[saghm]

> But ChatGPT does nothing to scale copying somebody else's website. What are we talking about here, exactly?

"Make me a website that has the same content as that other one so I can get views instead" is not something you could could do generically and quickly with a free service a few years ago, but it is today. I'd argue that it's not beneficial to people who create original content or society at large that this is the case. There are plenty of other uses of LLMs, some of which are genuinely beneficial, some which are mixed, and some which are also a net negative. It seems pretty reasonable to me that issues like this are worth discussing, because as all of the comments on this article here show, people clearly are not on the same page about it.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Of the set of people who have the idea to do this, who think to ask an LLM for help, and who can pay for the hosting, how many do you think would have been stopped by googling wordpress tutorials? Even if you do think that was a high barrier to entry, a dozen people could plagiarize the whole internet. Plagiarism had already fully saturated scaling 15 years ago. Nobody in 2010 would think "my content was stolen and their SEO outranks me on google" was a line out of sci-fi; it was status quo. It sucked but nothing changed, it just still sucks. The price we pay for an open web.

This article adds nothing to the discussion and seems to be here just because of a provocative title. These same arguments happen under every other AI article, they don't need to happen here. Nobody reads the articles anyway, or else one of the myriad coherent, well-written, and/or insightful AI-critical articles of the month would be here instead.

[saghm]

> Of the set of people who have the idea to do this, who think to ask an LLM for help, and who can pay for the hosting, how many do you think would have been stopped by googling wordpress tutorials?

In the past six months I've organically come across at least a dozen instances of projects from people who had never coded before LLMs producing non-trivial projects that they could have learned enough to do themselves beforehand but they obviously never did. I feel like you're woefully underestimating how much faster these technologies have lowered the amount of initial investment needed in learning how to produce software for people who have never touched a line of code in their life before, and while that can be a boon when people who have good intentions but not enough free time to sink into up-front learning with no immediate payoff, it's also lowered the barrier for people who just want to make a quick buck off someone else's work; the type of person who would never bother with spending a month learning Python or how to customize a Wordpress instance just to be able to try to rip off some website for a couple hundred dollars of ad revenue can pretty easily start doing that if they want.

> Even if you do think that was a high barrier to entry, a dozen people could plagiarize the whole internet. Plagiarism had already fully saturated scaling 15 years ago. Nobody in 2010 would think "my content was stolen and their SEO outranks me on google" was a line out of sci-fi; it was status quo. It sucked but nothing changed, it just still sucks. The price we pay for an open web.

There clearly are people making original content on the internet and making money from it today. I'd argue that if you think it's logically impossible for further dilution to occur if new technology scales the ability to copy content more efficiently than it scales the ability to produce original content, more elaboration on why you're convinced that we're literally at rock bottom would be helpful. If you think that this could happen but this technology isn't it, I've laid out my reasons for why I think you're wrong, and I haven't yet been able to figure out what the basis is for your disagreement.

> This article adds nothing to the discussion and seems to be here just because of a provocative title. These same arguments happen under every other AI article, they don't need to happen here. Nobody reads the articles anyway, or else one of the myriad coherent, well-written, and/or insightful AI-critical articles of the month would be here instead.

Speak for yourself; I read this one, and I've read a number of articles posted here this week. If you don't, I'm not sure why you even care what articles get posted in the first place.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Copying someone's website contents is not a material programming project. I was thinking you'd say something like 90% of people would balk at this point and sure, maybe, but 10x as many people doing this doesn't matter because 1) that's still a lot of people and 2) people are not the bottleneck. Do you think the barrier blocked more than 90% of people? A dozen people doesn't make a difference here.

Yes, people can make money making original content. They can also make even more money making movies, music, and TV shows. Do you know any movies, songs, or TV shows that you can't find on the pirate bay? Of course not, piracy is fully saturated. Audiences prefer to support original creators, but this is not evidence we're not at rock bottom. LLMs make torrent production easier every step of the way, but there will not be a wave of piracy because the situation essentially cannot be worse.

When I say 'nobody reads the articles', that's an exaggeration. I'm definitely not speaking for myself, which should be clear from my criticizing the article. I mean, of the HN users who are not on the same page with one another that you point to as evidence the article should be here, the vast majority did not read the article and approximately none of them are engaging with its content.

I'm curious what you got from it and why you think it deserved to sit on the front page all day. I see a retread of LLM training complaints that may as well be plagiarism because it doesn't say anything I didn't hear in 2023, then a complaint about AI bros, followed by two sentences about what set them off that don't explain why they suspect ChatGPT or provide any material detail (and have nothing to do with the training complaint they opened with) before finally sending off by blaming Google for being victimized by SEO manipulation (which also rock-bottomed before LLMs). I'd understand if it was a famous person's low effort rant- I wouldn't be thrilled, but it would make sense- but what's the value here? What did 700 people see here that made them think other HN users need to see it? I'm still convinced the answer is "the title", a title that is not at all supported by the text and that you just told me you disagree with.