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by supriyo-biswas 1064 days ago
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.
1 comments
Kostchei 1064 days ago
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.

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jaen 1064 days ago
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.

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