> Why should I contribute any information just so that it immediately gets monetized by a handful of LLM firms?
If this matters to you, then you shouldn't. But to flip this around: why should you care?
Unless you're doing some unique work targeting a global audience, the point when LLM gets trained on what you created is way outside space you'd normally care about. Trying to capture all the value your work generates does not lead to a good world.
Or maybe it's me who isn't profit-minded enough, but e.g. a lot of what I wrote on-line, including blog articles and commentary on Reddit and HN, has been used by search engines for free for a long time (over a decade, in some cases), and now is (most likely) part of the training corpora for LLMs. But I never believed, and still don't believe, that I'm entitled to some share of the gains LLMs (or search engines) make.
Perhaps there will be a drop in high value information in the public domain, but right now, I can't exactly see LLMs impacting the incentives for creation and sharing of that information. I don't see how LLMs would make someone go "oh well, AI is here, I might as well stop providing people with no-strings-attached high quality information", if the existence of search engines didn't make them stop already.
For years people have been making travel blogs based on where they've visited and the practical information they've discovered, like experiences of visiting attractions or good places to stay in cities or how they got from one place to another. They monetised with ads and affiliate links so they could travel more based on that income.
In LLM land, they get no monetisation any more because nobody visits their sites, instead the LLM just regurgitates the answers they found.
The search engines actively supported these authors, by sending them people who needed the answers they had.
So in LLM land this information goes away because the feedback loop of the traveller creating information which earns them money to continue travelling goes away.
A LOT of the useful information on the web was built on similar feedback loops and they go away in LLM land.
I consider this to be a problem on its own, but it's not relevant here because:
> In LLM land, they get no monetisation any more because nobody visits their sites, instead the LLM just regurgitates the answers they found.
That can't possibly be true, because if it were, there wouldn't be any travel blogs anymore today. All that travel spam has been made redundant approximately around the time Flickr was created, and every interesting location ever has been photographed from every interesting angle in a way neither me, nor you, nor your favorite travel blogger could ever hope to match. All the information they post has also been posted many times over by travel bloggers that came before.
The point being: travel information and photography is worthless commodity these days. Travel bloggers (or Instagrammers, or whatever) are not in the business of selling information. They're selling dreams and personal experiences. The photos and information are necessary as delivery vector ("social object"), but by themselves are worthless and not the point. The point is entertainment, and ideally getting you trapped in a parasocial relationship with the travel blogger/grammer, which gives them a recurring revenue stream.
> In LLM land, they get no monetisation any more because nobody visits their sites, instead the LLM just regurgitates the answers they found.
It's the same model as with most other ad-monetized social media publishing. People will keep visiting them for the same reason they visit them now, and for the same reason they have their favorite youtubers and tiktokers. LLMs and other generative models don't change anything here, at least not short-to-mid-term, because they can't convincingly replicate human connection and keep it up for long.
(Also, I personally don't buy that travel instagrammers can actually sustain their travel lifestyle through ads and affiliate marketing and sponsorship deals. I suspect most are funded in some way, whether by family wealth or by services performed while traveling around.)
> The search engines actively supported these authors, by sending them people who needed the answers they had. (...) A LOT of the useful information on the web was built on similar feedback loops and they go away in LLM land.
Hard disagree. The only feedback loop this created in practice is the one that displaces quality information from the Internet - the combination of SEO and ad-based monetization means the most scummy players are the ones with most money to stalk every conceivable search query. The results speak for themselves: making a Google query for pretty much any topic of interest to general population will give you only content marketing sites - results that carry negative knowledge, as in if you waste your time reading them, you'll come more misinformed about the topic than you were before. If LLMs make all that go away, I'm 100% for it.
As for "A LOT of the useful information" - nope, can't think of a single case where ad/affiliate-supported site was a good information source, vs. just displacing a better free source.
> As for "A LOT of the useful information" - nope, can't think of a single case where ad/affiliate-supported site was a good information source, vs. just displacing a better free source.
> Today stingynomads.com is our full-time business and main source of income.
Now please tell me in what way is this not an example of an ad/affiliate supported site that provides a lot of useful information and what non ad/affiliate based resource has it displaced that was better? Cause I'm doubting someone would write up a better guide than that, publish it and not monetise it.
Then perhaps they should find other means of livelihood, instead of preventing the rest of the world from making full use of the information and technology available to it.
They will and less information will be put into places that are freely accessible. If it's put anywhere at all it'll be put behind login only/paywalled/unscrapable places that LLM's can't access.
Why would they suddenly paywall information if they weren't already?
The way I see it, there are roughly three groups of information providers:
1. Those who do it pro bono - because they feel like its a worthwhile thing to do, or because they believe in by "pay it forward", or otherwise because they haven't even thought that what they share is worth trying to extract rent from.
2. Those who do it "for free", as a way to lure people to where they can expose them to ads, affiliate marketing, upsells, or other such schemes - making money by being predators using information as bait.
3. Those who just put up a paywall, being up front that they're selling information, not giving it away.
(There's also a weird "in-between" group of publishers that are almost like 1., except they're being funded out of marketing budgets of companies that figure providing quality information is good advertising.)
LLMs don't change anything for group #1. They may compete with group #3, but that's business as usual, not anything transformative. The group that's directly affected is #2, which also happens to be the group that produces all the garbage on the Internet, so I'm actually very happy to see them forced to find a more useful way of making money. Since group #2 produces "information" that's arguably negative knowledge on the net, it's likely to improve the amount of quality information you'll be able to find on-line.
Group #2 is the reason why there's so much information on the internet in the first place, especially free resources, for better or worse. I think it's pretty ignorant of you to say we can just discard one of the main ways people who create things on the internet get paid.
Ideas are copied by reading or hearing them. You can't own your ideas now, unless by own you mean horde. The perpetual creators rights you want extended are already artificial and require a non-trivial amount of our GDP to enforce and they still stifle future creation in a lot of areas.
Most people are paid for doing things every day, they don't get to create one thing and never work again. Expanding creators compensation laws is regressive and only helps a few elites survive job uncertainly, not the bulk of the people. We're better off limiting this sort of thing specifically to help everyone advance, share the knowledge.
LLMs aren't just a mere database containing indexed copies of other peoples' IP. AI companies are charging you for access to a sophisticated automated reasoning system, that necessarily had to memorize half of the Internet in the process of becoming capable of (some approximation of) reasoning.
(BTW. that you can even make a system this way is a huge breakthrough that's not being talked about enough.)
But even if they were a mere database indexing copies of other peoples' IP, then - copyright issues notwithstanding - the de-bullshittifying of information retrieval process alone would be service worth paying a lot of money for.
I think we are talking past each other. Let me try to narrow down where I think we disagree.
1) LLM providers harvest a common to create their product (don't think we disagree here much).
2) What happens next is where we diverge, I suspect: I think they will use their products to extract rents from that common while you think they will provide a fairly priced service.
Ultimately time will tell how the business model shakes out. Both could even be happening in sequence.
> 2) What happens next is where we diverge, I suspect: I think they will use their products to extract rents from that common while you think they will provide a fairly priced service.
Phrased like this, I can't really disagree with you. I don't expect a business to play fair in general, when it has a profitable option to do otherwise.
I guess my objection is more that right now, I don't see LLMs creating any kind of disincentive to publish quality content. In my eyes, LLMs are not a substitute for quality content in the first place - I see them more like using quality content to create a tool that competes with ad-hoc and shitty content.
That's not to say LLMs won't be able to eventually provide high-quality information on their own - but at that point, we'll have more important problems to deal with, such as chunk of humanity being rendered obsolete.
You're writing in English, which I doubt you came up with on your own, and I don't see you crediting the original speakers who developed your style or popularized the idioms you so casually use.
How do you claim the right to learn from the works of others and then demand government regulation and forceful intervention to keep from having to share whatever paltry innovations you may develop?
If this matters to you, then you shouldn't. But to flip this around: why should you care?
Unless you're doing some unique work targeting a global audience, the point when LLM gets trained on what you created is way outside space you'd normally care about. Trying to capture all the value your work generates does not lead to a good world.
Or maybe it's me who isn't profit-minded enough, but e.g. a lot of what I wrote on-line, including blog articles and commentary on Reddit and HN, has been used by search engines for free for a long time (over a decade, in some cases), and now is (most likely) part of the training corpora for LLMs. But I never believed, and still don't believe, that I'm entitled to some share of the gains LLMs (or search engines) make.