Comment by VonGallifrey
1 day ago
> turns out plenty of people say they write for others to read
LLMs are not people. They don't write blogs so that a company can profit from their writing by training LLMs on it. They write for others to read their ideas.
LLMs aren't making their owners money by just idling on datacenters worth of GPU. They're making money by being useful for users that pay for access. The knowledge and insights from writings that go into training data all end up being read by people directly, as well as inform even more useful output and work benefiting even more people.
Except the output coming from an LLM is the LLM's take on it, not the original source material. It's not the same thing. Not all writing is simply a collection of facts.
And rarely cite their sources, thus affording the author not so much a crumb of benefit in kind.
Which is irrelevant if you're truly trying to "pay it forward".
That is the core of my observation: people claim to publish to benefit society, but push come to shove, they care more about getting credit and having oversight over who is benefiting, to the point of refusing to publish further (and sometimes unpublishing things) if that credit/control isn't given.
The problem isn't in wanting these things - it's in not being up-front about it.