4 ms·
All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the
by paxys 2mo ago
All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else.
If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- _dark_matter_ 2mo agoI wonder the same thing. I only imagine that what comes next is worse: AI companies using vast resources to develop new training data, in house, locked down. They are already doing this with developers and code at Meta. Information will become locked away behind AI paywalls and chatbots.
- jefftk 2mo ago> If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.
- exmadscientist 2mo agoThe danger that's concerning people (rightly or wrongly) isn't that LLMs are going to be an intermediary to your website. It's that they'll be the only thing reading it. No one will ever read your post or know what you wrote. The only consumers will be LLMs, they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author (probably more due to expedience than any sort of malice; it's not like you're famous, are you?), and your idea might get embedded into a set of model weights somewhere. No human will see a byte of it. Are you actually saying you'd be OK with that?
- JKCalhoun 2mo agoNot the OP, but I suspect no one goes to my website anyway. (I write nonetheless.)
- altern8 2mo agoI do! You invented the crayon picker in MacOS..?
- JKCalhoun 2mo agoYes, I did do that thing a long time ago, ha ha.
- exmadscientist 2mo agoThere's massive differences between "my site isn't hugely popular, but I get some readers", "my site is up and findable but genuinely no one visits except scraping bots" and "it's available, people would visit if they knew it existed, but they're not being offered it, they're being offered bot distillations with no reference back". The last one is the worry. The middle is... where we all start. The first is not a bad place to be, all things considered!
- jefftk 2mo agoYes, that would be fine. I write primarily communicate ideas, not for credit or fame. Empirically, however, LLMs don't strip out the author: the big models know a lot about what I've written even with search disabled. Ex: https://claude.ai/share/8cbcdf88-a360-421a-8c06-ae7b7992e866 https://claude.ai/share/8cbcdf88-a360-421a-8c06-ae7b7992e866
- frabcus 2mo agoSure they know about you if you ask, but generally they won't credit you if they cite an idea from their latent space that came from you.
- 2mo ago
- laughing_man 2mo agoThere are different types of writing. If we depend on people writing because it's enjoyable at some level, we're going to lose writing that's important but also a bit tedious.
- jefftk 2mo agoOf course! I do think we'd lose a lot of great writing if it went amateur-only. But my parent seemed to be saying the incentive would entirely disappear, so I wanted to give my perspective.
- shuwix 2mo agoYour level of thinking is defined by ICD-10. Yeah, authors don't want to be recognized as authors, they don't want any reward for their work, they don't want to amass pool of loyal readers, interact with them, etc. All they want is for halucinating AI to take excerpts of their work and compile it with random sh!t. GENIUS
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoThanatic drive masquerading as transhumanist virtue signalling.
- mittensc 2mo agoI mainly shared my projects for learning, discussion and bragging rights. LLMs just use everything, generate similar code with no attribution and keep users from visiting, so no bragging rights or attention. Worse, there are some PRs that seem fully generated ... So i mostly stopped sharing and started pulling my old repos offline. At this pace, i don't want to compete with a clone of myself in the future that will do my work for much cheaper.
- gspr 2mo ago> I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me. Sure. But you can see that for some people (myself included), writing for peers is part of the joy? And that if instead a megacorp places an opaque computer program between the author and the readers, that joy might be ruined?
- jefftk 2mo agoMy parent wrote "what incentive is there to publish anything new?" and I described my motivation, but of course people vary a lot in what drives them.
- penneyd 2mo agoWell in the example above the manufacturer still has incentive to provide the manual's and guides that describe how to use their products, and if that is subsequently served by an LLM that's totally fine. The only sites that LLM's would have a negative effect on are those that are only hosting content for the ad views.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoManuals don't always well explain how to use their products with everybody else's products because there are too many to do that. But there are lots of people trying things out and might figure out the fine details on how to make various things work. They then publish these how-to pieces (which exist no where else) to the internet, or at least they used to when there were incentives to do so.
- GrinningFool 2mo ago> are those that are only hosting content for the ad views. I might never blog/publish code again amidst all this. I never had ads on my sites. I am not alone in this.
- Ajedi32 2mo agoThose hosting content for ad views, or for fame or other personal gain. Sites like Wikipedia or developer documentation pages which exist to distribute knowledge for its own sake don't have any reason to care whether that knowledge is consumed by a human or a computer being used by a human.
- Havoc 2mo agoThat is next earnings quarters problem is the approach being taken
- swingandamiss 2mo agoGemini can just consume the device documents. There's an incentive for device makers to publish this content.
- dspillett 2mo agoThere had always been some incentive for manufactures to publish device documentation, and yet it has often been quite lacking either in quality or overall existence. I doubt LLM/agents being the readers will change that at all. What I expect AI scraping and using without credit will impact is people publishing their own unofficial help and guidance, and the affect there is likely to be negative. It won't stop all of them, but enough to be noticeable. Another possible negative is the manufactures documentation being AI generated without sufficient review, so possibly more erroneous than before, or intentionally not producing full documentation at all and expecting AI to fill the gap (MS seems to be heading this way: pushing "ask copilot" all over Azure instead of links direct to good reference material). All this would add up to a situation that is somewhere between "a little worse than pre-AI" and "an absolute shit show".
- satvikpendem 2mo agoPeople write and create regardless of profit motive, it has been that way for thousands of years.
- _DeadFred_ 2mo agoActually no. The original copyright laws were created in part because of the realities of needed profit motive to have high value writing done, time consuming compilation work done. It was even titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". The thousands of years writing you are talking about was often funded by patrons, who kept the output in their private libraries to show off (and maybe lend out) for prestige. It was a horrible limitation of knowledge and ideas. Much worse than the profit motive, copyright based system that came after that spawned a new age of knowledge in which everyone had cheap access, and those that didn't had access to the (no longer just private) libraries. I'm sure the billionaire class would love a return to patronage based libraries, NDAs on authors of books, and the elitism they would feel with a return to private libraries locking away all kinds of knowledge that would happen if patronage become the only way authors could make money (such as with AI just regurgitating their works, or if the stupid 'do away with copyright' people got their way).
- nairboon 2mo agoIt's not copyright that caused cheap access. The printing machine allowed for cheaper publications, that's what spawned the new age of knowledge. The raw materials and the duplication of knowledge was the bottleneck. With digital systems this cost is minuscule, but still there.
- _DeadFred_ 2mo agoDisagree. The printing machine was killing the industry allowing copies where people earned nothing. Copyright was created to ensure quality works existed to be copied.
- inigyou 2mo ago
- neuralkoi 2mo agoI've seen websites put up some draconian measures to try and get a grip on the scraping. So much for the sub-second loading experience when you have Cloudflare, Google, Anubis, and all these other captcha services trying to see if you're a human. It's made the web browsing experience so much worse. Some of the proposals to address this include charging bots for access to web resources, but they will also have repercussions for regular users. I don't see how you solve this cleanly.
- JKCalhoun 2mo agoMe, I'm just scraping the parts of the internet I like, toying with local LLMs… ready really to just shove off.
- Grimburger 2mo agoCloudflare specifically has a block for LLM and AI training bots now. Not sure of the effectiveness but it's there.
- matherial 2mo agoMinimal. I'm behind Cloudflare and 90% of the traffic is still scrapers. I don't think they're serious about the long tail. I think the main thing Cloudflare is trying to do is block direct traffic from frontier labs and then start charging them for access. They might end up shooting themselves in the foot, as this simply empowers sketchy residential-proxy outfits to undercut Cloudflare and sell the data to labs for less.
- inigyou 2mo agoI think the other thing they're trying to do is get most of the internet to send them all of their cleartext traffic. Expect in 2040 the PRISM2 docs will get leaked by some Eduardo Rainedon and we'll find out Cloudflare was the NSA all along.
- bakugo 2mo agoIt still only blocks "well-behaved" bots that have proper User-Agents and respect robots.txt, so it's largely pointless. The problematic bots are all disguising themselves as Chrome and sending requests from millions of residential proxy IPs, and the only real solution to those is some sort of captcha or PoW page on first visit.
- no-name-here 2mo agoAt least LLMs almost always transform the original - it usually isn’t as straightforward as “Here’s the original but without the ads that pay for it”. But we already have the latter case that exists - ad blockers. Ad blockers literally serve up the word-for-word original content minus the ads.
- karmakaze 2mo agoFunny, I published information in the hopes that humans would benefit from it. If it happens to be through collective intelligence of LLMs I'm ok with that--even more so if through open models.
- wartywhoa23 2mo ago> Funny, I published information in the hopes that humans would benefit from it. Sure, humans would benefit. It took them searching, reading themselves, maybe even understanding something in the process, to complete a 360° revolution of their squirrel cages in time T. Now they can omit searching, skip reading to the regurgitated answer, throw away understanding, and complete a full revolution in T/N, where N is a heuristic value directly proportional to the amount of skin in the AI hype. But the catch is that the squirrel cage must run non-stop still.
- dudefeliciano 2mo agoWell companies are starting to put hidden ads in text content if the user agent is an AI crawler
- ekianjo 2mo ago> incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content? obviously new content still has value because it remains the source layer for LLM agents. it just wont be ads giving you revenues thats all.
- littlecranky67 2mo ago> "humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward" That expectation is a problem, has always been a problem, and Tim Berners Lee never mentioned anything about a reward structure when coming up with the WWW.
- pferde 2mo agoYour thinking too narrowly about the reward. Sometimes, it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator, not anything tangible for themselves.
- esposm03 2mo ago> Your thinking Should be "You're thinking".
- cryptoz 2mo ago> Should be "You're thinking". This should be "This should be 'You're thinking'." don't you think? Why bother correcting someone's grammar with a sentence fragment? You're just trading one mistake for another. I'm hoping someone finds a grammar error in my post, because continuing this would be hilarious.
- danhite 2mo ago> This should be "This should be 'You're thinking'." don't you think? Reflexively, I think it should be more like ... javascript: `This should be "You're thinking".` ; // to preserve the original character use and to avoid '...'...' parse foos // however `"...".` also possibly deserves a [sic] to critique the original // i.e. ~grammar police say the period belongs within the quote marks, no? ... but then that's just me, in [my] quirks mode.
- pferde 2mo agoMaybe I'm just making silly misspellings like this on purpose, to prevent someone from fingerprinting me based on my writing style. :-)
- latexr 2mo agoExactly. What’s problematic about comments like your parent is the absence of mid-to-long term thinking. It’s like bragging about a new highly addictive psychedelic drug that a dealer gave you a taste of for free. The effects are awesome today, you feel so fun and free! Never mind that it’s destroying your body and that the dealer will eventually charge you or demand you pay in other ways, that’s a problem for another day. Weeee!
- dwayne_dibley 2mo agoEasy to fix a well documented router now. Difficult to fix a non documented router in five years time because no one has been contributing to the web about its bug fixes.
- mc3301 2mo agoAgreed on all of the above. However, when it comes to non-creative things (such as hooking up some hardware ABC to some software XYZ using RST), LLMs might be better at digesting the factory manuals (hopefully THOSE were written by humans) and explaining it in a way the user understands for their specific case.