[malwrar]

I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore.

Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, now it’s a bunch of omniscient robots and maybe half of those original people are using the robots instead.

[niek_pas]

This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it.

I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?

[TeMPOraL]

Dog in the Manger.

I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share".

There's hardly any other way to read all the proclamations of quitting to do anything because "cognitive dark forest" (itself a butchering of the original idea of "dark forest" across so many orthogonal dimensions in parallel, that it starts to look like a latent space of a transformer model).

[chromacity]

Conversely, some people feel entitled to 100% of the value created by others. Oh, you wrote a book? Too bad, it's a part of my training data set now.

Downloading public stuff off the internet with no regard for the creator's wishes or license is bad enough, but we have many people here who defended AI companies seeding models with pirated content.

The internet is a social contract. AI is not the first thing to try and erode it for profit, but it's by far the most aggressive one.

[pc86]

Putting a book into a training data set does not take 100% of the value created by the author. You could make a convincing argument that since the LLM was never going to purchase the book, and the number of people who would have purchased the book but now won't because it's included in the training data is effectively zero, that no value was lost at all.

Licenses are legal documents and are usually treated as such, but "the creator's wishes" are irrelevant without case law, legislation, or licensing to back it up. And jurisdiction - show me a license that doesn't stand up in court in my home jurisdiction and I'll show you a license I won't care if I break or not.

[joquarky]

Let's not forget the basis here: To promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

Everything else is window dressing. The fact that licenses even exist to conditionalize use goes against this grain and creates far too much overreach that spoils the spirit of the basis of copyright law.

[trollbridge]

I don't like the idea that I'm restrained by intellectual property laws, but that other powerful entities are not. That is fundamentally unfair.

[coldpie]

> I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person

Rather, I don't like that the terms I released my work under aren't being respected. I believe LLMs are derivative works of the pieces they are trained on. I spent more than ten years working on open source code, and now the models that were trained on my GPL'd code are being used to make proprietary code against the terms of the license. I find this reprehensible.

While it wasn't an explicit term of release, generally I did not expect anyone to get any kind of financial value from the blog posts I wrote. I just wrote them for fun & maybe others would find them interesting. Now, LLMs have been trained on my blog posts and are generating financial value for some of the worst human beings on the planet who are using their money to murder, demean, and maim other humans.

I now know that blog posts I wrote for fun are putting money in some sociopath's bank account, and the GPL'd code I wrote is being used to create software to exploit me & other users. If I continue to create things publicly, it will be used against me and other people, and there's nothing I can do to stop it except to stop creating things. It's all very disrespectful & demoralizing.

[thedevilslawyer]

> I believe LLMs are derivative works of the pieces they are trained on

That's your opinion with 0 legal backing. IMO, calling them derivative is untenable logically for anyone with some understanding of LLM/transformer architecture.

[robocat]

You desire a sharing community, but the takers/defectors are destroying that community.

Copyleft attempts to create a pool of code that forces sharing. But it broadly fails because you simply can't force antisocial people to be good sharers (plus source code usually isn't as valuable as we hope).

With any gifting/sharing, you have to accept that some of it will be abused. It is hard to filter for only community minded people who don't greedily abuse, and ideally who give freely.

I don't believe my circle of friends are becoming more selfish. I'm unsure what I would say about the rest of the world.

[martin-t]

I am in exactly the same boat, down to the ~10 years. Only difference is I ended up picking AGPL for my later works. Like it made a difference...

The whole situation disgusts me.

- They expect me to pay for access to my own stolen code.

- Arguing stealing should be legal because China does it and if US companies don't, they'll be left behind.

- People like the poster you're replying to who argue you're not entitled to 100% of the value you create - completely ignoring that the value will go to some-one and that some-one is already much richer than any of us and getting richer faster while providing less value, if any. Honestly, this makes me wanna track these people down just to find out if they're also in the owner class and are just secretly laughing at us while pretending "we're all equal" or if they're workers who genuinely don't understand how much they're being exploited and how much worse it's gonna get.

- People don't give a fuck. Colleagues happily using "AI" because it "saves time", not realizing if this continues, we'll all be without jobs and the only way this was possible was by stealing from each other and most of us being OK with it.

Honestly, I am hoping for a revolution. A proper one, with guns if need be, but most importantly, where people get what they deserve in full.

Last time this happened was during the second industrial revolution, so many people got fucked so hard, entire countries turned to communism. That was a bad idea but we can do better. It's not (just) about how owns the means of production but who owns the product. Even if "AI" turns into actual AI, as long as it's built on top of our work, we should own it - that means both controlling it and getting paid proportionally to our contribution.

The currently rich people can negotiate what fraction they get paid if they show us they're providing value. Of course, only after we get back what they stole and unless they end up executed. The value of a human life is apparently $7.5M so anybody who steals more than that should logically get a death sentence.

But none of this will happen, people are too stupid and will get manipulated by a charismatic liar like every single time before.

[joquarky]

How did they steal your code? Don't you have backups?

[martin-t]

They used it against my consent. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=steal+meaning&ia=web

[martin-t]

What do you think is the end state? What will society look like 5 or 15 years down the line if somebody creates actual AGI, according to you?

[martin-t]

So who should the value go to?

[TeMPOraL]

Whoever can materialize it. That's how societies grow and thrive, how a civilization is built - people building things, and instead of capturing 100% of the value, creating a surplus for others to build on top.

It's not like any of us ever did anything completely new, isolated and unaffected by influences and contributions of those around us, and those who came before us. Trying to capture 100% of the value and getting up in arms about "freeloaders" is a deeply antisocial form of greed, and usually the thing people accuse companies of doing, claiming it's a hallmark of "late stage capitalism".

[martin-t]

So you're saying that the most advantaged people (who control the most money to use for advertising and who can buy companies and their network effects at will) should get the most benefit?

> how a civilization is built

No, civilization is built by people who do actual work. Some of that work is services/research and building/maintaining stuff, some of that work is connecting supply and demand. The reward should go to the people doing the work according to how much work they do and their skill level.

> late stage capitalism

Nah, that's the idea that money should be able to create more money without any input of work. And before you say they made that money through work, no they didn't, they either inherited it or got into a position of power from which they can take a disproportionate cut.

[martin-t]

I see this take a lot and I think it's harmful in ways you might not realize.

Even if it's true and you genuinely have nothing to hide, have nothing to lose from being profiled, there are people who absolutely do.

Look at the radicalization happening in countries around the world, including the USA. It might be OK to be part of a minority or to have an uncommon opinion. A few years pass and suddenly the same person is considered an undesirable, a foreign agent, a terrorist or a deviant.

I've posted a lot of shit online which can be connected to my person and which could label me as any of the groups above. But that's a decision I make for myself. I would never dare make it for others or claim that they should not care about surveillance and take the same risks I do.

I know a guy from russia who lost his job because he expressed an antiwar opinion. The same thing can happen in the US or and other country you consider civilized. The US proto-dictator is already sending death-threats to people who only expressed the opinion that soldiers can refuse illegal orders. Neither you or me can know what will happen next.

[malwrar]

There’s definitely a fear of repercussions (I’ve been commenting on this site for over a decade now! Who knows what’s in my history...) but importantly I actually take some pride in many of the comments I write. What drew me to this site originally was how high quality everyone’s perspectives and articulation was, and I suppose I view the writing voice I’ve nurtured here as unique and special to me. It’s not about compensation, I’d just hate to see some future chatbot sound 1/1,000,000th like me I guess? Hard feeling to describe, but I’d rather just not be globbed in and instead express myself in ways that aren’t profitable or feasible to copy.

[simianwords]

HN always offered the data to anyone, what changes now? How does it matter if it is LLM's that is consuming your data. What a strange attitude.

[satvikpendem]

HN comments have always been public, I don't really understand this thought process. The robots also aren't going to care about some individual user, it'd be more of an agglomeration of everyone's comments.

[progbits]

I've heard it phrased as: Would you rather LLM trained on your comments, or one trained on facebook comments.

Obviously that's a false dichotomy and a pretty defeatist attitude. But it does have a point.

[philipwhiuk]

I think the immediate term action is to viciously block all crawlers.

Writing a blog yes, feeding the beast no.

[ArcHound]

This sounds like a nice principled stance, but you won't get any traffic with this approach. That's demotivating - to me blogging is a tight balance of exploration, learning, improving and feedback. I'm not able to write without considering how this impacts the reader - removing all readers breaks the process for me.

[lstodd]

Yeah, everyone went on "blocking all crawlers" end result being half of internet inaccessible over vpns. Good job, people.