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I’m not a participant in this race. Are the AI companies worried about anything but their valuations? I don’t care about their valuations, but I do care about
by Demiurge 18d ago
I’m not a participant in this race.
Are the AI companies worried about anything but their valuations?
I don’t care about their valuations, but I do care about the risks that they are creating for the economy, society, and the technological advancement, at large.
Micro transactions [in this case] are a great idea, these crawlers need to be taxed and made to pay for the unaccounted external costs. Furthermore, we need to fund any risk mitigations, security coordination, and other safety work. If these things are not imposed on the market, the most ruthless player will create the biggest mess they can get away with.
I don’t see a better way to do this, right now, than to allow Strips, or CF, to create some way to charge the crawlers. Imagine I have some really expensive content, I can put it behind the paywall, or subscription model, but that’s very specific to the human consumer. What if I do want to search engine or content aggregator to consume some of the content? It would be quite hard for me to sign an exclusive agreement with OpenAI, like what Reddit or NYT are doing. It might be quite beneficial to create some infrastructure to let bots automatically to pay for access. It might even be crypto based, I don’t think it really matters. It just has to be easy for me to integrate it, and the bots need to find it easy to use.
If we all start doing this, I think this could be of benefit to all content creators, such as musicians, movie makers, game developers, and even independent journalists.
We used to pay for software and things, but what has happened? Walled gardens and production monopolies are taking over. This has largely reduced the quality of all the content we consume.
- inigyou 17d ago[to prove you are not a crawler and read this comment, please deposit $2.00]
- Demiurge 17d agoI think that to prove I am not a crawler I probably just need to supply a Safari user agent string. The crawlers on my sites actually self identify for the most part. The malicious ones are banned when they try to post spam. Anyway, what’s wrong with making 2 cents? :)
- desterothx 17d agoThe troubling part for me is that a system like this could also just as easily be pawned onto the humans (I realize it technically already is with the subscription model internet, but there are still plenty of open sites). A feature like this seems to me will lead to an internet where no one can browse anything without having a wallet connected and paying for each attempted access. Exactly what the internet is not supposed to be.
- Demiurge 17d agoI don’t see how this is different from having Stripe easily available to any web developer. I want this feature, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to add it to every website I build. I think of it as Stripe pay wall at infrastructure level rather than a JavaScript popup. If we look at NYT, WP, many already do this. But HuffPost and Reddit rely on different models. I don’t think this will make the internet less open, I think the internet is already pretty much less open. Who blogs these days for free? They rely on medium or substack, and have no choice, they submit to these platforms rules about the articles they write, even though they’re pretty generous. Now, if the reward system was as open as say, Bitcoin, I think there would be a lot more independent and different bloggers and journalists, and independent platforms.
- inigyou 17d agoOnce you have the payment system, all I have to do is make a site that looks valid until you make a payment. Then it will display the trolololololololololol gif and keep your money.
- andai 17d ago> Are the AI companies worried about anything but their valuations? >I don’t care about their valuations, but I do care about the risks that they are creating for the economy, society, and the technological advancement, at large. Doesn't the same thing apply to every company? And also every government? And also individual? We're all doing the "locally rational" thing, and globally doing... well... I think the main factor is time horizon. Locally rational behavior begins to look globally rational when you add time horizon. For example, if I'm doing what's best for my family for the next five generations, that starts to look a lot like what is good for the whole country and the whole world.
- Demiurge 17d agoYes, this applies to every company. The institutions have evolved a lot, and how we look at social safety and fairness have both evolved and devolved at the same time. Companies, individuals, and governments have different roles. Rationality from their perspective is specific to their perspective, and I don’t believe just because evolution or physics are rational we should die off from a new virus or asteroid impact. That would be perfectly rational, but I don’t care about the global rationality of the universe. What is best for my family and other families is not what is best for Sam Altman or Sataya, or Elon Mask. We’re just talking about market players. What I’m saying is that these market forces need an outlet via some new infrastructure and regulation. Maybe it’s not micro-payments, maybe it’s some other new ideas. I just don’t want the next century to be the century of East India AI sticking me in a Matrix pod, rationally.