless corporation is externalizing the work of organizing the proper storage of their property on public land without paying the workers" or so on. I just think it's nice to contribute to the human commons and it's fine if some subset of my fellow organism uses it in whatever way. Realistically, the fact that Brewster Kahle is paid whatever few hundred thousand he's paid for managing a non-profit that only exists because it aggregates other people's work isn't a problem for me. Or that Larry Page and Sergey Brin became ultra-rich around providing a search interface into other people's work. Or that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei did the same through a different interface. This particular notion doesn't seem to be a post-AI trend. It seems to have happened prior to the big GPTs coming out where people started doing a lot of this accounting for contribution stuff. One day it'll be interesting to read why it started happening because I don't recall it from the past. Perhaps I just wasn't super plugged in to the communities that were complaining about Red Hat, Inc. It's not that I don't understand if I sold my Subaru to a guy who immediately managed to sell it to another guy for a million times the money. I get that. I'd feel cheated. But if I contributed a little to it, like I did so Google would have a site to list for certain keywords so that they could show ads next to it in their search results, I just find it so hard to be like "That's my money you're using. Pay me!".

wat10000 6mo ago
You do it as a hobby, that's fine. Some people do it for a living. And while they aren't owed a living doing that specific thing, it is going to be a big problem for them if they can't make money at it anymore. I'm sure plenty of people feel the same way about software. They make software as a hobby and don't care about remuneration or credit. Meanwhile I write software for my day job and losing the ability to make money from it would be devastating.

cjcole 6mo ago

"but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution" You're not the only one. The current Pope Leo XIV explicitly named himself after the the previous Leo, Pope Leo XIII, who was pope during the Industrial Revolution (1878-1903) and issued the influential Encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) in response to the upheaval. “Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo recalled. “Today, the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.” A name, then, not only rooted in tradition, but one that looks firmly ahead to the challenges of a rapidly changing world and the perennial call to protect those most vulnerable within it.” https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum... https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/pope-leo-xiv-addresses-cardinals-10-may-2025-vatican.html https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/pope-leo-xiv...

anal_reactor 6mo ago
[flagged]
salawat 6mo ago
>RERUM NOVARUM ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR Oh hohm. Such a great mouthpiece Pope Leo XIII was for extolling and providing cover for the excesses of the worst breed of capitalist. Whilst my experience with such religious writing is used to coming away from them not wholely satisfied one way or another, this particular piece was heavily biased toward the "Captain's of Industry" and capitalist civilizations of the time. Explicitly condemning the practices by which labor can usurp the yoke of the unjustly enriched, and no consideration whatsoever against the fact that as capital centralizes, there are fewer and fewer places to actually look for employment that isn't in one way or another unconscionable to the Soul. Which, thankfully, the fellow at least had the decency to recognize that one isn't at, nor should be at liberty to give one's soul up because the only people signing cheques are those that are most conditioned to being in service not to anyone else, but merely to themselves. For instance, it places the burden of the yoke of thrift equally on all men, without recognizing that that yoke provides exactly the spiritual cover required for the pernicious greedmonger to sleep soundly after condemning thousands to a situation where in their self-preservation is not guaranteed. I see some mild concessions to the working class, which we have plenty of history from which to reason that even with a Papal acknowledgement, these words did not suffice to tilt the behavior of men away from ungodly and abusive treatment of their fellow men until such time as they were confronted with force. That the Pope of all people then doubled down by pointing out that "agitators would arise to foment violence and revolt" without taking into consideration that is the only language left that will be understood by the man whose heart has sufficiently hardened to enable him to with a stroke of a pen condemn thousands to millions, nay billions at a time to suffering. To usurp their livelihoods as his own to be rented back, ensuring that no ownership is onto his potential competitors conferred upon which could be built the means to diminish his own prosperity. No... Pope Leo XIII, your encyclical is in places valid, but woefully out of date and in need of a massive update. Even in it's time, that wording would have been fairly what we today call "milquetoast" in terms of providing the necessary spiritual force to temper the excesses of man's vices. Our current day, is evidence enough of that. Where instead of true virtue and the ability of all to live prosperously, we have a divided class of those seeking desperately to get by, and those seeking desperately to ensure no one gets by them. Whilst I'm not Catholic, I do do tend to honor the tradition of firmly worded letters nailed to their doors to keep them honest. This encyclical in it's time may have seemed fine, but with hindsight reeks of inadequacy and hedging, with excessive pandering to the already wealthy. This alone explains to me greatly why the labor movements of the late 1800's and early 1900's were not only as bad as they were, but absolutely necessary. If Leo XIV can't do any better than this, then it may once again come to bloodshed. The feedback loop is much tighter, and news travels much faster. Likely why the wealthy are doing everything they can to weight media outlets in their favor, and destroy any unregulated medium of anonymous communication. For these men are greedy, but not stupid. They know deep down the Lord dost tolerate the machinations of the Devil to test the tendencies of humankind, and they fear the inevitable outcome that will arise when the rest of mankind through privation is forced to harden their hearts as they (the wealthy) have. For in the eye's of one who has only their Soul left to bargain with, laid bare is the banal veil of Evil, and if one is to meet their Maker earlier than planned as a result of another man's artifice... Well. Justice doth favor action, whereas the banal finds fertile sustenance in the inaction of vacuous platitude debated endlessly. Perhaps I am one of the Agitators of which the Pope spoke. Yet I feel no pause at any of the words I have hitherto written. So do with them what you will. If what we have to live with is supposed to be fine, I do not agree that anything about it is what one could conscionably call just.

konschubert 6mo ago

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. The opposite is true. Central Europe was almost devoid of trees. Food was scarce as arable land bore little fruit without fertiliser. Society was Malthusian until the Industrial Revolution.

jsmo 6mo ago
Can we interpret "abundant" in a Darwinian sense e.g. diversity of life? I would think the industrial farming revolution decreased crop variety over time same for animal lineages aside from the rapid increase in mixed poodle breeds.
- Sharlin 6mo ago
  Crop variety was decreased by the original farming revolution, about 10k years before the industrial revolution. Rather than eating whatever was available, the large majority of the caloric input of an agricultural society comes from a few staple crops optimized for overwinter storability and producing large yields and thus supporting a large number of people. The industrial revolution didn’t qualitatively change farming. It just made it possible to have more of it thanks to machine labor. The same goes for the later agricultural revolutions.
  - imtringued 6mo ago
    This is particularly evident if you had been around rural villages in eastern Europe in the late 00s, particularly those inhabited by elderly people at 70 years old and above. They were still doing subsistence agriculture to supplement their own income well into the 21th century. Of course they didn't grow enough calorie heavy crops like corn, potatoes or wheat to live entirely off the land, but they had enough food that a bi-monthly shopping trip with their children was enough to get by.
    - xyzzyz 6mo ago
      No, they totally grew enough calories for themselves. My grandparents lived like that. They farmed around 15 hectares, which was actually quite a lot. You can easily grew enough calories for your family on 5 hectares, or even less if you have access to modern cultivars and artificial fertilizer. It’s just even poor people like variety, and will trade some of their crops for stuff they cannot make at home efficiently, like sugar, fish, or candy.

pocksuppet 6mo ago

Stuff gets put online when the reader isn't the customer. Someone is paying for a reader to be told certain things. So it's free at the point of reading.

trinsic2 6mo ago

>This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm? I have been thinking about this. I was pretty amendment a few months ago that AI is going to make a lot of thing worse for everyone because of the externalities of the technology (Data Center Creep, lock in of models, ect) and it probably still will. But then someone suggested to me that I use Claude Code to upgrade my SSG site to the new version because I had been sitting on my ass as the years went by, missing deadline by deadline. I just couldn't put my self into gear to upgrade it. It was massively out of date 10 years plus and I knew it was going to be a nightmare to deal with the problems. I probably was making it more harder than it really was in my head. So I purchase Claude Code pro and the thing upgrade my site pretty well. There were things it missed because I didn't know the problems existed in the first place until the upgrade was complete, but I had a working updated site in less than an hour. If I had done this myself it would have taking me days/weeks. So at that point I realized something. Its a tool that can handle good amount of tasks I throw at it as long as I am specific. I think the problem with most people is they expect it to respond like a human. Thats not going to happen, IMHO. Maybe some day it will be more than what it is but right now its just a tool. I don't care what anyone says about AGI and the likes. Its not going to happen with the current iteration (the pattern recognition type) We are going to need more than that if we want to simulate a human brain.. The point is. And I know this is not going to be received very well, mostly because this tech is in the hands of people that are gatekeeping it, is that maybe someday we might reach a point where all of humanities knowledge is put into these things and we can use them to better our lives. Maybe at some point we don't need to hold onto or hoard things as if its the only way we can make a living? And instead we can build things just for the sake of creating it and improve humanity in the process? Obviously the commercial model of these things is not great, that is going to have to be dealt with, but I can see a future where we might be able to fix a lot of humanities problems with this technology as more and more good people put it to use for things that help humanity.

idiotsecant 6mo ago

monocasa 6mo ago

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods. I mean, medieval Europe (speaking broadly) had pretty well defined property rights wrt hunting. In fact, the forester at the time was thought of as one of the most corrupt jobs, as they'd commonly have side hustles poaching and otherwise illegally extracting resources from the lands they enforced and kept others from utilizing in a similar way. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

gritspants 6mo ago

At what point do we look at 'Industrial Society and its Future' and go from "yeah that'll never happen", "ok some parts of it are happening", to ...? I swear tech folks are the most obtuse people on the planet.

sweezyjeezy 6mo ago
I think it's completely normal. Whenever automation comes knocking, people are inclined to think it's going to flatline conveniently before their job is at risk. LLMs can code now? Cool, they can't code well though can they? Oh they can code pretty well now? Cool, coding was never the hard part of SWE anyway, it's [thing we have no reason to think AI can't beat 99% of humans at at some point], etc I think SWE as a mainstream profession is much nearer to the end than the beginning, I'm curious and quite scared about what becomes of us.
- gritspants 6mo ago
  I don't think you understand. Frankly, AI is a failure if all it does is replace coders. AI needs (given its current investment levels) to conquer all forms of knowledge work. This is an example of tech/industry needing to impose itself on society, rather than society needing it.
  - sweezyjeezy 6mo ago
    I think your numbers are off. TAM for office workers is ~20T a year, of which SWE compensation is ~3T. So if they can make 3T x 10% X 5 years = 1.5T that covers their current valuations. It's not as insane as you make out, even not taking into account the other high risk areas like legal, accounting etc
  - pnexk 6mo ago
    Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society. I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.

AnthonyMouse 6mo ago

> We are truly in the Information Age now, and I suspect a similar thing will play out for the digital realm. The analogy seems to be backwards though. It would be as if we previously had a scarcity of land and because of that divided it up into private property so markets could maximize crop yield etc. and then someone came up with a way to grow food on asteroids using robots, and that food is only at the 20th percentile of quality but it's far cheaper. Suddenly food becomes much more abundant and the people who had been selling the 20th percentile food for $5 are completely out of the market because the new thing can do that for $0.05, and the people providing the 50th percentile food for $10 are also taking a hit because the price difference between what they're providing and the 20th percentile stuff just doubled. The existing plantation owners then want to put a stop to this somehow, or find a way to tax it, but arguments like this have a problem: > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? This was already the status quo as a result of the internet. Newspapers were slowly dying for 20 years before there was ever a ChatGPT, because they had been predicated on the scarcity of printing presses. If you published a story in 1975 it would take 24 hours for relevant competitors to have it in their printed publication and in the meantime it was your exclusive. The customer who wants it today gets it from you. On top of that, there weren't that many competitors covering local news, because how many local outlets are there with a printing press? Then blogs, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter come and anyone who can set up WordPress can report the news five minutes after you do -- or five hours before, because now everyone has an internet-connected camera in their pocket so the first news of something happening now comes in seconds from whoever happened to be there at the time instead of the next morning after a media company sent a reporter there to cover it. The biggest problem we have yet to solve from this is how to trust reports from randos. The local paper had a reputation to uphold that you now can't rely on when the first reports are expected to come from people with no previous history of reporting because it's just whoever was there. But that's the same thing AI can't do either -- it's a notorious confabulist. And it's the media outlets shooting themselves in the foot with this one, because too many of them have gotten far too sloppy in the race to be first or pander to partisans that they're eroding the one advantage they would have been able to keep. Damn fools to erode the public's trust in their ability to get the facts right when it's the one thing people would otherwise still have to get from them in particular.

nick32661123 6mo ago

Our only hope is that AI in the long run is both powerful and benevolent enough to be its own "whistleblower" in cases of misuse.

irishcoffee 6mo ago
I struggle so hard with this anthropomorphism of LLMs. At the end of the day it's a statistical gradient descent predictor with a bunch of "shit" bolted on top to try and steer outputs in a specific way. They don't have the actual concept of "benevolent"... or a concept of anything at all. Based on an input, they regress down a path of "what is the next most probable statistical token to output next" and that's fucking it, with the bolted-on shit manipulating these outputs a bit. I don't doubt that at some point there will be some other AI leap, but I'm not even sure it'll be built on this foundation. What really needs to be developed is an actual artificial brain of sorts. Much like an infant learns language from first principals, a real AI would have a phase of continuous growth, creating actual memories and being able to reflect upon them. I daresay context windows are not that. I'd really like to encourage anyone to pump the brakes a bit on how these things actually work, and what they actually are. There is a reason sama is pivoting away from video, et. al. and into corporate software coding, much like anthropic.

EamonnMR 6mo ago

> We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. With AI, we're in the industrial era of the digital world. Now a single corporation can train an AI using someone's copyrighted work and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale. The idea that copyright simply doesn't apply to AI has more to do with AI companies deciding that they're not going to comply with those laws than the design of the laws. Also a very successful lobby against enforcement by positioning AI as a strategic necessity.

randomNumber7 6mo ago
It's not possible (or at least extremely hard) to prove that the final weights they come up with resulted from copyright infringement. Thats why they are evaluated so high on the stock market. Basically the will steal all the value of intellectual property in a semi legal way.

delusional 6mo ago

>Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. >We had to invent giant legal systems in order to determine who has the right to do that and who doesn't. Excuse me? The industrial revolution was like 300 years ago. We had laws before that.

randomNumber7 6mo ago

> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? I'm happy to miss all the stuff that was written just for the financial benefit of the author.

Retric 6mo ago

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. This is just wildly incorrect. People started running out of trees during the early Iron Age. Woodlands have been a managed and often over exploited resource for a long time. Active agriculture vs passive woodlands vs animal grazing has been in constant tension for thousands of years across most of the globe.

Quarrelsome 6mo ago
> This is just wildly incorrect. from an global perspective it isn't. Some places sure, like Western Europe, who in some cases had completed enclosure, but remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point. Just google maps the north part of South America, even today there are large swathes of undeveloped land across it and back then it was considerably less exploited. At that time it would have appeared infinite, especially to the European industrialists.
- squigz 6mo ago
  > remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point. By White people*
  - Quarrelsome 6mo ago
    we're talking about the fucking industrial revolution, of course this defaults to the European perspective. Unless you wanna spit some new bars about Aztec foundries and train lines connecting meso-america in the 19th century, then the point stands. At that time, the world appeared to the industrialists of the industrial revolution to be infinite. Nor had humanity discovered the terrible side effects of fossil fuels on the atmosphere. Why are you weirdly making this about race?
    - squigz 6mo ago
      Sure, of course it's convenient to ignore the native peoples and pretend that prior to the Industrial Revolution the rest of the world outside of Europe was some untapped well of resources that Europeans had a natural right to. Who might be swept underfoot in this "Information Revolution", I wonder?

slibhb 6mo ago

> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? In the brave new world we're creating, people will write specifically for AI. If you can impress models so much that they "regurgitate" your work, then your work has achieved a kind of immortality.

xyzzyz 6mo ago

Prior to Industrial Revolution, nobody could go hunt in the woods, because the woods were King’s, and poaching King’s game carried death penalty. Situation was similar on the continent: the tiny slivers of remaining wood lands were off limits. Granted, things were different in the New World, as a result of mass depopulation event following the Columbian exchange. But even there, the megafauna was hunted to extinction soon after the humans first appeared there. Anyway, the point is that no, prior to Industrial Revolution, the world was of full of scarcity, not abundance.

some_random 6mo ago

That is straightforwardly not true, land ownership was very well defined and the people who hunted in it without permission were prosecuted.

derangedHorse 6mo ago

> If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods. Property rights don't just protect natural resources, but labor as well. If I cleared out hunting ground in that forest to be the prime spot to catch animals, I would make sure I can use it when I want. > a small number of people were able to completely deplete parts of the earth A small number of people seems inaccurate when there's typically many more individuals in the pipelines for these technologies. > and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale Not off just that knowledge, there needed to be a model trained on the data of many others to utilize it. > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who's better at writing in this scenario and what are my motivations? If it's ChatGPT and I did it for money, then I would say I should recognize that I can't compete and find something AI can't do. If it's ChatGPT and I write to convey my ideas in an effort to learn regardless of the bestowment of a new perspective on the reader, I'll keep writing. > Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm? They wouldn't unless it was their own way to attain food and survive. And if it's not the only way, they can defer to those with optimal methods to get it the cheapest they can in the market.

AlexCoventry 6mo ago

> If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

navaed01 6mo ago

The natural world was not meaningfully abundant… Way before the industrial revolution land which was once used for opening hunting was closed off by the ruling class. Even before the Industrial Revolution you had a new class of merchant and factory owners who earned riches to buy land and keep the poor from hunting on it. Much of the natural resources out of reach for the majority and only accessible by those with deep pockets

noosphr 6mo ago

>Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. The mammoths disagree.

voidhorse 6mo ago

I've been looking at things from the same lens since 2023. At the same time, the depletion/hoarding bit isn't new. Companies were already doing this with consumer data, LLMs are just finally the factory moment—now that we have all the raw material we finally have a means of automating production using it. So, in some ways, I also view LLMs as a pivotal and important wake up call. Companies were already taking the data and using it for a variety of other purposes—it was just way less evident to people when they weren't in direct competition with labor, since, under capital, labor is what we sell. Either an entire new industry needs to form, or it's finally time to move beyond capitalism. Centralized capital ends up killing itself, because it effectively shuts down its own engine if it kills off consumers, who can only exist in the first place if the wage labor structure holds.

Waterluvian 6mo ago

Maybe it’s a useless distinction but it feels like we’ve gone through overlapping ages of Communication, Data, Processing, and Information. First we conquered the ability to move matter and transmit signal, greatly shrinking the world. Next was sensor technology, especially the mobilization of it, and our ability to collect more data than we could ever imagine being able to process. Then we started going crazy with data centres and big data and the idea that maybe we can somehow correlate it all if we just process it enough. And now we’re finally turning data into information, building enormous graphs of correlation without even having to manually reason about a lot of it. Before AI, the hard part was figuring out how to go about finding the signal you needed. Now it’s getting easier at an incredible speed.

kilbey1 6mo ago

I'm halfway through Foundation on Apple TV and this piece landed hard (you had me at Asimov) because of it. Asimov's whole deal with psychohistory is that you can predict what large populations do even when individuals are unpredictable. Seldon doesn't need anyone to be honest; he needs the math to converge on something real about how people actually behave. LLMs are sort of the inverse of that. They produce text that looks like the statistical aggregate of human knowledge, but nothing underneath is converging on truth. Seldon's math worked because it modeled actual dynamics. LLMs work because they model plausible text. The "jagged competence frontier" Kingsbury describes: crushing multivariable calculus, failing a word problem, is exactly what you'd get from a system that learned the shape of correct answers without learning what makes them correct. The part of Foundation that feels prescient right now isn't the predicting-the-future stuff. It's the part where everyone can see Empire is hollowing out and the response is to just...keep going. More spectacle, more confidence, less substance holding any of it up. Hmmm, wait...

idiotsecant 6mo ago
how are you enjoying the live action saturday morning cartoon version of Foundation with bonus plucky protagonists?
- kilbey1 6mo ago
  Ha! Yeah, it is not the books. That said, it's been long enough since I read them that I didn't feel too annoyed ("oh wait, I don't remember that in the books" did come up more than once, as well as "oh wait, they're mixing up a bunch of books, is this the Robot series?". It's done really well personally, but hey, this is a way to make the money come in longer.
Setas 6mo ago
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twobiers 6mo ago

> There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. You might want to give the following Articles a read then: https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_1/ https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_1/ https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_2/ https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_2/

dogcomplex 6mo ago

ares623 6mo ago

The silver lining in that scenario is that consumers can "choose" to just go back offline. I put choose in quotes because with so many things in life requiring online accounts nowadays, that choice is tenuous.

raincole 6mo ago

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. Prior to the industrial revolution, people fight to death for who can use the rivers. Pre-industrial societies are societies of scarcity. [0]: People have been fighting for water for more than 4000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umma%E2%80%93Lagash_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umma%E2%80%93Lagash_war

idiotsecant 6mo ago

Absolute peak HN energy that the top reply to this very insightful point is a rambling pedantic argument about the finer points of agricultural development.