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Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?
by tome 1mo ago
Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- mittensc 1mo agohe's missing out on any attention that his shared thoughts would bring? and all benefits that might bring if he's good at what he does. he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.
- Gigachad 1mo agoIt feels like volunteering at an Amazon warehouse when you previously volunteered at a charity store. Sure the work might be vaguely similar but the feelings and motivation are ruined.
- spacechild1 1mo agoThat's a very striking - and depressing - comparison.
- recitedropper 1mo agoThis is such a good analogy, I might have to steal it. :)
- tome 1mo agoIs he? Why? People never read blog articles any more, and only consume content generated by AI? > he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that. So? That's not a harm.
- bulder 1mo agoThe downside, as stated in the message, is implicitly supporting the LLM data ingestation pipeline by providing fresh content. It's not a direct harm in itself, but feels very tragedy of the commonsy
- tome 1mo ago> The downside ... is implicitly supporting the LLM data ingestation pipeline by providing fresh content I don't understand why that's a downside. > It's not a direct harm in itself I don't understand how it's a harm at all.
- Nasrudith 1mo agoIdée fixe that AI is axiomatically bad.
- bulder 1mo agoWould you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity that explicitly financializes that work's benefits? Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work? For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.
- tome 1mo ago> Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity that explicitly financializes that work's benefits? Yes, that was one of the things that I hope happens with the open source software I write. > Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work? Sure, that's what doing SEO on one's own blog is, isn't it? > For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer. I think this is probably the crux: that writing is no longer discoverable because people aren't using search engines any more. It would be interesting to put some hard numbers on that. I reckon writing is still more discoverable (in absolute numbers) than it was when blogs first took off (over 20 years ago?)
- frabcus 1mo agoYes - previously there was some chance someone reading the ideas on the blog would contact the author to thank them, or ask them to collaborate. When laundered via LLMs whose pretraining destroys all credit, that can't happen.
- bko 1mo agoIf all you care about is financial, expected value of someone reading your blog and asking to collaborate is MUCH lower than odds of being part of some settlement in the future with these AI companies ingesting your data for training purposes.
- rcxdude 1mo agoFrom their phrasing I don't think the reward they're looking for is financial: more the emotional reward of knowing that someone else appreciated their ideas. I dunno how much less likely this is in the age of LLMs, though.
- bko 1mo agoIn that case, more LLMs scraping the net will read your blog than people, that's almost a guarantee. And they'll immortalize your ideas at least in some sense, well after your hosting platform ends up gating your content, or GitHub pages is down indefinitely, or you forget to renew your domain.
- eloisius 1mo agoI don’t think that’s fair. Some bloggers may hope for financial reward, but many just want recognition for their creativity, to attract a readership, or build a community around their work. Those are meaningful ends, apart from financial reward. What’s not meaningful is to perform free labor to produce the raw materials that a mega corp then goes on to monetize without any recognition.
- tome 1mo agoOK, and there's still some chance, right? I don't understand why you say it can't happen any more.
- account42 1mo agoIs there some downside to the slave who is housed and fed for free? Are there any upside he would have were he not property of another man?
- tome 1mo agoI would be grateful if you could explain how that is related to my question.
- mike_hearn 1mo agoA lot of blogging especially in the tech space is driven by recruiting (startup blogs), or establishing a reputation as a thought leader (personal blogging, LinkedIn). So there were upsides that are now gone.
- tome 1mo agoWhy are they gone?
- mike_hearn 1mo agoPublish some interesting info on a startup eng blog and nobody will see your pitch to apply for jobs, they'll just delegate the task that needs the info to an agent and it'll remember the answer from its training. Ditto for personal blogging and thought leadership pieces. You get drowned out by the volume of AI generated pieces, and any unique ideas you do propose will be presented by the models as their own.