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You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

newyorker.com

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Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#81

Post by rafram »

rpgwaiter wrote: post #44
rafram wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of attribution doesn’t tell you anything. If they’re licensing their images from a stock photo site, attribution likely isn’t required.

Hadn’t thought about that, you make a good point. However in that case the author didn’t feel it necessary to explicitly say the image is not AI generated, which means they likely share very different views about AI artwork and I’ll probably avoid. Even without that caveat, if they feel it beneficial to pay for stock photos for an article I’m probably good giving it a pass. Most major stock media companies are buying…

Generally speaking, the human brain likes pretty pictures, and we're more likely to be engaged by an article if it has a pretty picture. Text-only sites don't draw as many eyeballs. Sad but true!

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#82

Post by _heimdall »

em-bee wrote: post #74
_heimdall wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you were homeschooled and it went poorly for you, was your takeaway that it could never be done well? What did you find that makes homeschooling always worse than trusting the local, likely poorly paid and appreciated, state educators?

What did you find that makes homeschooling always worse we all live by the experience of our childhood. it is pervasive, and influences us in ways that we can't escape. i don't know what the parent commented experienced. but most likely they have not experienced bad regular schools, nor seen well working homeschooling. so their own homeschooling experience probably is all they have to go on. i struggle as a parent be…

Thanks for sharing here, its always interesting to hear a different person's experience/story. With regards to public schooling I'll share my anecdotal experience, as you mentioned I can't compare directly to homeschooling since I only ever went to public school.

I grew up in a pretty well off area, by no means was it a rich area but solidly middle to upper middle class. My public schools were pretty well funded and maintained, the teachers I had were very hit or miss though.

I had a handful of really good teachers in high school, maybe 3 out of the 25 or so different teachers I had. I had at least as many that were down right awful and had no business teaching. The rest were somewhere in the middle, they did seem to care about their job but weren't very good teachers and were mostly just teaching to the test.

That is my biggest issue with how public schools are run. Public education is made into such a specific process of how students are taught, what they are taught, and how they are tested and evaluated that the education seems better suited to developing robots rather than adults. The remnants of an educational system designed to produce factory workers are still very noticeable in my opinion.

I saw plenty of my peers struggle in school because they weren't interested in the topics they were forced to learn and weren't offered the chance to engage with what they actually enjoyed. Others struggled because the teachers we did have didn't understand the materials very well and weren't able to teach lessons in different ways for different students (I always noticed this most in math classes).

Homeschooling is interesting to me, if and when we have kids, because (a) I experienced way too many bad teachers in what was comparatively a pretty good school system and (b) I don't prefer the idea of the state taking such direct control over what, how, and when kids are taught. It definitely isn't for everyone though, totally agree there and I've seen friends and relatives bounce between public schools and homeschooling as they struggled with making homeschooling work for them.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#83

Post by _heimdall »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #69
_heimdall wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what? If you want to profit, do something to create value. Write a book. Start a paid newsletter. Create a startup. Put on a show and charge admission. Nobody is stopping you. I believe that the GP's complaint is that their content online is actually being scraped and turned into value for companies, they would want compensation for it. I'm personally of two minds on this, posting public content online inc…

> I believe that the GP's complaint is that their content online is actually being scraped and turned into value for companies, they would want compensation for it. And the comment directly addresses that. If someone creates a valuable thing and it has a minuscule pinch of your content inside it, you shouldn't be complaining or demanding payment. That's how participating in culture is supposed to work. When someone c…

That's a totally reasonable take, though it is just one opinion. I wouldn't tell someone they can't complain or feel entitled to payment for the value they created, though I bet we both agree that posting publicly online offers no expectation of payment by anyone coming across your content.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#84

Post by p0w3n3d »

I think one could hypothetical create a preamble invisible to human which would overload the LLM reading one's article.

Like Rick and Morty did in simulation.

At least it would cost a lot more to harvest one's article for the harvesting company

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#85

Post by JohnFen »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #69
_heimdall wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what? If you want to profit, do something to create value. Write a book. Start a paid newsletter. Create a startup. Put on a show and charge admission. Nobody is stopping you. I believe that the GP's complaint is that their content online is actually being scraped and turned into value for companies, they would want compensation for it. I'm personally of two minds on this, posting public content online inc…

> I believe that the GP's complaint is that their content online is actually being scraped and turned into value for companies, they would want compensation for it. And the comment directly addresses that. If someone creates a valuable thing and it has a minuscule pinch of your content inside it, you shouldn't be complaining or demanding payment. That's how participating in culture is supposed to work. When someone c…

Since the web was widely scraped to train LLMs, I have to assume that the entirety of what I had up on the web was included. That's more than a "miniscule pinch". I consider it to be wholesale abuse. For me, money doesn't enter into it at all.

However, there's literally nothing I can do about it aside from withdrawing from the public web -- which is what I've done, aside from writing comments here. Until/unless there is some sort of effective way of defending against the crawlers, the open web is no longer a suitable place to publish anything.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#86

Post by seanhunter »

rpgwaiter wrote: post #23
joe_the_user wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic - I'm pretty sure OpenAI trained GPT-3+ on every single bit of data they could find, so they probably included a bunch of stuff I've written here already (though it is minuscule fraction of their vast corpus of course). Losing anonymity is something I'd be much more worried about overall (not that it's entirely separate I don't think it's the s…

There’s many good reasons, but for me it’s that I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts that have no intention of profit sharing. When I make a Youtube video and companies run ads on it, I get a piece of that pie (assuming I meet the requirements, etc.). That same video fed into Gemini so google can charge for AI video generation? I get nothing, Google makes bank. As a user I can pay for YouTube premium and…

I'm pretty sure for antitrust reasons Google is (ironically) about the only AI company who is not training generative AI on youtube content. So when you make a youtube video and people train AI on your video and generate stuff using it you only get 1 click of benefit out of it from their first download.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#87

Post by [deleted] »

Barrin92 wrote: post #25
doctorpangloss wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to make any forecast about "spaces" "prone to AI slop," whatever that means, besides social networks that you personally do not like, in aggregate or individually. TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking…

> If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking This isn't even factually correct, the New York Times has done well, and grown over the last decade. In particular their move in the early 2010s towards paywalled premium subscription content, away from advertising, which was lambasted at the time, was in hindsight a very smart move. Yes, in the aggregate premium offering…

[deleted]

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#88

Post by Dylan16807 »

JohnFen wrote: post #85
Dylan16807 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe that the GP's complaint is that their content online is actually being scraped and turned into value for companies, they would want compensation for it. And the comment directly addresses that. If someone creates a valuable thing and it has a minuscule pinch of your content inside it, you shouldn't be complaining or demanding payment. That's how participating in culture is supposed to work. When someone c…

Since the web was widely scraped to train LLMs, I have to assume that the entirety of what I had up on the web was included. That's more than a "miniscule pinch". I consider it to be wholesale abuse. For me, money doesn't enter into it at all. However, there's literally nothing I can do about it aside from withdrawing from the public web -- which is what I've done, aside from writing comments here. Until/unless there…

The complaints I see are almost always aimed at the output of an LLM, and that only contains a significant amount of a work when it breaks.

Going after the LLM itself, not the output, is a lot trickier. Anyone can make a big database of public website contents. And if they use it to make a search engine for example, that gets classified as entirely legitimate. If we're excluding the output of the LLM, what's the difference?

Also if you scrunch down into a small model, it mathematically can't contain very much of the input text.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#89

Post by _heimdall »

JohnFen wrote: post #85
Dylan16807 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe that the GP's complaint is that their content online is actually being scraped and turned into value for companies, they would want compensation for it. And the comment directly addresses that. If someone creates a valuable thing and it has a minuscule pinch of your content inside it, you shouldn't be complaining or demanding payment. That's how participating in culture is supposed to work. When someone c…

Since the web was widely scraped to train LLMs, I have to assume that the entirety of what I had up on the web was included. That's more than a "miniscule pinch". I consider it to be wholesale abuse. For me, money doesn't enter into it at all. However, there's literally nothing I can do about it aside from withdrawing from the public web -- which is what I've done, aside from writing comments here. Until/unless there…

There's never going to be a way to defend against crawlers and still have an open web. Good actors may respect conventions like a robots.txt file but that's ultimately just a polite request.

You could get further trying to block by user agent headers, known crawler IPs, etc but then you're just taking up the same fight advertisers have with ad blockers.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#90

Post by [deleted] »

shprd wrote: post #78
gruez wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but are you objecting to AI training because companies are benefiting while you're being uncompensated, or think AI training is fundamentally bad? Your previous comment suggests it's the former, but by the same logic you shouldn't comment online either, because that also benefits the company and is uncompensated.

Users are here because they want to, they chose to participate in this community. You can stop using HN at any minute and Ycombinator will not chase you. But AI companies on the other hand took the internet hostage. They stole any creative work, code, art, and literally any data they could their hands on with no regard to license or consent from users. No one actively opted-in to let AI companies have their personal…

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