The guy is scanning eyeballs for a living, I don't believe he has any respect for a small text file in your web server.
I think it'd be more useful to generate a set of absolute crap AI content pages and restrict their bot to that set of pages. It'll make it dumber.
They're already starting to feed on their own content and creating negative feedback loops...
Could somebody explain why this is bad? I'm not a fan of all this AI stuff. But I can't think of an argument besides "Big tech is bad and they should not make money if they use public information to do so."
I'm genuinely curious. There may be massive amounts of data being processed. But only public data, right? If they can use that data for something, isn't that something positive? Or at the very least nothing negative? I always thought anything that is posted in public spaces means making it available for anyone to use anyway. So what am I missing here?
If the results were also open and public, it'd be a different conversation.
This is more akin to rain water collection up-hill and selling it back to the people downhill. It's privatization of a public resource.
This comparison is lacking because water is unlike data. The data can still be accessed exactly the same. It doesn't become less and the access to it is not restricted by other people harvesting it.
While that is true, it does divert peoples' clicks.
Imagine you wrote a quality tech tutorial blog. Is it ok for OpenAI to take your content, train their models, and divert your previous readers away from your blog?
It's an open ethical question that it's not straightforward to answer.
EDIT: yes people also learn things and repost them. But the scale at which ChatGPT operates is unprecedented. We should probably let policy catch up. Otherwise we'll end up with the mess we currently have by letting Google and Facebook collect data for years without restrictions.
it's not a great comparison I'll admit, but it's essentially the same as digital privacy, only one of these is protected in courts and the other is encouraged.
I haven't sat down to really build a stance on this but it does not sit well.
As a freelance writer, I write an article for a respected tech website. That article gets views, which in part determines if I get any sort of a performance bonus.
Along comes an AI that scrapes my content, so that when someone asks it a question about how to do "x" on Mac, it spits out an answer based on what it learned from MY article, sometimes regurgitating it word for word, and in doing so deprives me and my publisher of a much need page view.
It affects their revenue, since it affects ad views. It affects my performance bonus.
This isn't about big tech being "bad". It's about writers and other artists not being credited or paid for their work.
This is a good explanation, thank you. I didn't think about people who literally post stuff to earn money. Since so much talk already revolved around scraping sites like Lemmy, that was all I had in mind.
What you describe sounds like the same problem with services that avoid paywalls or ads of news sites.
In this case I fully aggree that some solution needs to be found.
Just because something is public, does it mean the source is irrelevant? Not to mention, there's a lot of stuff that's not meant to be public that is. A computer won't know the difference. Public or not, it's theft to steal the content without credit and monetize it privately.
Why is everyone outraged when Google/Microsoft/Yahoo and others have scraped the whole internet for two decades and are also massively profiting from that data?
