Ben FrancisMay 27
AI needs the open web, but it also poses an existential threat to it. LLMs rely on the content that humans create for their training, whilst also undermining the business models that incentivise people to create the content in the first place. https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
AI is killing All About Berlin - Nicolas Bouliane

They used my work to train their AI, and now they're using their AI to put me out of work.

Show threadBen Francis
Where does this lead? It seems like either:
a) People stop making websites, LLMs are trained on the output of LLMs and the models collapse
b) Some other business model emerges to fund the web beyond ads
May 27 at 10:24amWeb
Show threadGabriele SveltoMay 27
@benfrancis one possible outcome is someone steals Google's lunch. These large companies have been floating for years with increasingly bad products purely thanks to monopolistic practices and network effects. If they become bad enough that they kill the network effects it might be enough for something else to take their place. And as we know the giants in our sector appear invincible and eternal until they quickly fade into obscurity.
Show threadBen FrancisMay 27
@gabrielesvelto Possible yes, but either way AI eats the web. How can the web survive and thrive post-LLM?
Show threadGabriele SveltoMay 27
@benfrancis I think it eats the web based on discovery via search engines and the associated SEO. After all content farms existed long before LLMs and served the same purpose, we only turbocharged that process. So what comes next is going to be different, probably curated, and I see first-party ads coming back in full force. If Google isn't sending traffic your way why let them take a cut of your ad revenue after all?
Show threadJoel TruherMay 27
@benfrancis I've been wondering the same thing, especially in the context if the collapse of stack overflow and the pollution of reddit, two significant aggregators of actual human expertise. I think it would be good to think about what model we actually want, instead of waiting to see the next step of technofeudal evolution. What do you think that model is? Services like Youtube simply pay authors, but that seems like a poor solution for many cases: this isnt a "factory" of some kind. The process seems to me are more like a party: a few vocal experts (who often become fatigued), a bunch of novices participating on the margins, a scribe in the corner publishing widely, and a constant small flow of people between these roles. What ecosystem would best support *that*?
Show threadyoasifMay 27

@joeltruher @benfrancis Probably the ecosystem that powered it before, before the AI companies decided that that was fair game for mass-scale piracy.

I left reddit because of where this was going: https://www.quippd.com/social/posts/2024/12/09/leaving-reddit-and-salvaging-my-posts.html and I don't know that that wasn't a rational response.

While you say that content isn't a "factory", I think Sam Altman does see it as one - we produce, he cuts off a large segment and sells it back to us as "knowledge".

Leaving Reddit and Salvaging My Posts

It has been a while since the unsuccessful Reddit protests, whereupon I argued that Reddit ought to pay posters, lest they leave. Reddit crushed the protests, and unsurprisingly, they aren’t paying posters for enriching the corpus of posts and comments that helped Reddit cash in to the tune of $203M in LLM training license fees.

Youssuff Quips
Show threadJoel TruherMay 27
@yoasif @benfrancis well, it's not like the knowledge ecosystem was healthy before LLMs. news orgs were failing, ad loads were ridiculously high, fake content farms were everywhere, stack overflow was already in steep decline. the traffic for content trade was already not working, and hasn't really ever worked very well.
Show threadyoasifMay 27
@joeltruher @benfrancis Right, but outright theft from big tech was still on the horizon.