[detourdog]

For reasons I can't articulate I see LLMs as a vehicle for removing the creators from their ideas. This is very different than search engines. If a search engine generates traffic for documented ideas it creates a community. An LLM based internet seems to remove the creator and shim itself in between for the sake of business.

[TeMPOraL]

It's tricky, because in many ways, this is achieving exactly what I, as user, want computers to do for me: give me information I requested, and only that. I very much do not care about who discovered/created/published it, except only if it helps me quickly ascertain the trustworthiness of said information. I do not want to be forced or prodded to establish relationships with creators or communities. I do not want their ads and upsells.

It's the same issue as with search engines providing "information boxes": huge win for me, but a mortal enemy for those who want to monetize anything resembling intellectual property.

> An LLM based internet seems to remove the creator and shim itself in between for the sake of business.

This sounds bad, and in some cases it is, but in others it is not. Content farms and recipe sites have creators behind them too.

[vouaobrasil]

> I very much do not care about who discovered/created/published it, except only if it helps me quickly ascertain the trustworthiness of said information. I do not want to be forced or prodded to establish relationships with creators or communities. I do not want their ads and upsells.

And this is why humanity is going down the tubes...because you want something, you derive value from what you want, and yet you do not care about giving something back to who makes it.

[TeMPOraL]

> And this is why humanity is going down the tubes...

On the contrary - this is exactly how and why humanity built a technological civilization in the first place. Note that I didn't say

> because you want something, you derive value from what you want, and yet you do not care about giving something back to who makes it.

Yes, because it would be backward and limiting to do that. Note: I never said I don't want to give anything back - I said I don't personally care specifically about the author/publisher. I don't want to establish any relationship with them. If I'm paying them directly for something, I'm paying them for that thing - not also for relationship (which really is a sales channel), not also for being advertised to. If I'm paying some intermediary, then rewarding the maker is the intermediary's problem, not mine.

Consider: do you compensate directly, and have an active relationship with, the person who bakes your bread (hint: people selling bread in bakeries are not actual bakers)? The company who supplied them with flour? The farmers who supplied the flour-makers with grain? Do you pay delivery drivers directly? After all, you're deriving value from their labor directly. Etc. Then there's an entire army of people whose work benefits you directly, and whom you don't even think much about, and rely on being compensated from the common pool (e.g. taxes) or stochastically.

The whole point of money is to allow exchanging value without forcing parties into maintaining an ongoing relationship. That's a feature, not a bug. And if anything is driving humanity down the drain, it's the idea that you should, need, or are even entitled to capture all the value you produce.

[dageshi]

What does your example have to do with this situation?

The people in the bread supply chain get paid, the author of content we're discussing will never get paid by anyone, will never even get a bit if personal satisfaction from their analytics knowing last month x thousand people read that page and it hopefully helped them.

It's completely zero reward, even worse it's completely zero feedback of any kind!

This really is the doom of the web as we know it because for the first time ever there will be an active disincentive to put knowledge on it. I think much information will retreat to places like Discord or locked down login only versions of sites like Stackoverflow.

[TeMPOraL]

> What does your example have to do with this situation?

It's addressing GP's complaint about me pointing out the indirect and transactional nature of the interaction between information producer and consumer.

> the author of content we're discussing will never get paid by anyone

That's... not my problem? Bear with me here.

> will never even get a bit if personal satisfaction from their analytics knowing last month x thousand people read that page and it hopefully helped them.

Aha!

So we're talking specifically about content creators that publish for free in hopes of maximizing a number on their analytics? That's healthy neither for them nor the society at large. Or you mean people publishing content for free to make money off ads? Yeah, I don't mind that content to disappear entirely.

Note that outside of web publishing, it was never the expectation of an author to have any idea how many people read their work, much less get paid for every single "read event". They only got a lump sum or a fraction of first sale of a printed work - but had no insight or control over further circulation of parts of entirety of their works. Being able to resell your books or magazines, or give or lend it to friends, or borrow some from a library, are all good things.

All that was true before AI, and people found reasons to write new books, or to publish quality content on-line, for free and without advertising or telemetry. LLMs don't change that. If anything, they may reduce readership, not publication.

> I think much information will retreat to places like Discord or locked down login only versions of sites like Stackoverflow.

This has already been happening for the past couple years; LLMs, again, don't change anything here.

[detourdog]

The analytics is similar to happy customers if you separate the customers from the bots.

[detourdog]

I'm really struck how this is the first time I have seen a disincentive to freely share information on the internet.

I can't tell if I have aged out of some ideal or is it that the individual creative efforts are being homogenized into pseudo answers for someone to sell.

[supriyo-biswas]

Regarding the baker example, some form of compensation is eventually directed to the employees, the farmers etc. even though you could say there are many layers of indirection.

In case of LLMs, no compensation is directed to the person authoring the information. While it may not be a problem for the consumer of the information, it removes any incentives for the people authoring the information to continue doing so, which has long term consequences.

[Kostchei]

Depends what the incentives are. Some folks like the community- that doesn't change. A website like honestwargamer or goonhammer has a clan. Mostly because they are insightful and friendly. But if an AI scraped their content, it would have to build a better goonhammer? Maybe. But I bet it would have half a dozen nerds contributing and tinkering at the backend, painting the new minis that came out, talking about tournament results etc.. That is current, constant fresh relevant content, based on IRL activity. Very hard to replicate. For honestwargamer... Build a better twitch stream... that seems even less likely. they run a round and stream games, review results, collate stats. And then engage with the audience in twitch.

So when you say "contribute to the internet", this is what I consume and.. I'm sure there are similar examples in every niche- fishing, golf, coding, AI art creation ...

No I don't see this as gloomy scenario, and content creators- the goonhammers and honestwargamers, creatives, are still going to get paid (a bit, they were never rich), maybe in new ways.

[jaen]

That's a somewhat one-sided view. For gaming and entertainment, yes, people would do it anyway, since it's just fun, but these do not contribute much useful information to the collective consciousness anyway. Hobbies & creative communities will also survive.

OTOH, there are also plenty of technical blogs full of advanced content that is not "fun" to produce on its own, that are written to interact with a community of professionals (or juniors), and that might wither if engagement with actual human beings is reduced.

[vouaobrasil]

Yes, because it would be backward and limiting to do that. Note: I never said I don't want to give anything back - I said I don't personally care specifically about the author/publisher. I don't want to establish any relationship with them. If I'm paying them directly for something, I'm paying them for that thing - not also for relationship (which really is a sales channel), not also for being advertised to. If I'm paying some intermediary, then rewarding the maker is the intermediary's problem, not mine.

And I maintain that your attitude is one that makes the world worse. We should know where things come from and not have an anonymous transactional attitude towards it. Our technological civilization as you call it has led us to destruction with only a minority benefitting.

BTW, my favourite place to get bread is one in which they actually sell and bake it in store (a tiny market with its own oven).

[detourdog]

I don't know that I have a position yet. The problem I have is when a tech wizard says the tech is so complex nobody knows what is going on is never good.

>I do not want to be forced or prodded to establish relationships with creators or communities. I do not want their ads and upsells.

I feel the same way I lurked on HN for 7 years before signing up. I enjoy the lurking aspects of the internet.

I usually think the internet can survive anything.

This seems like the same disruption that Uber promoted to avoid regulation. Imagine all the great ideas we can generate and claim they are original to the unauditable AI thought process.

The last worst thing to happen to the internet IMHO was SEO. I sort think a schism may develop to the reality of the broadcast world and the narrowcast world.

I definitely think that valid uses exist.

[RandomLensman]

And the cost of creating the information you want should be borne by whom? Even if it isn't monetizeable IP, how to share the costs?

[TeMPOraL]

I don't have good answers. I have some high-level intuitions.

One of them is that creation costs of information are fixed, while its usefulness is unbounded, so it doesn't make sense to try and reward creators for each access/view/use, in perpetuity.

Secondly, there's a lot of information laundering going on - any random book I read carries between a few to few hundred references to prior written work. What I pay for the book goes to the author and the publishers, but AFAIK it doesn't go to any of the authors and publishers of works referenced in the book. Wikipedia takes this one step further, effectively turning all that information free.

Thirdly, AFAIK copyright explicitly does not cover information/knowledge - it covers specific works. So Google showing me an info box with a recipe scrapped from some site could technically fall afoul of the law - but an LLM generating me a recipe based on associations created from being trained on millions of recipes, this feels like it should be in the clear, at least from user's POV.

[RandomLensman]

I think that is a somewhat narrow view. Maybe to make the contrast sharper: Why should I contribute any information just so that it immediately gets monetized by a handful of LLM firms?

The new situation isn't the same as search as that wasn't there to hide information sources or to immediately convert information into useful things (texts, guides, etc.).

[TeMPOraL]

> Why should I contribute any information just so that it immediately gets monetized by a handful of LLM firms?

If this matters to you, then you shouldn't. But to flip this around: why should you care?

Unless you're doing some unique work targeting a global audience, the point when LLM gets trained on what you created is way outside space you'd normally care about. Trying to capture all the value your work generates does not lead to a good world.

Or maybe it's me who isn't profit-minded enough, but e.g. a lot of what I wrote on-line, including blog articles and commentary on Reddit and HN, has been used by search engines for free for a long time (over a decade, in some cases), and now is (most likely) part of the training corpora for LLMs. But I never believed, and still don't believe, that I'm entitled to some share of the gains LLMs (or search engines) make.

[RandomLensman]

This isn't so much about compensation, but why should I help enrich a large, even more direct rent seeker?

Valuable information in a way is becoming more valuable for the LLM provider, so I would expect a drop in high value information in the public domain.

[__loam]

A lot of people justifiably care because making that information is their livelihood. Your entitlement to the labor of others is gross.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> One of them is that creation costs of information are fixed, while its usefulness is unbounded, so it doesn't make sense to try and reward creators for each access/view/use, in perpetuity.

The word "creation" is loaded. No one "creates" content. They discover it hidden in some idea-space... occasionally even two people might discover the same thing. The same melody, the same verse of a poem, the same fragment of art.

The idea that one should be rewarded, but the other is slandered the infringer is amusingly dumb.

> but an LLM generating me a recipe based on associations created from being trained on millions of recipes, this feels like it should be in the clear, at least from user's POV

But how will we entrench the rent-seekers?

[detourdog]

The biggest reason I care/have fear about information I will share freely getting absorbed into AI is...

I definitely believe that the I could get sued for my own ideas. The chance of lawyer claiming AI say it is their idea sounds horrible.

[version_five]

There is a big potential role for open source or more specifically copyleft / free AI here that is released as a community project but can be monetized as well. The evidence from software is that there is lots of interest in contributing to such products.

[detourdog]

I'm organizing the publishing of my thoughts of technology development and design. This has been something I have been mulling for decades. Completely uncompensated. I'm not doing any of this for reasons I can understand it is just what I think about and do.

Originally I saw a website as a way to hang out a shingle. Until recently I was thinking I could just publish away and maybe someone would hire me based off the website.

Currently I don't feel the same way regarding publishing on the web. I will be me more guarded in what I share.

[Swizec]

> Even if it isn't monetizeable IP, how to share the costs?

The internet started thanks to ample government funding for research. So have many other technologies, including AI.

I wonder if there's a way we could all somehow pool our resources and use that to pay for common goods that we all use. What would we call such a scheme?

[RandomLensman]

We could definitely fund things. Or tax LLM firms in some broad way to redistribute to the respective societies for using their creations.

[dbmikus]

> I wonder if there's a way we could all somehow pool our resources and use that to pay for common goods that we all use. What would we call such a scheme?

Is this tongue in cheek? I think it's called the government and taxes! :)

[detourdog]

I want attribution if I inspire a thought in AI.

I'm surprised the nerve the issue has struck in me.

[martingalex2]

It isn’t clear to me (other than it’s an open engineering problem) why LLs couldn’t also include attribution as part of training. Also tracking attribution could lead to some insights on how its internal representations in vector space are created.

[detourdog]

That is true I see no reason obvious reason why the LL companies take pride in not being able to document ideation process. I have no justification but I feel it is deceitful not technical reasoning.

[TeMPOraL]

The issue here is that memorization of any distinguishable part of IP is an incidental aspect - those models aren't memorizing stuff, they're learning it. We don't expect people to keep track of the source of every single piece of information they encounter. It would arguably make learning impossible - as much for humans as for LLMs.

As an intuition pump, when I write "2+2 = " and you mentally complete it with "4", should I chastise you for not completing it with "4, as per ${your elementary class math textbook} and ${that other book you read as a kid}, corroborated by ${your first math teacher} and ${your parent} quoting ${some other work}"?

[thunderrabbit]

I have really enjoyed using https://phind.com, which includes attribution in its responses.

[supriyo-biswas]

Phind’s base model, which is GPT3.5/4 doesn’t itself do attribution, it’s made to do that with prompt engineering which provides the most relevant materials on the web based on a word embedding vector search, and then asks it to reference each source in the answer.

[theonlybutlet]

This is the only valid take against LLM's I've seen to date.

At the same time, could it not be construed as humanity leveling up? We've abstracted away that, now low, level of thought. Much like we don't have people pressing the button in the elevator. Most developers and writers are still better than an LLM, but its good enough to replace their input on simple tasks.

Writing is being commoditized much like other industries. The moment you release a new vacuum cleaner there's ten others that do the same thing and nobody is fussed over who invented it. People still know who to go for a premium vacuum though.

[RandomLensman]

If a handful of firms are indeed allowed to harvest he collective knowledge for rent seeking that would indeed be a shame.

[DennisP]

I've been wondering whether an LLM could list its sources, if the training data included source data for each document (perhaps in the form "The source of the following text is XYZ:")

[detourdog]

I have no doubt the last thing the LLM firms want is to attribute their sources. I always see the claim, heck we don't know where the ideas come from that is impossible.

[martingalex2]

Yes it’s just an engineering problem, there is no a priori reason not to do it.

[DennisP]

I'm not sure it's all that easy though. We don't entirely know how LLMs do some of the things they do, and we can't interpret what's in them. They don't internally look up particular sources, it's just a big mess of connection weights.

Maybe my simple scheme would be all it needs. Or maybe it needs some new breakthrough and right now nobody knows how to do it. I was hoping some resident expert could let me know.

[FeepingCreature]

That's a very big "just" given that there is no good way to train for this.

[DennisP]

Why not? I could see two ways it could work.

First, it seems possible that if sources were in the training data like I described, then understanding of sources could be an emergent capability, just because the LLM reads "the source of the following is X."

Second, maybe a trainer LLM could be tasked with reading the trainee's answers and any sources it provides, and judging whether the source is correct.

But I'm no expert, hence my question.

[FeepingCreature]

Well, you can train the LLM to "provide source", but LLMs are prone to hallucination. You run into the same problem with a trainer model; the trainer also has no way to confirm where the model actually got the answer from. One thing that may work is a fundamental architectural shift where the LLM looks up all its info as it needs it, and then you can just list the sources it actually used. Microsoft tried that with Bing, but it turns out the model will search for a website, read it, and then ignore what the website says and claim "according to this website, <some other belief>". So it's definitely not easy at any rate.

[DennisP]

Perhaps, but EleutherAI for example is a nonprofit that has trained several open source LLMs.

[_Algernon_]

Google has done this for years, by quoting what it thinks you want to the top of the search results. This is just the next step.