First they came for writers and I didn't say anything because I wasn't a writer.
Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
#52I am reminded somewhat of the ride & delivery apps here. While they did use tech to enable some cool things like demand pricing and efficient route planning, a big part of their innovation really came from using that tech to shovel most of the risk and cost of providing the service onto independent contractors. LLMs are a genuinely exciting technology, but I am worried that a part of what they enable will turn out to…
> If you train your AI on a bunch of someone elses work, you can make it produce something very simiilar As a blogger of 10+ years this has been very interesting to realize. I can use ChatGPT to write really good first drafts because “in the style of Swizec Teller” works as a prompt. The results are way better than the usual generic corporate drone style of output. BUT! And this is an important but. The insights it p…
As a blogger, would you consider that approach to produce content? Don’t you find it incredibly boring and uninspiring?
Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
#53Big media companies go fuck yourself. That nightmare scenario, for Levin, would turn a Food & Wine review into a simple text recommendation of a bottle of Malbec. If there is just one wine review on the web which recommends Malbec, AI will not start recommending it. If there are many such reviews, then yes, AI will tell you "Many reviews recommend Malbec.". Just like a human can tell you about what they learned, our…
That is not correct. LLMs have no inventory of their input datasets. If you give it a billion reviews recommending Malbec, it does not know that many reviews recommend Malbec. It simply has a very good comprehension of what a Malbec review looks like.
In order to know that many reviews recommend Malbec, it needs to be taught this fact specifically, or infer it from context.
Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI is not my “brother” nor is it a human. This is a predictive model controlled by a for profit business and yea, they should be paying out if they are training on data owned by someone.
>they should be paying out if they are training on data owned by someone Virtually everything you "know" is because of current and past humans. Have you been paying everyone for all of that? If you want to be a great author and you read books by great writers.. then become a successful writer, are you paying all those authors for training you? I realize there is a difference with being able to absorb bulk data and al…
But you do pay for all of that in todays society.
Teachers are paid, tuition to schools is paid, feedback from tutors is paid, textbooks are paid for, copies of books are paid for, movies and TV are paid for. The experience you learn on the job is paid for via yours or your coworker’s salary.
I get the argument that it’s not copying it’s learning, but it’s also very different than a human learning by observation.
And if learning weights is okay, is it okay to train an AI with the structure designed to reproduce Shrek, then sell the AI? I think ShrekAI would be illegal in most countries. It’s a blurry question that we need to think about.
Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
#55I am reminded somewhat of the ride & delivery apps here. While they did use tech to enable some cool things like demand pricing and efficient route planning, a big part of their innovation really came from using that tech to shovel most of the risk and cost of providing the service onto independent contractors. LLMs are a genuinely exciting technology, but I am worried that a part of what they enable will turn out to…
Taxi drivers already were independent contractors.
And taxi drivers themselves caused Uber to be so popular.
The amount of times I've gotten into a cab in London before Uber and the cabbie was like: "Cash only". What's that machine for then? "Credit card machine down". Yea right...
I absolutely hate what Uber did with 'contractors' but I cannot deny the fact that I like being able to travel for work without having to worry about whether the cab has a credit card machine or not.
Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
#56Presumably OpenAI and others (for the most part) are checking the licenses for content they use in training? Let’s say for example that they trained on the content of the entire archive of the New York Times… isn’t it safe to say they’d have purchased a license for that content from NYT? Wouldn’t “commercial use” cover this? Seems like the publishers just want a piece of the money because they want a piece of the mon…
I don't think that's a safe presumption at all. Getty, e.g., claims to have found their watermark in the output of Stable Diffusion. More broadly, it's not a settled question of what license you need. The article presents a perspective that LLMs "would turn a Food & Wine review into a simple text recommendation of a bottle of Malbec, without attribution." I doubt that anyone has a license to republish the entire arch…
> At the other extreme, I can "train" myself on...
Well, how much harm would you, a single person who also needs to earn a living and probably wishes to write your own original content, be for the original author?
Compare that to a datacenter full of servers ready to output millions of articles per minute in the exact style of the original author for a per-article cost close to zero.
Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
#57I am reminded somewhat of the ride & delivery apps here. While they did use tech to enable some cool things like demand pricing and efficient route planning, a big part of their innovation really came from using that tech to shovel most of the risk and cost of providing the service onto independent contractors. LLMs are a genuinely exciting technology, but I am worried that a part of what they enable will turn out to…
The only thing that's copying is a copy. Copyright has never ever covered style.
That's a view of copyright that predates Williams v. Bridgeport Music.
Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
#58I am reminded somewhat of the ride & delivery apps here. While they did use tech to enable some cool things like demand pricing and efficient route planning, a big part of their innovation really came from using that tech to shovel most of the risk and cost of providing the service onto independent contractors. LLMs are a genuinely exciting technology, but I am worried that a part of what they enable will turn out to…
I'm a mod/admin on a topic site, similar to HN in structure... one of the posts I removed a few weeks ago literally made me feel ill... it was a guide on setting up a website, then using an LLM to generate hundreds of "articles" for said site.
I've started seeing content sites that are obviously generated content looking at it... mostly in terms of recipe content for lower carb, or sugar free... some list ingredients, but no measurements, others list directions that don't match ingredients. TBH, these kinds of activities make the internet less useful overall.
Between the above and sock puppet accounts, I can't help but think it may be a time to return to self-hosted systems like the BBSes of the 80's and early 90's. I know some still exist, but they're mostly around those that were into the tech, or otherwise into the older turn based text games or artwork. I know there's various systems from discorse to lemmy that are a bit more modern. I can't help but think something closer to a single server version of Facebook Groups +_Chat might go a long way... not even federated, but single-interrest groups that aren't beholden to a larger org (reddit, etc).
Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you train your AI on a bunch of someone elses work, you can make it produce something very simiilar As a blogger of 10+ years this has been very interesting to realize. I can use ChatGPT to write really good first drafts because “in the style of Swizec Teller” works as a prompt. The results are way better than the usual generic corporate drone style of output. BUT! And this is an important but. The insights it p…
As a blogger, would you consider that approach to produce content? Don’t you find it incredibly boring and uninspiring?
> Don’t you find it incredibly boring and uninspiring?
That depends. For me the fun part is in producing the novel insight. But nobody wants to read 5 bullet points and they wouldn't get it either.
Turning those 5 bullet points into a narrative that guides readers towards understanding, that part feels like work. If AI can create the skeleton that I then edit into good writing, that feels like a win.
The writing process for me goes something like this: 1) Read a bunch of books, 2) Percolate/simmer/gestate for weeks, 3) Observe reality and seek anecdotes, 4) Simmer some more, 5) Wake up one day with 4 insightful bullet points, 6) Turn that into 600+ words (this part feels like work)
Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI
#60I am reminded somewhat of the ride & delivery apps here. While they did use tech to enable some cool things like demand pricing and efficient route planning, a big part of their innovation really came from using that tech to shovel most of the risk and cost of providing the service onto independent contractors. LLMs are a genuinely exciting technology, but I am worried that a part of what they enable will turn out to…
I'm a mod/admin on a topic site, similar to HN in structure... one of the posts I removed a few weeks ago literally made me feel ill... it was a guide on setting up a website, then using an LLM to generate hundreds of "articles" for said site. I've started seeing content sites that are obviously generated content looking at it... mostly in terms of recipe content for lower carb, or sugar free... some list ingredients…
To the above, have thought about trying to create some kind of turn-key option or close to it that can run on Cloudflare workers + D1 or similar... just to let people get started relatively inexpensively.