[protocolture]

>But now I'm really reluctant to give more stuff to the free web. Because the fact that it gets scraped and added to a pile of training data to later be monetized really rubs me the wrong way.

I dont get this.

You provided something for free to help people, but dont want to do that anymore because it might go into training data and help many many more people?

So far LLMs have been loan funded donations of loss leading services. They might never actually make their first dollar of profit.

Meanwhile ISPs the world over have been monetizing access to your content.

I feel like what you mean is that you want control over attribution.

[danlitt]

I think the sheer magnitude of the economics have made the scales fall from a lot of people's eyes. For decades people put stuff on the internet for free on the assumption it was "not worth" anything. It turns out that as soon as that commons can be enclosed, we can marshal hundreds of dollars for every single living human, to pay for this commons to be repackaged. The money is there, and we're happy to spend it, we just won't spend it on you.

[brookst]

So basically the “information is free, encyclopedias are expensive” phenomenon from the pre-internet days? Collection, collation, and distribution have more and different qualitative value than the sum of the individual bits.

[protocolture]

It remains to be seen whether the commons can be enclosed here.

[gapan]

I think he just means that AI companies are not people.