There has always been those of course, but I think they will just end up becoming the default, rather then the fringes. And the thing with these smaller communities is that they are far less tolerant to their hosting platforms pulling dumb shit (like stating they will train AI's on the comunities content).
It really can't be overstated just how much it's come to dominate the entire site, skimming the frontpage now I immediately spotted a generic Midjourney-core image and the creator has posted 4100 pieces to date after joining... two months ago. 68 uploads every day on average.
People just use it as a hosting platform
Sounds more like a UX issue that you can see galleries
This made real.
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 exclude their presence on social media itself.
If anything we already live in a post-scarcity world with regards to engaging content, starting a few years before the advent of generative AI. Why would AI generated content reverse that trend? Isn't TikTok's feed algorithm agnostic to whether a video is AI slop or user created? Isn't Instagram's? Are you really going to play No True Scotsman with "spaces" "prone to AI slop?" Shouldn't Kyle Chayka, who supposedly wrote a book on this, know that? Aren't there already too many good books, movies, TV shows, video games, operas, plays, etc. to consume?
The toughest thing about this article is it is longing for a world that hasn't existed for a long time. If anything, the New Yorker and the New York Times, by doing a bad job at being media companies, have reduced the amount of new narrative creative projects that can thrive, not increased it. They never look in the mirror. The fickle and sometimes vindictive personalities that work there are not allied with narrative creators.
The idea that discovering one or two diamonds in the rough offsets the incumbent cultural trends the New Yorker reinforces has long been dead - there is just way too much new stuff for any traditional media company to accurately review, report on and amplify. Everyone thriving on YouTube, Instagram, Steam, TikTok, hawking their shit, figured that out.
It's even crazier to me that Kyle Chayka, who wrote a book on this, misses the mark here - I mean he should know about non-negative matrix factorization, which basically was the beginning of the end of traditional media, he should be able to make the leap that invention that enabled accurate collaborative filtering at scale killed The New Yorker, not AI, or anything in between 2000 and now. He should know there's absolutely no reason that AI generated content would be treated any differently than any other bad content, by NNMF or whatever feed algorithm.
There's a possibility that the reason the NYTimes and Conde Nast have to reinvent themselves is because they do a bad job. To them, "A.I." is just another effigy, when the reality is that fewer and fewer people care what important New Yorkers think. Listen guys, it's not looking good for the writers, better to get your head out of the sand.
Imagine the doctor walking into the room and saying "Congratulations! The tumor is growing faster than your legacy cells."
If you care about narrative creative media, the best thing you can do is pay for it. Whatever that means to you. That is my remedy. The New Yorker isn't going to go out and promote Substack, and the deeper you think about why, the more you realize it is the New Yorker who are the assholes.
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 offerings don't come close to the size of the market of slop, it's always been a numbers game, but if you're talking about cultural trends, the people who run those slop factories read the Times and the Journal, they don't watch Youtube shorts themselves and probably keep their kids a mile away from it.
Cultural capital and literal capital aren't the same thing. Danielle Steel has made 800 million selling 200 smut novels, but that hasn't given her a lot of cultural status or influence. The people who make decisions and set trends don't read her books.
The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is because people like it. The next iteration, IMO, will be AI generated children's science fair projects that also have a pepsi logo in them, still with 60k likes.
I suspect the actual outcome will be a rise of manual curation and providence where a feed of adorable puppies or discussions on technology will rise or fall by how diligent the moderator is at keeping slop out of the feed.
There are still people watching Facebook with unfiltered feeds? There are filters for that.
From the article: "The main people benefitting from the launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users trying to communicate with one another but those who are producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated content that is monetizable on social platforms."
Yes. The main use case for LLMs remains blithering.
And in a close second-place, to cheaply/easily counterfeit signals that we are/were treating as indicators of human things like "intelligence", "time-investment", "emotional involvement", "distinct identity", etc.
I wonder how many traditional cover-letters / essays will vanish because the format has been so debased it doesn't mean anything, and people will say: "Just give me the core bullet-points."
Or that buying likes from bot farms is incredibly cheap.
I believe we’re already seeing this on Reddit where upon the initial OpenAI deal, there was an influx of obviously poorly generated AI posts, people flagged them, and they fell off pretty quickly. The posts that make it through now are the ones people can’t tell are AI, based on that feedback.
We’re training it in real time how to fool us.
Adding a few magic words to bewitch the AI into not scraping your profile is the new superstition of the digital era, a cousin to the pseudolegal "no copyright intended" incantation often seen on pirated YouTube videos of yesteryear. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, for there is a fundamental tradeoff between privacy and convenience as popularized by Schneier, 11 years ago. [0] You must stop using the platform and do something other than continue to consume vapid social media nonsense; yet no one ever listens or cares, for the revealed preference of the masses is to continue to not be users of the system but to be used in exchange for "free" access to these platforms.
[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/trading_priva...
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 not see ads, but as a creator there’s no amount I can pay to not feed Gemini.
How do you feel about commenting on this site for free, which probably provides some benefit to ycombinator?
That said, if YC made a deal with some tech company to give them the firehose of data to train AI, I’d probably stop using HN. I stopped using reddit for a similar reason despite being a very frequent redditor with like 60k karma. I know it’s all pretty open and getting fed into many different LLMs anyways, but thats not necessarily YC’s fault.
My ideal would be strong government regulations regarding AI training, requiring explicit opt-in that isn’t buried in a ToS or EULA. Ideally companies would require a “non-AI feeding” version of their website to legally run in my country.
I can’t imagine a scenario where this happens in the current system, but I sure can fantasize.
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 data, they just silently grapped everything they could. Maybe there's some obscure website where you shared something private and lost access to the account or the website even went down? Congrats, it's now revived in OpenAI dataset where you've absolutely no control or details about how it's being used, not even a way to request and pursue legal action because the training data is a "secret".
It's not about compensation, it's that fact you have no option or say even if you don't use their services.
You can't escape or opt-out, unless you go off the grid, and even then they still retain your old data and use it as they see fit.
I won't argue with your position, but most people would be hurting themselves more than they would hurt the companies, even in absolute terms.
I despise this attitude. It's so entitled.
Our history of forever extending copyrights and protecting "intellectual property" has run amok, to the point where the average person thinks their scribbles, utterings, and ideas are valuable enough on their own to be worthy of a pay day. It's the culture of "My cut, my cut, my cut!"
Someone else profiting is not a tragedy to get up in arms about. The fact that you were somehow, tangentially, kinda sorta in the vicinity of that profit does not and should not mean you are owed money.
If you want to talk about privacy, sure, that's an issue worth bringing up. But, "I'm only mad because someone else made money and I didn't get paid," has nothing to do with privacy. It's pure greed, entitlement, and envy.
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.
But if someone else figured out how to use a snippet of a comment you made 10 years ago as one-quadrillionth of the training data for a powerful LLM… if someone else figured out how to use your publicly-shared social media posts to attract advertisers to a platform they built… if someone else used 6 notes from a song you once sang to create a smash hit… kudos to them. They created something of value. You should've and could've done it yourself. Hell, you still can.
But nobody should owe you money. We should not have a society where people who actually create stuff are subject to endless friction and threats from do-nothings and patent trolls demanding "my cut" if the metadata from their words or actions contributes to 0.0001% of someone else's idea that they turned into profit with hard work.
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 includes no guard rails for how its used. I also disagree strongly with LLM companies throwing mountains of resources at scraping the web though, if nothing else it feels very much like a monopolistic play leveraging massive power in those resources to create a competitive edge that other players couldn't compete with.
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 copies you orders of magnitude more directly, that's when you should be compensated or have control over it.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't want others to use what you say to make money... Shut up.
Do you want me to publish 12-15 different ebooks containing the content you actually worked to create, and it just found permutations for?
Just make sure you spread it out over a few days and you're all good: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-ge...
For me, the problem is almost entirely that doing so requires me to have a great deal of trust in entities that I consider untrustworthy.
Read the TOS. Didn't like what I saw. Told them I didn't want to install an app on my phone. Asked nicely if there was some way I could participate without it. They acted like I beat my kids.
I don't have kids yet though that time is likely coming, this goes firmly on the growing list of reasons why we'd choose to homeschool.
You've done your duty with them. Now write a letter to the school board. Give them a little while to respond, and if they don't, start handing copies of the letter to other parents outside of the school gates.
If you can't get other parents to care, then you're in trouble. Try to claim a religious exception.
Really, this is more damning. They could accommodate you but they don't because you could submit to their bullshit and choose not to.
Maybe the answer is to carry a dead feature phone to show to them. Like a talisman to ward off their evil.
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 because i missed a lot of important experiences from my childhood. as a result i am unable to replicate them. even if i get told by others what i should be doing, it feels unnatural and uncomfortable because i have not experienced that myself. for all i can tell, my kids childhood is better than my own, but i am repeating many of the mistakes of my parents because i simply don't know any better.
homeschooling may go the same way. if the parent had a bad experience homeschooling, they may just be unable to translate that into a better experience for their kids even if they believe or know that a better experience is possible.
trusting the local, likely poorly paid and appreciated, state educators?
my experience in a US highschool led me to conclude that the poor pay self selects for more motivated teachers. all the teachers i had there were excellent and i had the best time there out of all my schooling. that's an anecdote of course, and there are many counter examples, but equally you could ask the reverse question. what did you find that you believe that government schooling is necessarily a bad experience?
homeschooling is not for everyone. during covid, my ability to engage the kids into learning activities was an abysmal failure. so despite believing that great homeschooling is possible and not having experienced bad homeschooling myself, i'll never be doing it with my kids.
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.
besides that though, i think schooling really needs to be revamped. and we already have proven alternative options, if only our governments had the courage to try them.
i am mainly thinking of the montessori education model. it has proven itself. and teacher training is not expensive. it only takes one year if done fulltime.
i really do not know what it takes to change that though. there is so much resistance to change in the education sector that it is really painful to watch.
btw, it is interesting to note that in germany where i am from, homeschooling is strictly illegal. the reason today is that homeschooling allows families to avoid integration into the wider society. it enables insular thinking and allows families to avoid contact with others who think differently. the goal of public schooling in germany is to let children of different backgrounds, cultures, opinions and worldviews interact and learn from each other, to accept and tolerate them and to create an integrated society. school is the only place where different cultures are forced to interact with each other.
some people just do not understand that there are interactions that are forced on us and that refusing to participate is only to our own disadvantage.
even if they allow you to participate without installing that app, you will always be second class. people will forget to copy you on messages, or not see messages you sent. and they will have a grudge because you make them do extra work. they will leave you out on things that are optional, or not vote for you when electing a parent representative. they will reject you for not being a team player.
the irony is that as a software developer i would not hesitate to create such an app. surely my app is better than the alternatives. and the TOS of my app is fine. oh wait, my boss changed the TOS without asking me. ooops.
It's true that it is quite hard, but there are ways to reduce it for sure. Here is what I have done:
1. I've deleted accounts for websites that promote AI. I have already deleted LinkedIn, Github, Medium, and a few others.
2. I have stopped supporting businesses that use AI/support ones that are against AI. For example, the company behind the Procreate iPad app is 100% against AI so I support them. Also, in my professional life, I have already refused to collaborate with three separate companies due to their promotion and use of AI.
3. I've deactivated any tools that could be AI based like assisted writing tools in Gmail.
4. I do not click or read any articles with AI-generated images or text. Nor do I watch any videos any more.
5. I am reconnecting with friends and share with them through email and other means.
In my opinion, the internet has gotten WAY worse with the introduction of generative AI. Generative AI itself is not the root cause of course: the aggressive capitalistic takeover of the internet is, but AI is the apex tool for that and it makes the internet a rather horrible place.
How can you possibly know the articles you read have no AI-generated images or text?
Then he unjustly undermines the livelyhood of human authors.
The AIs will applaud him.
Are there vague images padding the article for SEO purposes?
If so, is there attribution to an artist? If they contain images and don’t attribute, I avoid the website. Either they use AI to make SEO bait, or they steal artwork. I’ll avoid in either case.
AI text is much harder to detect, not sure of a good way to avoid it at the moment.
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 fully into AI generation anyways, and I can’t think of too many cases where stock images really add anything to an article aside from adding to the page size by an order of magnitude.
I'm not sure why you think every use of AI generated images is "SEO bait". I'm sure some (most?) are, but it's perfectly plausible a well written article uses AI art in place of a generic image off unsplash or whatever.
Most of the internet is SEO bait. It’s the safe default assumption.
And if the images have AI-generated attributions?
I use a web of trust. I have a network of known writers who don't use AI. I avoid others...I mean, most articles on the internet are relatively useless anyway and just for entertainment so I don't really "need" those in my day to day life.
The ones in my web of trust are enough for me,
All that isn't to scare you from Y Combinator or anything, it's just to get your thoughts on how much you think these actions have really changed your consumption ratio vs your overall consumption? And how have you come to any certainty in the measurement of e.g. whether an article you're about to click on has AI images or text (that would seem near impossible to do much of the time even after reading?)
Well, in terms of overall consumption, I also write and talk extensively about the dangers of AI using these examples so I think they might help my audience
> And how have you come to any certainty in the measurement of e.g. whether an article you're about to click on has AI images or text
The idea is to build a web of trust. Often, I ask. If I am uncertain, I don't read. Also, I help run a small magazine and we ask all authors to submit a statement that says they did not use AI. Of course, we have to trust people but what are you going to do?
I also work for a magazine where all of us dislike AI and we don't use generative AI for any of our articles. I know my coworkers well so I trust them too.
Given that Gitlab and GitBucket are also integrating AI, is getting out of these two platforms even a realistic choice for 99% of devs working for a regular company ?
On the other hand, convincing your CTO to get your organization out of any major code management platform feels like a pretty exciting chalenge to tackle.
A few decades ago it would be a different story, but as of now the appeal of going for Github/Gitlab is usually not the git integration and more the rest of it: the issue/MR/PR management, the whole integrated workflow, the CI ecosystem, user and right access management, etc.
I think there must a decent number of organizations keeping a private/local code repository but sync it to github/gitlab to get all the other benefits.
Personally, I run a large-ish niche FB group and I haven't seen a threat of bots taking over there or other online spaces. Is there anywhere that people have seen the bots crowding out the people? My guess is Twitter but that place would already/always a sewer.
-Mark Zuckerberg.
Actually, you did. What you didn't do is read the fucking terms of service.
But sarcasm aside, it is a general failure of the system that things have gotten to this point. The amount of naivete like is seen above is tremendous, yet somehow we and everyone who understands this crap have failed to deliver the memo.
Like Rick and Morty did in simulation.
At least it would cost a lot more to harvest one's article for the harvesting company