Comment by malwrar
4 hours ago
Really hate to say it, but I’ve stopped publishing my work too for this reason. I spend most of my time now building my own little software ark, and I aspire to no longer think of programming in the next few years. I feel like the creative economy in general will be unrecognizable in the near future, maybe nonexistent. I wonder what modes of collaboration on ideas might form in the next few years.
Here is what the purveyors of AI don't seem to realise. You can bend copyright law all you want in order to train your models on whatever you can grab, but in the absence of genuine protection of their creative work authors are simply not going to be publishing at all.
I think they see it all too well. They still think they can make bank today while it lasts, whatever comes after is some other shareholder's problem. And if we're talking about open source, killing it might be a positive side effect, they'll be ready to sell you a closed source alternative when you no longer have options.
Furthermore, if people not only stop publishing, but also take down already published works, it will create a moat around already existing Language Models
And the more they DDOS small websites — instead of respectfully scraping once — the more realistic my conspiracy theory looks.
People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. And fighting to be noticed in an unending torrent of slop.
Without any material or immaterial benefits? And with one's work being ground up and turned into weights for the next version of the machine that's threatening one's employment?
Great. More work for AI then.
The sad thing is I feel trapped on all sides of the debate, I wrote a book about LLMs and human creativity (spoiler Humans win for a long time) but I was going to do it as a blog series, instead I published https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GXCSY4W8 because I felt at least I might get a bit back for literally 100’s of hours of my life I poured into the book and my editor and friends who read and provided reviews.
And I push a lot of open source code including a ton for the SWGEmu project, but now I’m of mixed mind to stop pushing anything public. I can’t decide, am I talking out of both sides of my mouth, it’s a confusing time to navigate for sure.