4 ms·

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

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 7mo 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.
- steveklabnik 7mo ago
  I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll have to chew on this. I certainly felt some shock on the IP questions when all of this came up. I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old. Also I'm not a fan of billionaires, obviously, but I think that given I've worked on open source and tools for so long, I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think. (Also, I didn't say this in the first comment, but I'm gonna be thinking about the industrial revolution thing a lot, I think you're on to something there. Scale meaningfully changes things.)
  - throwanem 7mo ago
    > the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating.
    - randallsquared 7mo ago
      No, it's as true now as it was then. The intellectual property team didn't win on the merits or by law enforcement; it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick.
      - idle_zealot 7mo ago
        > it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick That's not the whole story, though. There have been many community-driven projects to bring convenient access to copyrighted works to the masses in a convenient way. You may recall the meteoric success of Popcorn Time. Law enforcement shut them down. Without the hand of the state beating down any popular alternative to legal distribution it absolutely would be the dominant mode of media consumption.
lelanthran 7mo ago
> I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own. I think you are walking all around the word "consent" and trying very hard to avoid it altogether. Your perspective, because it refuses to include any sort of consent, is invalid. No perspective that refuses consent can be valid.
- steveklabnik 7mo ago
  Consent is absolutely important, but that does not mean that every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. That does not mean you're a bad person. Free use is an important part of intellectual property law. If it did not exist, the powerful could, for example, stifle public criticism by declaring that they do not consent to you using their words or likeness. The ability to do that is important for society. It is also just generally important for creating works inspired by others, which is virtually every work. There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not.
  - lelanthran 7mo ago
    > You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. I am not representing your words as mine. I am not using your words to profit off. I am not making a gain by attributing your words to you. > There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not. You are blurring the lines between "using a quote or likeness" and "giving credit to". I am skeptical that you don't know the difference between the two. Regardless, any "perspective" that disregards the need to acquire consent is invalid. Even if you are going to ignore it, you have to acknowledge that you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from. This whole "silence is consent" attitude is baffling.
    - steveklabnik 7mo ago
      You made an incredibly strong statement that is much broader than what we are talking about. I am pointing out various cases where I think that broadness is incorrect, I am not equating the two. I do not think that, if you read, say, https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs-str/ https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... , and then later, a friend asks you "hey, should I use String or &str here?" that you need my consent to go "at the start, just use String" instead of "at the start, just use String, like Steve Klabnik says in https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs-str/ https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... ". And if they say "hey that's a great idea, thank you" I don't think you're a bad person if you say "you're welcome" without "you should really be saying welcome to Steve Klabnik." It is of course nice if you happen to do so, but I think framing it as a consent issue is the wrong way to think about it. We recognize that this is different than simply publishing the exact contents of the blog post on your blog and calling it yours, because it is! To me, an LLM is a transformative derivative work, not an exact copy. Because my words are not in there, they are not being copied. But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output.
computably 7mo ago
> 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. Not a contradiction but an addendum: plenty of creative pursuits are not about functional value, or at least not primarily. If somebody writes a seemingly genuine blog post about their family trauma, and I as the reader find out it's made-up bullshit, that's abhorrent to me, whether or not AI is involved. And I think it would be perfectly fair for writers who do create similar but genuine content to find it abhorrent that they must compete with genAI, that genAI will slurp up their words, and that genAI's mere existence casts doubt on their own authenticity. It's not about money or social utility, it's about human connection.
- ai5iq 7mo ago
  The consent question gets weirder when agents have persistent memory. I run agents that accumulate context over weeks — beliefs extracted from observations, relationships with other agents. At what point does an agent's memory become its own work product vs. derivative of its training? There's no legal framework for that.
kokanee 7mo ago
That seems fine if you're not publishing content for a living. A lot of people are.
intended 7mo ago
> I write for two main reasons > people read things… their life is better > it’s just my own What was the point of writing this though? Perhaps I should know who you are, but assuming you are a regular HN forum user - you are still very much a participant in a larger information economy / ecosystem. All of us depend on that system, that commons. Visits to Wikipedia have dropped by at least 8% since 2025, other estimates are starker. This will have an impact on donations. These reports are similar for many sites which write or produce content. Your individual behavior may be perfectly fine, and you are entitled to your perspective, but that doesn’t become a defense for the degradations of the commons. If anything, it’s a classic example of the kind of argument that ends up entangling ideas and making conclusions harder to reach.

munificent 7mo 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.

steveklabnik 7mo ago
I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll have to chew on this. I certainly felt some shock on the IP questions when all of this came up. I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old. Also I'm not a fan of billionaires, obviously, but I think that given I've worked on open source and tools for so long, I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think. (Also, I didn't say this in the first comment, but I'm gonna be thinking about the industrial revolution thing a lot, I think you're on to something there. Scale meaningfully changes things.)
- throwanem 7mo ago
  > the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating.
  - randallsquared 7mo ago
    No, it's as true now as it was then. The intellectual property team didn't win on the merits or by law enforcement; it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick.
    - idle_zealot 7mo ago
      > it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick That's not the whole story, though. There have been many community-driven projects to bring convenient access to copyrighted works to the masses in a convenient way. You may recall the meteoric success of Popcorn Time. Law enforcement shut them down. Without the hand of the state beating down any popular alternative to legal distribution it absolutely would be the dominant mode of media consumption.

lelanthran 7mo ago

> I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own. I think you are walking all around the word "consent" and trying very hard to avoid it altogether. Your perspective, because it refuses to include any sort of consent, is invalid. No perspective that refuses consent can be valid.

steveklabnik 7mo ago
Consent is absolutely important, but that does not mean that every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. That does not mean you're a bad person. Free use is an important part of intellectual property law. If it did not exist, the powerful could, for example, stifle public criticism by declaring that they do not consent to you using their words or likeness. The ability to do that is important for society. It is also just generally important for creating works inspired by others, which is virtually every work. There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not.
- lelanthran 7mo ago
  > You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. I am not representing your words as mine. I am not using your words to profit off. I am not making a gain by attributing your words to you. > There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not. You are blurring the lines between "using a quote or likeness" and "giving credit to". I am skeptical that you don't know the difference between the two. Regardless, any "perspective" that disregards the need to acquire consent is invalid. Even if you are going to ignore it, you have to acknowledge that you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from. This whole "silence is consent" attitude is baffling.
  - steveklabnik 7mo ago
    You made an incredibly strong statement that is much broader than what we are talking about. I am pointing out various cases where I think that broadness is incorrect, I am not equating the two. I do not think that, if you read, say, https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs-str/ https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... , and then later, a friend asks you "hey, should I use String or &str here?" that you need my consent to go "at the start, just use String" instead of "at the start, just use String, like Steve Klabnik says in https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs-str/ https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... ". And if they say "hey that's a great idea, thank you" I don't think you're a bad person if you say "you're welcome" without "you should really be saying welcome to Steve Klabnik." It is of course nice if you happen to do so, but I think framing it as a consent issue is the wrong way to think about it. We recognize that this is different than simply publishing the exact contents of the blog post on your blog and calling it yours, because it is! To me, an LLM is a transformative derivative work, not an exact copy. Because my words are not in there, they are not being copied. But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output.

computably 7mo ago

> 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. Not a contradiction but an addendum: plenty of creative pursuits are not about functional value, or at least not primarily. If somebody writes a seemingly genuine blog post about their family trauma, and I as the reader find out it's made-up bullshit, that's abhorrent to me, whether or not AI is involved. And I think it would be perfectly fair for writers who do create similar but genuine content to find it abhorrent that they must compete with genAI, that genAI will slurp up their words, and that genAI's mere existence casts doubt on their own authenticity. It's not about money or social utility, it's about human connection.

ai5iq 7mo ago
The consent question gets weirder when agents have persistent memory. I run agents that accumulate context over weeks — beliefs extracted from observations, relationships with other agents. At what point does an agent's memory become its own work product vs. derivative of its training? There's no legal framework for that.

kokanee 7mo ago

That seems fine if you're not publishing content for a living. A lot of people are.

intended 7mo ago

> I write for two main reasons > people read things… their life is better > it’s just my own What was the point of writing this though? Perhaps I should know who you are, but assuming you are a regular HN forum user - you are still very much a participant in a larger information economy / ecosystem. All of us depend on that system, that commons. Visits to Wikipedia have dropped by at least 8% since 2025, other estimates are starker. This will have an impact on donations. These reports are similar for many sites which write or produce content. Your individual behavior may be perfectly fine, and you are entitled to your perspective, but that doesn’t become a defense for the degradations of the commons. If anything, it’s a classic example of the kind of argument that ends up entangling ideas and making conclusions harder to reach.