Comment by wat10000
5 hours ago
You do it as a hobby, that's fine. Some people do it for a living. And while they aren't owed a living doing that specific thing, it is going to be a big problem for them if they can't make money at it anymore.
I'm sure plenty of people feel the same way about software. They make software as a hobby and don't care about remuneration or credit. Meanwhile I write software for my day job and losing the ability to make money from it would be devastating.
> Some people do it for a living.
I was going to write, "not for long," which might be true for some. But then I realized there will always be a difference between LLM output and human writing. We don't read blogs because of their facts, we read them because of how the facts are presented and how the author's personality comes through on the page.
EDIT: That said, LLMs are great at faking it, and a lot of amateur writing will be difficult to distinguish from LLM output. So I'm disagreeing with myself a bit.
But we are talking about "slurping up" IP and regurgitating it right? OK. So if I slurp up Mickey Mouse and output Micky Mouse that's an offense. But what if I slurp up a billion images and output some chimera? That's what the LLMs do. And that's what humans do too.
Ah, I see. It’s just straightforward protectionism like dockworkers opposing automation and so on. That I do comprehend, in fact.
I write software too and I may no longer be able to just do it in the old way. Pretty scary world but also exciting. I can’t imagine trying to restrict LLM software writers on that basis but I can comprehend it as simply self-interest.
Fair enough.
It’s about the amount of time available.
Do you make money writing software? I bet you either try to restrict LLM usage or assign your rights to an employer who does. Putting code in the public domain is pretty rare, and extremely rare for paid work.
I allow them to train on my work as described here (for example) https://code.claude.com/docs/en/data-usage
And I do paste code into CC. I’m not super concerned that they’ll see it.
That’s fine by me. It doesn’t require putting code in the public domain which is something else entirely.
I make money off hosted software so in some sense there is writing involved at one end. But I’m not paid by output tokens.
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