Then perhaps they should find other means of livelihood, instead of preventing the rest of the world from making full use of the information and technology available to it.
They will and less information will be put into places that are freely accessible. If it's put anywhere at all it'll be put behind login only/paywalled/unscrapable places that LLM's can't access.
Why would they suddenly paywall information if they weren't already?
The way I see it, there are roughly three groups of information providers:
1. Those who do it pro bono - because they feel like its a worthwhile thing to do, or because they believe in by "pay it forward", or otherwise because they haven't even thought that what they share is worth trying to extract rent from.
2. Those who do it "for free", as a way to lure people to where they can expose them to ads, affiliate marketing, upsells, or other such schemes - making money by being predators using information as bait.
3. Those who just put up a paywall, being up front that they're selling information, not giving it away.
(There's also a weird "in-between" group of publishers that are almost like 1., except they're being funded out of marketing budgets of companies that figure providing quality information is good advertising.)
LLMs don't change anything for group #1. They may compete with group #3, but that's business as usual, not anything transformative. The group that's directly affected is #2, which also happens to be the group that produces all the garbage on the Internet, so I'm actually very happy to see them forced to find a more useful way of making money. Since group #2 produces "information" that's arguably negative knowledge on the net, it's likely to improve the amount of quality information you'll be able to find on-line.
Group #2 is the reason why there's so much information on the internet in the first place, especially free resources, for better or worse. I think it's pretty ignorant of you to say we can just discard one of the main ways people who create things on the internet get paid.
Ideas are copied by reading or hearing them. You can't own your ideas now, unless by own you mean horde. The perpetual creators rights you want extended are already artificial and require a non-trivial amount of our GDP to enforce and they still stifle future creation in a lot of areas.
Most people are paid for doing things every day, they don't get to create one thing and never work again. Expanding creators compensation laws is regressive and only helps a few elites survive job uncertainly, not the bulk of the people. We're better off limiting this sort of thing specifically to help everyone advance, share the knowledge.
LLMs aren't just a mere database containing indexed copies of other peoples' IP. AI companies are charging you for access to a sophisticated automated reasoning system, that necessarily had to memorize half of the Internet in the process of becoming capable of (some approximation of) reasoning.
(BTW. that you can even make a system this way is a huge breakthrough that's not being talked about enough.)
But even if they were a mere database indexing copies of other peoples' IP, then - copyright issues notwithstanding - the de-bullshittifying of information retrieval process alone would be service worth paying a lot of money for.
I think we are talking past each other. Let me try to narrow down where I think we disagree.
1) LLM providers harvest a common to create their product (don't think we disagree here much).
2) What happens next is where we diverge, I suspect: I think they will use their products to extract rents from that common while you think they will provide a fairly priced service.
Ultimately time will tell how the business model shakes out. Both could even be happening in sequence.
> 2) What happens next is where we diverge, I suspect: I think they will use their products to extract rents from that common while you think they will provide a fairly priced service.
Phrased like this, I can't really disagree with you. I don't expect a business to play fair in general, when it has a profitable option to do otherwise.
I guess my objection is more that right now, I don't see LLMs creating any kind of disincentive to publish quality content. In my eyes, LLMs are not a substitute for quality content in the first place - I see them more like using quality content to create a tool that competes with ad-hoc and shitty content.
That's not to say LLMs won't be able to eventually provide high-quality information on their own - but at that point, we'll have more important problems to deal with, such as chunk of humanity being rendered obsolete.
You're writing in English, which I doubt you came up with on your own, and I don't see you crediting the original speakers who developed your style or popularized the idioms you so casually use.
How do you claim the right to learn from the works of others and then demand government regulation and forceful intervention to keep from having to share whatever paltry innovations you may develop?
