>Your intentions might not have been to make money, but you were creating social credit that could be redeemed for a higher and better paying job. With GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc., you are adding to your resume, but with AI, you literally get nothing in return for contributing.
I guess I never really thought about having a dog in this race (effectively being a tradesman as I am, and not a "content creator"). I did write a ton on ServerFault.com. I guess I am in this unwittingly.
I'm a little salty about the LLM training on my Stack Exchange answers but I knew what I was getting in to when I signed-up. I don't really subscribe to notions of "intellectual property" so I don't feel strongly on that front.
It just feels impolite and rude. More like plagiarism and less like copyright infringement. A matter of tact between people, versus a legal matter.
The way LLMs turn the collective human expression into "slop" that "they" then "speak" with a tone of authority about feels scummy. It feels like a person who has read a few books and picked up the vernacular and idiom of a trade confidently lying about being an expert.
I can't attribute that scumminess to the LLM itself, since it's just a pile of numbers. I absolutely attribute that scumminess to the companies making money from them.
re: Stack Exchange social credit and redeeming it - I'm not a good self-promoter, and admittedly ServerFault.com is a much smaller traffic Stack Exchange site than Stack Overflow, but begin the top-ranked user on the site for 5+ years didn't confer much in the way of real-world benefits. I had a ton of fun though.
(I got a tiny bit of name recognition from some IRL people and a free trip to the Stack Overflow offices in NYC one time. I definitely got a boost of happiness every time a friend related a story to the effect of: "I ran into an issue, search-engined it, and came up with something you wrote on Server Fault that solved my problem.")
> I absolutely attribute that scumminess to the companies making money from them.
so if they weren't making money (or weren't planning on making any), then would it still be "scummy"?
In other words, do you feel that they're only scummy because they're able to profit off the work (where as you didn't or couldn't)? Why isn't this sour grapes?
"sour grapes" assumes that both I, and the person using this information, intended to make money and they were better at it.
The reality is many wikipedia, stack overflow, etc contributors want information to be free and correct, and don't want money, so it's not sour grapes, it's rather annoyance at a perversion of the intent and vision.
I contributed to wikipedia because I want a free reservoir of human knowledge to benefit all, I want the commons to be rich with information.
Anyone making money off it is scummy not because I couldn't figure out how to, but because they are perverting the intention of information to be free.
Instead, we've ended up with one of the main interfaces to wikipedia being a paid often inaccurate chatbot for a for-profit company which doesn't attribute wikipedia and burns down forests as a side-effect.
This isn't sour grapes, this is recognizing exploitation of the commons.
I might suggest that exploiting the commons does not diminish the value or accessibility of the commons. Indeed, it spreads knowledge faster.
Equally I'd suggest that the commons is not free. It has to be paid for by someone. Wikipedia exists by begging for donations. Google sells advertising (as does StackOverflow as job listings) etc.
I mean, the first carpenter who took "common knowledge" and wrote a (paid for) book did the same thing. Knowledge is definitely not free, and it costs money to spread it.
(As an aside, I've been using LLMs for free all year.)
All through history people have exploited the commons. The printing press, books, universities, education, radio, television, through computers, Google, sites like SO. LLMs are just the latest step in a long long line of history.
If you know of the commons, you near certainly, know of the “tragedy of the commons’. It is VERY clear that exploiting the commons diminishes its value.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Over grazing common pasture land, results in its decimation.
There are national and international level bodies required to ensure we dont kill all the rhinos. Hell - that we dont kill all the people.
The printing press, universities, education - these are NOT commons in many places, nor do they function as commons. Let alone function as LLMs.
> It is VERY clear that exploiting the commons diminishes its value.
does it diminish, if the commons is knowledge based, such as online sources? Those sources does not truly disappear after the information is extracted and placed into an LLM.
Unlike a physical commons, which has limitations on use, informational commons don't.
So the fact that someone else is able to gain more value out of the knowledge than others is not a reason to make them scummy - as if they alone don't deserve access to the knowledge that you claim should be free.
If contributors, after seeing how someone else is able to make profits off previously freely available knowledge, feel that they somehow now suddenly deserve to be paid after the fact, then i dont know how to say it but to call it sour grapes.
I guess I never really thought about having a dog in this race (effectively being a tradesman as I am, and not a "content creator"). I did write a ton on ServerFault.com. I guess I am in this unwittingly.
I'm a little salty about the LLM training on my Stack Exchange answers but I knew what I was getting in to when I signed-up. I don't really subscribe to notions of "intellectual property" so I don't feel strongly on that front.
It just feels impolite and rude. More like plagiarism and less like copyright infringement. A matter of tact between people, versus a legal matter.
The way LLMs turn the collective human expression into "slop" that "they" then "speak" with a tone of authority about feels scummy. It feels like a person who has read a few books and picked up the vernacular and idiom of a trade confidently lying about being an expert.
I can't attribute that scumminess to the LLM itself, since it's just a pile of numbers. I absolutely attribute that scumminess to the companies making money from them.
re: Stack Exchange social credit and redeeming it - I'm not a good self-promoter, and admittedly ServerFault.com is a much smaller traffic Stack Exchange site than Stack Overflow, but begin the top-ranked user on the site for 5+ years didn't confer much in the way of real-world benefits. I had a ton of fun though.
(I got a tiny bit of name recognition from some IRL people and a free trip to the Stack Overflow offices in NYC one time. I definitely got a boost of happiness every time a friend related a story to the effect of: "I ran into an issue, search-engined it, and came up with something you wrote on Server Fault that solved my problem.")