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jefftk | on: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
> 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 | parent | next
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?

jefftk | root | parent | next
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

frabcus | root | parent
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 | root | parent
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)

inigyou | root | parent | next
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.
JKCalhoun | root | parent
Not the OP, but I suspect no one goes to my website anyway. (I write nonetheless.)
altern8 | root | parent
I do! You invented the crayon picker in MacOS..?
shuwix | parent | next
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 | root | parent
Thanatic drive masquerading as transhumanist virtue signalling.
mittensc | parent | next
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.

laughing_man | parent | next
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 | root | parent
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.
gspr | parent
> 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 | root | parent
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.