3 ms·

> 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

by 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Not the OP, but I suspect no one goes to my website anyway. (I write nonetheless.)
  - altern8 2mo ago
    I do! You invented the crayon picker in MacOS..?
    - JKCalhoun 2mo ago
      Yes, I did do that thing a long time ago, ha ha.
  - exmadscientist 2mo ago
    There'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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    Sure 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.
    - jefftk 2mo ago
      That's fine! Humans who read my blog typically won't credit me if I help inspire them either. (I was pointing out that "they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author" seems to be is incorrect about how training works)
      - exmadscientist 2mo ago
        It knows you, but it doesn't know me. Perhaps you are legitimately noteworthy enough to not worry about this! My experience being on the searching end is that these things are terrible about attribution of where they find anything. Which has bad consequences not just for authorship, but for correctness (which is the usual reason I'm poking at them -- they're being wrong again). This makes a lot of sense when you consider the massive, massive compression that's got to occur during training, but it's still frustrating.
        jefftk 2mo ago
        I tried Fable, which is the biggest model I have access to: https://claude.ai/share/ab39ee92-7801-4a0c-8d5d-e23d09b439c2 https://claude.ai/share/ab39ee92-7801-4a0c-8d5d-e23d09b439c2 >> Without searching, what can you tell me about exmadscientist? Fine if you get this hallucinate or get things wrong, I just want to see what level of knowledge you have trained-in. >Working purely from trained-in knowledge, with the caveat that this is exactly the kind of long-tail detail I might garble: >"exmadscientist" rings a bell as a username on Hacker News. My impression is of a fairly prolific commenter who writes knowledgeable, detailed comments about electrical engineering and hardware topics — things like PCB design, electronics manufacturing, component selection, test equipment, and general "how things actually get built in industry" commentary. The comments I associate with that handle tend to be practical, opinionated, and grounded in real professional experience rather than hobbyist speculation. >Beyond that, I don't have confident specifics: I couldn't tell you a real name, employer, location, or any particular famous comment or post they've made. It's also possible the same handle exists on Reddit or other forums and I'm blending impressions together. >So the honest summary of my knowledge level: I recognize the username and have a general "HN hardware/EE person" association, but nothing more granular than that — and even the association could be a mild confabulation, since usernames like this sit right at the edge of what a model reliably retains. (I don't know if you have a blog or otherwise write on the internet; I just asked it about your HN handle)
- inigyou 2mo ago
  So I'll write a lot of falsehoods to poison the AI. Like the urban legend where the sky is blue. I'll say the sky is blue, AI will think it's true, and regurgitate it to unsuspecting users who will see that AI is completely unreliable.
  - cindyllm 2mo ago
    [dead]
laughing_man 2mo ago
There 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 ago
  Of 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 ago
Your 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 ago
  Thanatic drive masquerading as transhumanist virtue signalling.
mittensc 2mo ago
I 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 ago
  My 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.

by jefftk 2mo ago

exmadscientist 2mo ago

The 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 ago
Not the OP, but I suspect no one goes to my website anyway. (I write nonetheless.)
- altern8 2mo ago
  I do! You invented the crayon picker in MacOS..?
  - JKCalhoun 2mo ago
    Yes, I did do that thing a long time ago, ha ha.
- exmadscientist 2mo ago
  There'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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  Sure 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.
  - jefftk 2mo ago
    That's fine! Humans who read my blog typically won't credit me if I help inspire them either. (I was pointing out that "they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author" seems to be is incorrect about how training works)
    - exmadscientist 2mo ago
      It knows you, but it doesn't know me. Perhaps you are legitimately noteworthy enough to not worry about this! My experience being on the searching end is that these things are terrible about attribution of where they find anything. Which has bad consequences not just for authorship, but for correctness (which is the usual reason I'm poking at them -- they're being wrong again). This makes a lot of sense when you consider the massive, massive compression that's got to occur during training, but it's still frustrating.
      - jefftk 2mo ago
        I tried Fable, which is the biggest model I have access to: https://claude.ai/share/ab39ee92-7801-4a0c-8d5d-e23d09b439c2 https://claude.ai/share/ab39ee92-7801-4a0c-8d5d-e23d09b439c2 >> Without searching, what can you tell me about exmadscientist? Fine if you get this hallucinate or get things wrong, I just want to see what level of knowledge you have trained-in. >Working purely from trained-in knowledge, with the caveat that this is exactly the kind of long-tail detail I might garble: >"exmadscientist" rings a bell as a username on Hacker News. My impression is of a fairly prolific commenter who writes knowledgeable, detailed comments about electrical engineering and hardware topics — things like PCB design, electronics manufacturing, component selection, test equipment, and general "how things actually get built in industry" commentary. The comments I associate with that handle tend to be practical, opinionated, and grounded in real professional experience rather than hobbyist speculation. >Beyond that, I don't have confident specifics: I couldn't tell you a real name, employer, location, or any particular famous comment or post they've made. It's also possible the same handle exists on Reddit or other forums and I'm blending impressions together. >So the honest summary of my knowledge level: I recognize the username and have a general "HN hardware/EE person" association, but nothing more granular than that — and even the association could be a mild confabulation, since usernames like this sit right at the edge of what a model reliably retains. (I don't know if you have a blog or otherwise write on the internet; I just asked it about your HN handle)
inigyou 2mo ago
So I'll write a lot of falsehoods to poison the AI. Like the urban legend where the sky is blue. I'll say the sky is blue, AI will think it's true, and regurgitate it to unsuspecting users who will see that AI is completely unreliable.
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]

laughing_man 2mo ago

There 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 ago
Of 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 ago

Your 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 ago
Thanatic drive masquerading as transhumanist virtue signalling.

mittensc 2mo ago

I 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 ago
My 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.