12 ms·

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 re

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 1mo ago
Not the OP, but I suspect no one goes to my website anyway. (I write nonetheless.)
- altern8 1mo ago
  I do! You invented the crayon picker in MacOS..?
  - JKCalhoun 1mo ago
    Yes, I did do that thing a long time ago, ha ha.
- exmadscientist 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo ago
  [dead]

JKCalhoun 1mo ago

Not the OP, but I suspect no one goes to my website anyway. (I write nonetheless.)

altern8 1mo ago
I do! You invented the crayon picker in MacOS..?
- JKCalhoun 1mo ago
  Yes, I did do that thing a long time ago, ha ha.
exmadscientist 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo ago
[dead]