OpenAI finally admitted they're crawling the web to profit off of GPT. Block it from your sites using robots.txt.

Yeah right. Same goes for Google and such. This is more a legal game. As long as you don't catch then overgoing your rule, it's "legal". If you do and can prove it, you can pull them to court. But yeah, you know.. will resolve to nothing probably.

There's a significant difference in the purpose of the scraping.

Google et al. run crawlers primarily to populate their search engines. This is a net positive for those whose sites get scraped, because when they appear in a search engine they get more traffic, more page views, more ad revenue. People view content directly from those who created it, meaning those creators (regardless of whoever they are) get full credit. Yes, Google makes money too, but site owners are not left in the cold.

ChatGPT and other LLM's works by combing its huge database of known content its "learned" to cook up an answer through fast math magic. Content it scrapes to populate this database can be regurgitated at any time, only now its been completely processed and obfuscated to an insane degree. Any attribution of content is completely stripped in the final product, even if it ends up being a word-for-word reproduction. Everything OpenAI charges for its LLM goes directly to OpenAI, and those who have created content to train it will never even know it was used without their consent.

Essentially, LLM's operate like a huge middle school plagiarism machine shitting all over any concept of copyright, only now they're making billions off said plagiarism with no plans to stop. It's a huge ethical conundrum and one I heavily disagree with.

Because until now they weren't competing against individual content creators.

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I just hide the N word, long R word very well several dozen times throughout my site so they have to manually blacklist it.

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.

"public" does not mean you're allowed to steal it and republish it as a work of your own. There are things like copyright and stuff

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.

Could somebody explain why this is bad?

Consent.

I don't consent to my copyrighted material -- which is literally everything I write and post online, including this comment -- being included in these products. In some cases, I have implicitly consented to allowing this to happen via the EULA of websites I've used over the years, but having them actively scraping the web for content means they're directly bypassing any agreements I may have made with service providers, and that they're collecting my copyrighted works without my ever having done business of any sort with them.

I haven't agreed to contribute to their for-profit operation, I'm not being compensated in any way for this participation -- whether financially or via the providing of a service -- and I don't believe they have any moral right to decide that I'm going to contribute whether I want to or not.

They can fuck right off.

They're copying your content, mashing it up with other content, and showing it to their customers, without ever sending their customers to your website. As a result, you don't get paid and you don't even get exposure.

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.

Let's said I use AI to write a book, in that case, AI will just grab what someone's else wrote.

Let's said I use AI to Write code, AI will just copy someone's else code.

Let's said I use AI to make art, AI uses Someone's else art.

Then, let's said I sell the book, use the code and make nft's with the art, since AI "did it" I don't have to follow any license or give credit to anyone.

About using only public information, that should be an opt in, but instead AI companies are just taking public internet, putting it inside a can a selling it, you like it or not.

Yeah, I don't really care what they harvest either. I suppose if conversations showed up in chat that would be an issue, but the internet is a public forum anyway and there's no expectation of privacy here.

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They're already starting to feed on their own content and creating negative feedback loops...