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GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

ybrikman.com

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Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#51

Post by loudmax »

worik wrote: post #49

The old model of selling eyeballs to advertisers was horrible I do not know what will replace it, but I will not miss websites trying to monetise my attention

The GenAI providers will certainly explore advertisement revenue. They're not doing much of it yet because they're trying to gain market share while they figure out what what pain threshold of advertising their users will tolerate.

People today may have a better sense of the downsides of ad-based services than we did when the internet was becoming mainstream. Back then, the minor inconvenience of seeing a few ads seemed worth all the benefits of access all the internet had to offer. And it probably was. But today the public has more experience with the downsides of relentless advertising optimization and audience capture, so there might be more business models based on something other than advertising. Either way, GenAI advertising is certainly coming.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#52

Post by nomadygnt »

cthalupa wrote: post #33

This is an article that I agreed with more reading the headline than I did when I finished reading the article itself. Stack Overflow peaked in 2014 before beginning it's downward decline. How is that at all related to GenAI? GPT4 is when we really started seeing these things get used to replace SO, etc., and that would be early 2023 - and indeed the drop gets worse there - but after the COVID era spike, SO was alrea…

I see what you mean, but the problem is that the LLM provider is trying to provide all the value from the book to the user without the user needing to look at the book at all. I agree if the LLM fails to do so then there is a market for the book. But the LLM provider is trying to minimize that as much as possible. And if the LLM succeeds at providing all the value of the book to the user, without providing any value to the book creator, then in the future there is no incentive to create the book at all, at which point the LLM has no value to provide, etc etc etc.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#53

Post by aogaili »

Companies will provide incentives for people to generate authentic content. Example X giving $1M reward for the top Articles. Because they can use it for training.

In fact, this might be overall good thing, because finally original content will be highly on demand since those companies now use to train their models. But we are probably just in a transition phase.

The other thing is that new sources of input will come, from LLM usage probably, so they cut the middle layer, users input in the LLM is also a form of input, and a hybrid co-creation between users/AI would generate content at much faster rater, which again would be used to train the model, and that would improve their quality.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#54

Post by aogaili »

znsksjjs wrote: post #3

We’ve seen decades of growing wage gaps and erosion of labors strength. The current elites don’t really care to enrich the people. Why would they care to do anything about this problem? They likely don’t see it as a problem at all. If they did actually stumble on AGI (assuming it didn’t eat them too) it would be used by a select few to enslave or remove the rest of us.

People should vote for more socialist governments pushing for UBI and automation tax on the companies..but which this comment get downvoted because of the capitalism religion.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#55

Post by cthalupa »

nomadygnt wrote: post #52
cthalupa wrote: post #33

This is an article that I agreed with more reading the headline than I did when I finished reading the article itself. Stack Overflow peaked in 2014 before beginning it's downward decline. How is that at all related to GenAI? GPT4 is when we really started seeing these things get used to replace SO, etc., and that would be early 2023 - and indeed the drop gets worse there - but after the COVID era spike, SO was alrea…

I see what you mean, but the problem is that the LLM provider is trying to provide all the value from the book to the user without the user needing to look at the book at all. I agree if the LLM fails to do so then there is a market for the book. But the LLM provider is trying to minimize that as much as possible. And if the LLM succeeds at providing all the value of the book to the user, without providing any value…

Sure - but I think this makes it a self equalizing problem, more than it eating it's own tail.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#56

Post by midas89 »

bitwize wrote: post #48
aeon_ai wrote: post #27

GenAI changes the dynamics of information systems so fundamentally that our entire notion of intellectual property is being upended. Copyright was predicated on the notion that ideas and styles can not be protected , but that explicit expressive works can. For example, a recipe can't be protected, but the story you wrap around it that tells how your grandma used to make it would be. LLMs are particularly challenging…

No. The idea-expression dichotomy is a common myth about copyright law, right up there with "if I already own the physical cartridge, downloading this game ROM is OK". The ONLY things that matter when determining whether copyright was infringed are "access" and "substantial similarity". The first refers to whether the alleged infringer did, or had a reasonable opportunity to, view the copyrighted work. The second is…

I think what you'll find is that most aren't happy with the current copyright law anyway (I include myself in that group) or don't understand it or don't agree with it, and thus will just shrug.

For example, copyright duration is far longer than most people think (life of author plus seventy (or plus ninety-five years if corporation). Corporations treat copyright as a way to create moats for themselves and freeze competitors than as a creative endeavor. Most creative works earn little to nothing anyway, while a tiny minority generate the most revenue. And it's not easy to get a copyright or atleast percieved to be easy, so again it incentivises those that can afford lawyers to navigate the legal environment. Also, enforcement of copyright law requires surviellance and censorship.

Truthfully I think there will be a time when people will look at current copyright law the same way we now look at guilds in the middleages.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#57

Post by cthalupa »

discreteevent wrote: post #50
mapontosevenths wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's being downvoted because it's a ridiculous premise. "The Elites" are human too. This attitude is nonsensical and child-like. Nobody is out here trying to round up the hippies and force them to live in some kind of pods to be harvested for their nutrients or whatever. This technology, like every prior technology, will cause some people to lose their jobs and some new jobs to be created. This will annoy people who…

Henry Ford didn't make his cars out of buggy whips. He made a new industry. He didn't cannibalize an existing one. You cannot make an LLM without digesting the source material.

> He made a new industry. He didn't cannibalize an existing one.

I don't see how you can claim the second part is true. Cars directly cannibalized other forms of self transportation.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#58

Post by keeda »

semiquaver wrote: post #9
furyofantares wrote: post #4

The article feels very confused to me. Example 1 is bad, StackOverflow had clearly plateaued and was well into the downward freefall by the time ChatGPT was released. Example 2 is apparently "open source" but it's actually just Tailwind which unfortunately had a very susceptible business model. And I don't really think the framing here that it's eating its own tail makes sense. It's also confusing to me why they're t…

The proposed solution is also pretty confused: > For each response, the GenAI tool lists the sources from which it extracted that content, perhaps formatted as a list of links back to the content creators, sorted by relevance, similar to a search engine This literally isn’t possible given the architecture of transformer models and there’s no indication it will ever be.

Technically correct, but the workarounds AI search engines use for grounding results could be a close enough approximation. Might not be accurate, but could be better than nothing.

Also Anthropic is doing interesting work in interpretability, who knows what could come out of that.

And could be snake oil, but this startup claims to be able to attribute AI outputs to ingested content: https://prorata.ai/

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#59

Post by georgefrowny »

worik wrote: post #43
cthalupa wrote: post #33

This is an article that I agreed with more reading the headline than I did when I finished reading the article itself. Stack Overflow peaked in 2014 before beginning it's downward decline. How is that at all related to GenAI? GPT4 is when we really started seeing these things get used to replace SO, etc., and that would be early 2023 - and indeed the drop gets worse there - but after the COVID era spike, SO was alrea…

I feel no nostalgia for Stackoverflow. I always found it very frustrating that for a person at the start of the learning curve it was "read only" Actually asking a naive question there was to get horribly flamed on the site. It, and the people using it, were very keen to explain how stupid you were being LLMs on the other hand are sweet and welcoming (to a fault) of the naive newbie I have been learning to use Shell…

It was very strange to me how StackOverflow consistently, every time it was mentioned everyone had exactly the same complaints and nothing changed. They can't have been unaware of the reputation or the sinking activity rates.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#60

Post by mapontosevenths »

lbrito wrote: post #30
mapontosevenths wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article gets the part about organic data dying off right. Look at Google SERP's for an example. Almost nobody clicks through to the source anymore, so ad revenue is drying up for them and people are publishing less or publishing in places that pay them directly and live behind a paywall like Medium. Which means Google has less data to work with. That said, what it misses is that the AI prompts themselves become a…

>AI prompts themselves become a giant source of data. Good point, but can it match the old organic data? I'm skeptical. For one, the LLM environment lacks any truth or consensus mechanism that the old SO-like sites had. 100s of users might have discussed the same/similar technical problem with an LLM, but there's no way (afaik) for the AI to promote good content and demote bad ones, as it (AI) doesn't have the concep…

> (AI) doesn't have the concept of correctness/truth

They kind of do, and it's getting better every day. We already have huge swatches of verifiable facts available to them to ground their statements in truth. They started building Cyc in 1984, and Wikipedia just signed deals with all the major players.

The problem you're describing isn't intractable, so it's fairly certain that someone will solve it soon. Most of the brightest minds in society are working on AI in some form now. It's starting to sound trite, but today's AI's really are the worst that AI will ever be.

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