Unfortunately the new victims in the system of LLMs and the way they distribute knowledge is the specialized content website.

Now an LLM just knows all the content you painstakingly gathered on your site. (It could also be, and is likely that it was also collected from other hard to find sites across the internet).

The original web killed off the value of a certain kind of knowledge (encyclopedias, etc.) and LLMs will do the same.

There are plenty of places to place the blame, but this is a function of any LLM, and a funcamental way LLMs work, not just a problem created and profited from by Google- for example the open-weight models, where no-one is actually profiting directly.

> There are plenty of places to place the blame, but this is a function of any LLM, and a funcamental way LLMs work, not just a problem created and profited from by Google- for example the open-weight models, where no-one is actually profiting directly.

First time learning that scraping and training on data that they have often been explicitly disallowed to obtain for free or for that purpose by the rights holders is "fundamental to how LLMs work". If not, then there is no reason those who gathered the information wouldn't stand to profit by selling LLMs this data.

We killed forums and now were killing specialty websites. Soon we will get right back to pre internet levels of knowledge. Ai will be able to find all the stuff that was easily available in encyclopedias and text books and none of the stuff that made 90s-2000 internet great.

The Internet had plenty of specialty knowledge before "Gathering that knowledge, SEOing it, and stuffing ads all over it" became a viable business model, and it will have plenty of specialty knowledge after this era is over.

Specialty knowledge can also be a guy reviewing air purifiers with obsessive care. It can be someone writing detailed travel guides or in my case an essential resource for immigrants. There were a lot of good websites, and if you could not find them, blame Google for letting its search engine go to the dogs.

Gathering that knowledge is work, and if anyone should capture that value, it's the people doing the work. Seeing bug tech slurp it all up, insert inself in the middle and capture all the value is heartbreaking.

I hate that AI is destroying the economics of the independent web, and people cheer for it because they landed on Forbes one too many times. It's insulting to all the people who did their job right, and still get their work slurped up by an uncaring corporation with no way to stop them.

We will get the web that we deserve.

That was already dying if not dead thanks to YouTube and short form video being the preferred way for people to make content and I guess consume

I wonder how long it will take AI agents to automatically make accounts and submit credit card info to scrape data that is paywalled

I don't think there is any reason they couldn't do that

>The original web killed off the value of a certain kind of knowledge (encyclopedias, etc.) and LLMs will do the same.

I wonder how many people will decide to just stop sharing technical knowledge because of that, and how much we will lose because of it.

Maybe (I can't emphasize enough that I say this with a high degree of skepticism) they'll come up with a way of doing cited/credited/paid work where the LLM will include who "taught" it something.

Eg: instead of writing a blog post, you'll submit a knowledge article to an AI provider and that'll go into the AI's training set and it'll know "you" told it. And maybe (even more skeptical) pay you for it.

Again: highest degree of skepticism, but at the same time, that's the only way I could see people continuing to write content that teaches anything.

This will only happen as an absolute necessity, for example if the EU threatens massive fines or the US antitrust people grow some teeth.

Even then, you'll get malicious compliance. The best case scenario would be a bit like Spotify: everyone getting fractions of a penny.

Agreed. I'm particularly pessimistic about how this will play out.

> There are plenty of places to place the blame, but this is a function of any LLM, and a funcamental way LLMs work, not just a problem created and profited from by Google- for example the open-weight models, where no-one is actually profiting directly.

One problem with monopolies is their massive multiplicative effects on otherwise manageable problems.

You put your information on a public website for free, and are surprised that people use it as they see fit?

Not always creators puts the content for free free, they expect views, gratitude, and/or ad revenue..

It's not free if there's any kind of expected return.

Attribution would be one thing. See ooen-source and free software licenses.

There are specific constraints on "free" in that context. For example *GPL also generally forbids providing functionality without making the source available.

If the return is also free, yes. A smile or a thank you is free to give.

Don't be surprised if there is no more free information in the next 10 years.

There will always be people putting information out there with 0 expectation of any kind of return. What will happen is there will be far fewer websites enforcing return, as they'll be automatically deranked for that enforcement.

I am tech blogging for free, and my expected return is people reading my content, recognition, attribution, social media attention and people discussing my content.

I have zero interest in providing free labor for LLM companies with no human actually reading my words. I don't think I'm alone in that stance.

Similarly, I used to help people on forums for free. My reward was getting respect of my peers, the feeling of helping another human being and sometimes them being grateful, rare side job opportunities thanks to people finding my specialist posts. That was fun, being anonymous question-answering bot for AI to scrape is not.

> recognition, attribution, social media attention

Expectation of these in particular makes your blogging a product.

> with no human actually reading my words

But it - or at least the idea - is being ultimately read by humans, as long as some article is in the top results for relevance to some LLM prompts. It just may be summarized, or particular parts extracted first, or reworded for clarity (like I may ask for an "eli5" if I encounter something that's interesting but I find concepts going over my head), or otherwise preprocessed in order to fulfill the prompt parameters. All actions which the very human users may have to do manually anyway in order to efficiently consume your content (or give up and move on if they can't be bothered), is now automatically done by LLM agents.

The number of people who have the privilege to publish content for free for others (or spend their free time contributing to open source) is minimal. And now they will feel like they're being disrespected and exploited by LLM's and its users who think of the authors not as people but as just as the source of content. You can be sure most of the content will be gone because nobody wants to be just a content cow for LLM's.

Why do you think they'll feel disrespected? They literally have no expectations; they're just putting content out there for others to do as they wish with. Several here have weighed in to say they don't care about LLMs accessing and morphing their content.

Of course they won't be nearly as many as those who publish with expectations, but also history has shown that whenever there's a gap, someone tends to fill it just because. I'm not worried about content gaps at all. What I see is an overall increase in quality as no-expectation sources float to the top of search results.

Well I'm one such person so you can hear it from me instead of guessing. I feel disrespected.

I can also confirm that I will do a lot less of it since it's threatening the parts of my business that supported me and gave me so much free time to release things for free. It almost halved my audience, so I have to do the same amount of work for nearly half the pay, half the community, and half the credit.

You do have expectations though. You expect to grow and maintain an audience, gain credit, which makes what you're releasing a product, not something free.

Free as in beer, not as in public domain.

>whenever there's a gap, someone tends to fill it just because

lol what. That only works when the demand is actually paying. You are talking about FREE content!

>They literally have no expectations

I'm sorry but this is completely false.

If that were the case why do we have so many licenses? Why GPL/MIT/Apache, CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND, and so on, when it's either "free or not"? Surely we don't need all this fluff when the only thing free for real is Public Domain?

Just consider this: we're living in an age where even people who publish MEMES on Reddit watermark them because they don't 9gag/Instagram/Facebook pages reposting it without permission/credit. And they are MEMES!! Even I find this cringe. But it proves that the author has some expectation. Even if you don't agree with their expectation, it proves that the expectation EXISTS.

What is next? Are you going to extend this to say that all web comics accessible for free on the web are "free free" so you should be allowed to remove watermarks to repost them on Facebook? You are filling the gap of having a single place where people can read funny comics for free, except you didn't make any of the comics and you have no right to post them. In fact, this is a great example. How is ChatGPT different from a guy that just reposts comics and memes on Facebook? It's literally the same thing.

And then next you are going to say that all videos posted on Youtube/TikTok are "free free" so you should be allowed to rip them off too.

I feel like you're just going to make an enemy out of everyone who publishes anything for free on the Internet if you start thinking like this.

> That only works when the demand is actually paying

You should see the internet 20+ years ago. It was rich in forums, interest sites, etc where people just shared because they had this interesting thing they wanted to put out there. Reddit still has a bit of it, though it's mostly a mess now.

> why do we have so many licenses?

Because the way how the law works in some jurisdictions is that permission must be explicitly granted by the author via license, and some authors (who are aware of the legal requirement) just do up a thing without checking to see if there's something that fits their desires. And some want to tweak a license in some way to account for some other thing and end up creating a new license. See also CC0, 0BSD, WTFPL, Unlicense, and others [0].

BTW I'll clarify that it's not "expectations", but specifically "expectations of return". It's OK, and expected, for instance, that someone putting something out there for free wouldn't want to be held legally responsible if that thing is used in an illegal manner.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_equivalent_lic...

If I gave my surplus eggs for free, I'd be annoyed if they ended up at the Best Western's buffet. These eggs were meant for my neighbours.

There is a difference between working for free for your community and working for free for a trillion dollar company's investors. Doubly so when you strip consent or attribution from the equation.

Then you should make sure you are giving the eggs to your neighbors and not to Best Western.

I can't help if the Best Western plunders the honesty box in front of my house. There is no way to stop them.

I hope that you understand that this is a metaphor for free labour intended for a community being exploited by big corporations with no way of stopping them.

Just because something is on a public website accessible for free doesn't mean it is then public domain. Sharing is not necessarily giving.

(Though unfortunately in the Wild West Web of today it seems it does, practically speaking.)

Unfortunately, existence is a thankless job. Just gotta enjoy the ride.