3 ms·
People were effectively copying websites (especially ecommerce tutorials) and beating the original authors at SEO decades before ChatGPT 2.
by tptacek 6mo ago
People were effectively copying websites (especially ecommerce tutorials) and beating the original authors at SEO decades before ChatGPT 2.
- phendrenad2 6mo agoThe reason OP doesn't notice this is because it happened 10-20 years ago. The current crop of news sites? They ALL stole, plagiarized, "summarized". They're just so entrenched now that everyone forgot how they got started.
- moralestapia 6mo agoThe article’s point isn’t really about whether this was happening before or not, but whether this kind of behavior is what we want in the first place.
- tmarthal 6mo agoThere are only two ways to change society's behavior: policy or technology. No use arguing individually: court cases are dealing with the policy aspect and technically there's zero recourse on information being disseminated/copied that is published online.
- short_sells_poo 6mo agoThere are two issues the author raises (as I understand it): 1. People copying others' work, made much easier by AI. 2. AI companies effectively harvesting all the accessible information on an industrial scale and completely sidestepping any permissioning or licensing questions. I believe both of these are bad and saying "people copied each others' works before the advent of AI" is a poor cop out. It's tantamount to saying that there's no reason to regulate guns more than say knives, because people have used knives to kill each other before guns were invented. The capabilities matter. The way LLMs empower wholesale "stealing" rather than collaboration is quite evident: why collaborate when you can just feed an entire existing project into the agent of your choice and tell it to spit out a new implementation based on the old one, with a few tweaks of your choice, and then publish it as your work? I put "steal" in quotes because it's perhaps not really stealing per-se, but there's a distinct wrongness here. The LLM operator often doesn't actually possess any expertise, hasn't done any of the hard work, but they can take someone else's work wholesale, repackage it and sell it as their own. Then there's the second, and IMO much more egregious transgression, which is that the LLM companies have taken what is effectively a public good, but more specifically content that they haven't asked permission to use, and just blanket fed it into their models. Legally speaking, it's perhaps A-OK because it's not copyright infringement (IANAL). But people on this site often hold the view that if something is a-priori legal, it is also moral (I'm not accusing you of this). What the LLM companies have done is profoundly immoral. They extracted a fortune of the goods and work made by others, without even bothering to ask for permission - or even considering this permission. And then they resell access to this treasure to the public. Perhaps AI will bring an era of prosperity to humankind like we haven't seen before, perhaps it won't, but that changes nothing about the wrongness of how it started.
- lubujackson 6mo ago"Profoundly immoral" is a very modern and capitalistic perspective. A free exchange of ideas has been the basis for human advancement up until the printing press made exact replicas trivial. From a capitalistic standpoint, they are clearly in the wrong by basing their models on illegally torrented content. But it's hard to argue their usage isn't transformative.
- short_sells_poo 6mo agoNobody said that it's useless, that's a straw man. But it also isn't a free exchange of ideas. It's a concentration of capabilities in the hands of a few corporations.
- strogonoff 6mo agoThere’s a world of difference between people simply “copying websites” and providing tools that, along with other kinds of plagiarism[0], do so at scale while benefitting from that commercially. Sure, you can do the same thing with people, but it’s 1) time-consuming, 2) expensive, 3) prone to whitleblowers refusing to do the shady thing, 4) prone to any competent and productive person involved quitting to do something worthwhile and more profitable instead. [0] Mind you, “copying websites” is but a drop in the ocean in the grand scale of things.
- oblio 6mo agoAwesome! Let's have more of that and turn it into a 2 trillion industry!
- nilirl 6mo agoAnd that was wrong too.
- darkwater 6mo agoI'll obey to Godwin's Law here and say: sure, and minorities have been always prosecuted before the Nazi did it at industrial scale, so the Nazi's were not a big deal!
- saghm 6mo agoPeople also got blown up before atomic bombs, but it's hard to argue that they weren't worth treating more seriously than a stick of dynamite. Sometimes being able to do something at a massively larger scale is a meaningful difference.
- darkwater 6mo agoYou transmitted the same concept I tried to transmit, but without falling into Godwin's Law :)
- saghm 6mo agoI was actually worried that I was so close to it because of the obvious relevancy to WWII that people might object to my analogy, so I found it amusing to read yours immediately after I submitted mine!
- ToValueFunfetti 6mo agoBut ChatGPT does nothing to scale copying somebody else's website. What are we talking about here, exactly? The article doesn't link to the original or clone, they don't mention rephrasing, and they specifically call out link text being the same. Even if you need the cloned site not to be identical, a thesaurus + scraper should scale far better than having an LLM do it!
- saghm 6mo ago> But ChatGPT does nothing to scale copying somebody else's website. What are we talking about here, exactly? "Make me a website that has the same content as that other one so I can get views instead" is not something you could could do generically and quickly with a free service a few years ago, but it is today. I'd argue that it's not beneficial to people who create original content or society at large that this is the case. There are plenty of other uses of LLMs, some of which are genuinely beneficial, some which are mixed, and some which are also a net negative. It seems pretty reasonable to me that issues like this are worth discussing, because as all of the comments on this article here show, people clearly are not on the same page about it.