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Wrong. The low-quality content farm will be out and the high-quality site will be fully paywalled (no more data to AI). For instance, when searching for inform

Wrong. The low-quality content farm will be out and the high-quality site will be fully paywalled (no more data to AI). For instance, when searching for information on setting up RDS, like high availability MySQL on self-hosted servers on-premises, neither ChatGPT nor Brad provided the necessary details. I would not make a publicly searchable blog or Github repository if I were well-versed in setting such RDS on-premises. Instead, I would make it available only behind a paywall. Why should Google and MS/Bing benefit from my hard work if they do not direct traffic to my site? Previously, low- or high-quality pages benefited from SEO, but that is no longer true. There is a wealth of knowledge that has not yet been documented. Unless Google or Bing starts directing many traffic, experts, and websites will not share updated and other valuable information. I anticipate more paywalls for high-quality content, similar to good news sites. Besides that, be careful about wishing for one or two centralized sites controlled by big tech giants with AIs such as Google and Microsoft. The web developed because of many 3rd party websites. I don't have answers on how good 3rd party sites will survive with Google/Bing sending traffic and Ad clicks, but the equation is about SEO changing. Either you create non-profit Wikipedia-style content or high-quality content paywalled. That is my best guess.

prepend 3y ago
> I would not make a publicly searchable blog or Github repository if I were well-versed in setting such RDS on-premises You won’t. But I will and I think others will as well. My goal is to help people set up RDS and I don’t care about commercialization. So happy if AI reuses all the material. There are many technical blogs that are just hobbies, or fun, or brand PR, or book tie ins or whatever.
- post-it 3y ago
  Yup. Commercializing things is hard. If I want to share info, I'll make a Reddit post or maybe a blog post if it's something lengthy. If I want to paywall it, I don't know where to start. I imagine there's keys-included solutions, but I doubt they can just send me e-transfers for each payment. Maybe they can send money to my PayPal? I've never used that for receiving money before. Do I need a business bank account? Will transparency rules require me to share my address publicly? Maybe I need a PO box. I just wanted to share something helpful.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    > Yup. Commercializing things is hard. If they are in abundance or in low demand.
- Alupis 3y ago
  You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge. The for-profit company is helping people, in exchange for direct and/or indirect monetization. Your blog post's knowledge-dump ends up never being seen. This is why StackOverflow reacted so poorly to Stack Exchange's announcement they would be using all of your hard work to train a for-profit model. It might not be illegal - but it sure does feel weird, at a minimum.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    > You aren't helping people This seems trivially false. Even if the info just gets sucked into an LLM there will still be people helped.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    I feel similarly to prepend: I often write things up because I want to help people by sharing knowledge. I don't care whether people get that knowledge via directly seeing it on my site vs hearing it second hand from a friend vs reading it in LLM output. It's not important that my contribution go directly from me to the other person; what matters is that they get the information they're looking for.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      How do you know anyone ever gets this information?
      - jefftk 3y ago
        I don't have a strong feedback loop here, but I generally figure that if I make it public then search engines (or now LLMs) will give it to people who want it.
        Alupis 3y ago
        A lot like shouting into the wind. With a blog post - you get feedback via comments. With SO, you get feedback via votes and comments. With HN, you get feedback the same way. We have feedback on all of these systems so that humans can more readily discern correctness. An AI model is not going to be able to readily understand what solution is correct, lest it wouldn't need to crawl the page in the first place.
- koreth1 3y ago
  > My goal is to help people set up RDS and I don’t care about commercialization. This feels like the same philosophical difference that leads to debates about GPL vs. Apache licenses. The "how dare someone else make money using my work" camp vs. the "if someone else is able to make money using my work, more power to them" camp.
  - pydry 3y ago
    That was more about Google/Microsoft crying about not being given absolute freedom to do whatever they wanted with somebody else's IP. Google even banned AGPL at one point from its code hosting platform - it was that upset with open source.
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    Monetization is not what GPL vs. Apache license is about, even if that's often how the Apache proponents want to paint things. The GPL doesn't prevent you from making money; it only requires you to contribute your changes back. That way others can also make money based on your work, like... you just did!
    - prepend 3y ago
      > The GPL doesn't prevent you from making money; it only requires you to contribute your changes back. I think it does though as if my contribution is made public others are less likely to buy it. With Apache/etc, I can make modifications and sell more easily.
  - prepend 3y ago
    I agree and have been having this discussion for decades of people who don’t care and just want their work to help others (Apache/bsd/mit/etc) vs those that want to have a specific ideology furthered (gpl) that all software should be free. It’s not exactly the same, but I’ve frequently heard “I don’t want someone to take my code and just sell it.” So want to use gpl or some other license that opens but prohibits selling. I don’t think the latter really works out that well, but people seem to ask for it quite a bit.
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  Ha, jokes on you, I’ll just be using LLM’s to churn out obscene amounts of plausible-sounding-but-actually-incorrect amounts of content on the same topics, hosted across a variety of domains. Almost anything shortcut LLM’s provide can be a countered and aggressively wrapped in return. N.B. I’m not actually going to do this, but it’s still a straightforward attack.
waboremo 3y ago
Why wouldn't Google [replace with whoever becomes owner of leading AI platform] just hire experts themselves to generate for LLMs? Seems like the obvious next step. For clarity, I'm not saying I particularly like that future, but I have a hard time grasping why you think a paywall would be an obstacle here. Especially not for the wealthiest corporations (ever). Additionally because most paywalls to information have very hard time keeping information from leaking. Otherwise news orgs would have figured that out by now!
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Paywall sites allow google in but not you. That will change if no traffic is given.
- failuser 3y ago
  This is just too expensive. Google is used to get all the content for free.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Right now, but if information becomes a serious obstacle for Google/AI platforms in general, it would easily spend billions to ensure control. It's not as if Google is a stranger to hiring experts to keep them away from other places!
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I would assume that licensing content from paywalled books, research reports, etc. would be much more economical.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - notatoad 3y ago
    I'd guess that google is currently the single largest funder of "content" in the world, between adsense on websites and payouts to YouTubers. They're certainly not getting the content for free. They're running ads against it, and making money on it, but they are also paying for it. It's a relatively small shift in their funding model to pay out to creators for their contributions to an AI model instead of paying out per pageview.
gumballindie 3y ago
> Wrong. The low-quality content farm will be out and the high-quality site will be fully paywalled (no more data to AI). The only way to protect ip really. The question is what happens when they attempt to steal content and integrate it in their "ai"?
tshaddox 3y ago
It seems to me like the options will be 1) publish free content on your website and make zero money because it will get crawled and displayed to readers elsewhere or 2) publish content on your website behind a paywall and make zero money because no one will pay for it (even if they could somehow find it, which they couldn’t).
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  The freemium model (similar to what Substack is doing) may work for some bloggers and news and news-adjacent publications. For regular tech bloggers such as the ones you see posted on HN, I agree it’s desperate.
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    > may work for some bloggers and news and news-adjacent publications Yes, for creators who have managed to establish an audience that had high intent to consume that creator’s content. But good luck to people who are trying to make money just by delivering useful niche content where the consumers don’t even know of the creator.

prepend 3y ago

> I would not make a publicly searchable blog or Github repository if I were well-versed in setting such RDS on-premises You won’t. But I will and I think others will as well. My goal is to help people set up RDS and I don’t care about commercialization. So happy if AI reuses all the material. There are many technical blogs that are just hobbies, or fun, or brand PR, or book tie ins or whatever.

post-it 3y ago
Yup. Commercializing things is hard. If I want to share info, I'll make a Reddit post or maybe a blog post if it's something lengthy. If I want to paywall it, I don't know where to start. I imagine there's keys-included solutions, but I doubt they can just send me e-transfers for each payment. Maybe they can send money to my PayPal? I've never used that for receiving money before. Do I need a business bank account? Will transparency rules require me to share my address publicly? Maybe I need a PO box. I just wanted to share something helpful.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > Yup. Commercializing things is hard. If they are in abundance or in low demand.
Alupis 3y ago
You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge. The for-profit company is helping people, in exchange for direct and/or indirect monetization. Your blog post's knowledge-dump ends up never being seen. This is why StackOverflow reacted so poorly to Stack Exchange's announcement they would be using all of your hard work to train a for-profit model. It might not be illegal - but it sure does feel weird, at a minimum.
- concordDance 3y ago
  > You aren't helping people This seems trivially false. Even if the info just gets sucked into an LLM there will still be people helped.
- jefftk 3y ago
  I feel similarly to prepend: I often write things up because I want to help people by sharing knowledge. I don't care whether people get that knowledge via directly seeing it on my site vs hearing it second hand from a friend vs reading it in LLM output. It's not important that my contribution go directly from me to the other person; what matters is that they get the information they're looking for.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    How do you know anyone ever gets this information?
    - jefftk 3y ago
      I don't have a strong feedback loop here, but I generally figure that if I make it public then search engines (or now LLMs) will give it to people who want it.
      - Alupis 3y ago
        A lot like shouting into the wind. With a blog post - you get feedback via comments. With SO, you get feedback via votes and comments. With HN, you get feedback the same way. We have feedback on all of these systems so that humans can more readily discern correctness. An AI model is not going to be able to readily understand what solution is correct, lest it wouldn't need to crawl the page in the first place.
koreth1 3y ago
> My goal is to help people set up RDS and I don’t care about commercialization. This feels like the same philosophical difference that leads to debates about GPL vs. Apache licenses. The "how dare someone else make money using my work" camp vs. the "if someone else is able to make money using my work, more power to them" camp.
- pydry 3y ago
  That was more about Google/Microsoft crying about not being given absolute freedom to do whatever they wanted with somebody else's IP. Google even banned AGPL at one point from its code hosting platform - it was that upset with open source.
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  Monetization is not what GPL vs. Apache license is about, even if that's often how the Apache proponents want to paint things. The GPL doesn't prevent you from making money; it only requires you to contribute your changes back. That way others can also make money based on your work, like... you just did!
  - prepend 3y ago
    > The GPL doesn't prevent you from making money; it only requires you to contribute your changes back. I think it does though as if my contribution is made public others are less likely to buy it. With Apache/etc, I can make modifications and sell more easily.
- prepend 3y ago
  I agree and have been having this discussion for decades of people who don’t care and just want their work to help others (Apache/bsd/mit/etc) vs those that want to have a specific ideology furthered (gpl) that all software should be free. It’s not exactly the same, but I’ve frequently heard “I don’t want someone to take my code and just sell it.” So want to use gpl or some other license that opens but prohibits selling. I don’t think the latter really works out that well, but people seem to ask for it quite a bit.
FridgeSeal 3y ago
Ha, jokes on you, I’ll just be using LLM’s to churn out obscene amounts of plausible-sounding-but-actually-incorrect amounts of content on the same topics, hosted across a variety of domains. Almost anything shortcut LLM’s provide can be a countered and aggressively wrapped in return. N.B. I’m not actually going to do this, but it’s still a straightforward attack.

waboremo 3y ago

Why wouldn't Google [replace with whoever becomes owner of leading AI platform] just hire experts themselves to generate for LLMs? Seems like the obvious next step. For clarity, I'm not saying I particularly like that future, but I have a hard time grasping why you think a paywall would be an obstacle here. Especially not for the wealthiest corporations (ever). Additionally because most paywalls to information have very hard time keeping information from leaking. Otherwise news orgs would have figured that out by now!

ipaddr 3y ago
Paywall sites allow google in but not you. That will change if no traffic is given.
failuser 3y ago
This is just too expensive. Google is used to get all the content for free.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Right now, but if information becomes a serious obstacle for Google/AI platforms in general, it would easily spend billions to ensure control. It's not as if Google is a stranger to hiring experts to keep them away from other places!
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I would assume that licensing content from paywalled books, research reports, etc. would be much more economical.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- notatoad 3y ago
  I'd guess that google is currently the single largest funder of "content" in the world, between adsense on websites and payouts to YouTubers. They're certainly not getting the content for free. They're running ads against it, and making money on it, but they are also paying for it. It's a relatively small shift in their funding model to pay out to creators for their contributions to an AI model instead of paying out per pageview.

gumballindie 3y ago

> Wrong. The low-quality content farm will be out and the high-quality site will be fully paywalled (no more data to AI). The only way to protect ip really. The question is what happens when they attempt to steal content and integrate it in their "ai"?

tshaddox 3y ago

It seems to me like the options will be 1) publish free content on your website and make zero money because it will get crawled and displayed to readers elsewhere or 2) publish content on your website behind a paywall and make zero money because no one will pay for it (even if they could somehow find it, which they couldn’t).

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
The freemium model (similar to what Substack is doing) may work for some bloggers and news and news-adjacent publications. For regular tech bloggers such as the ones you see posted on HN, I agree it’s desperate.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  > may work for some bloggers and news and news-adjacent publications Yes, for creators who have managed to establish an audience that had high intent to consume that creator’s content. But good luck to people who are trying to make money just by delivering useful niche content where the consumers don’t even know of the creator.