It really fascinates me how the "other" clientele of HN operates. The world of networking, marketing yourself, creating a resume of sorts through your blogging. I'm just some dude with a decent job occasionally writing blog posts because it amuses me. I'd be pleasantly surprised if a dozen people read them before I die. AI doesn't really factor into the calculus of whether or not I want to continue doing it at all.
Yes. I don’t really understand the “you will be replaced” mentality. I do things because I like doing them not because they have some optimum economic value.
Like read the ad copy of old apple or HP or xerox and see how they wanted to help make tools that help you think. Today everyone wants to make tools that help you make money. I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
I love designing posters for thé love of it. AI helps me learn new shortcuts or suggest tools, helps me delete this or that, but essentially - my appreciation for the process comes from actually moving things around myself and having a say myself.
With generative art/writing, well honestly - the author is very very limited in what he can command the NN do and particularly if the author has a string vision.
Same for music - I wouldn’t let AI arrange my Renoise tracks, I’d love to do it myself. Is love to create the VCV patches by carefully tuning each knob. And particularly when I actually know/imagine/envision how it should sound.
It takes understanding of underlying tech and love for the work. Love - very important.
For people lacking vision and creativity, those in a hurry, those under pressure to do shitjobs they hate - it idées may be better to use AI. But not for the real artist.
I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
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This hit me hard! Thanks a lot mate for this comment.
This view that you can't just do an activity for your own joy, you have to do it for the approval of other, is the actual dystopia. I wonder how old you are because this seems very much like the attitude of someone who was born in the age of social media.
It's not that nobody enjoys doing anything just for its own sake—it's the destruction of ways to provide for others, socially. Humans really, really like doing that. The two things may as well be completely different activities, scratching totally different itches. No amount of solo activity will make us feel whole in the same way feeling that our abilities and passions are helpful to and desired by—not just humored by—others we care about will.
> I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
I feel the same way. But I think this is kind of forced on us nowadays. For example, I might want to write a blog post to share my ideas/work/whatever. But it will be used to make money. It will be used to feed my competition. Maybe not necessarily my content, or not necessarily directly compete with me. But as a class of people, by creating more content we are feeding our competition and some minority will make a lot of money out of it.
Maybe I was not doing it for the money in the first place, maybe it was being read by 5 humans in total anyways. But still, I have no escape and I personally find the whole idea disgusting. I will take no part in it.
Yes I agree. But also I just don’t know what to do about it. I mostly try to make things more private. Like I write a newsletter about my thoughts on ai/ml, physics, etc that’s only for my research institute sent through the email listserv. Maybe nobody reads it but also nobody monetises it. And I get an outlet that is hopefully useful to others I’m directly connected to.
> I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.
> This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.
The people I know that are focusing on "engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around [them]" are the "poorest" I know of.
They chose to have a part-time job (if they have one at all), they chose to live a simple life (from Western standards)... to do what they care about.
The only luxury they have is living in a society with enough solidarity to allow them to live this way.
I'm not rich and I have this mindset. I make far less than most people on HN do, less than industry average too, but I've been able to live an okay life regardless.
The goal was never to get rich as I realized early on that was improbable and I focused on other things.
I have met a lot of people who live in poverty. They're not all that interested in making money (although they are not necessarily averse but it's definitely never an all-consuming priority). By and large their focus is on human connection.
It's not the default human condition to be consumed by greed any more than it is any of the other deadly sins.
Exactly. People are trying to make ends meet. They aren't trying to optimize for money making for fun We're trying to eat today, and maybe someday retire, if we're lucky. It's harder than it used to be, so people are looking for strategies.
It's not some morally superior attitude to "engage in peace and happiness" blah blah you're just rich congrats
There is a very large gap between being "rich" and having to turn every moment into money so that you can eat beans and rice. The general point upthread is that for many/most people, not everything they do has to be a "side hustle."
(And there are probably quite a few people here who are pretty comfortable who still look at a lot of activities through the side hustle lens.)
People who are just trying ro make end meets with no hope of improvement do often adopt this thinking. It is that or alcoholism, drug use and gambling.
People need meaning in their life and work that mistreat you is not that.
I suppose I rather appreciate the lot of you who believe I am wealthy and therefore able to find happiness in life. I suppose I’ll have to disappoint you a bit and tell you that I am not wealthy and certainly not wealthy by most standards on HN. I simply accept that it’s my job to create my happiness. Nobody else will do it for me.
I might be the kind of person that requires external validation, what I noticed is I simply stopped writing online, for the most part. It just feels like writing/tweeting/etc into a cacophony, makes me slightly uncomfortable adding to the noise and discouraged that nobody (no human at least) will read anyway. So I just write what would be blog posts on Notes app and don’t post anywhere…
That said I have also found myself writing less, but not because I think it’s less worthwhile than it was 15 years ago when I started, it’s that the internet feels like it has become less deep. Probably not because the internet has changed but because I’ve learned more so fewer and fewer things tickle that curious part of the brain and feel worth writing about. The things that do feel worth it are so off the deep end that there are fewer and fewer readers who are interested.
Writing on the internet sometimes feels like being a blob of uranium in a reactor where control rods are slowly being inserted at the same time as the reaction chamber is being expanded. There is factually more fissile material out there, but it's no longer as close to critical mass.
I am not a blogger, but was very active on StackOverflow for years -- mostly asking, but sometimes answering. I used it to learn and to create digital footprints, similar to blogging. I blame most of my slow down on experience and age (same-same, but different). After a while, my questions for SO became so hard, they would only get a few views and no answers. I'm no genius, but with enough experience, you will stumble across some never-before-answered problem.
So you actually enjoy writing, without getting anything in return. Sounds like it'd be the good kind of blog (as opposed to content marketing, personal branding and all that hustling). If you were to publish it, maybe one person will come across it and get something out of it.
There's this Spider Man quote I like: "If you help someone, you help everyone". I think it's not comic canon but just from the PS4 game. So getting meta here, that random line a writer for a random video game came up with had a big impression on me.
It's a typical programmer fallacy to avoid redundancy. If somebody else already wrote about something, why would you? Yet in communication, redundancy and repetition is actually quite key. We need to hear ideas multiple times and from different angles before they land.
I used to blog and write a lot and I never cared how many — if any — read it. Purposefully avoided analytics tools etc.
But after the last few years with the proliferation of “AI” tools and the increasing amount of noise on every level I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”. It might be unreasonable but I’ve felt it for over a year now and it’s not going away. Instead I value interpersonal conversations a lot more again. I hang out in discord voice chats with a few people at a time. Text communication feels soulless and low signal to noise in general now.
Anecdotally almost every text chat server I’m on has less active users writing than I’ve ever seen in 25+ years of using the internet. Might be a coincidence but I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s behaviours are changing. Just like knowing you’re being watched changes your behaviour, knowing text content may or may not be fed to or generated by a slop machine algorithm probably changes how you view text as well.
"I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”"
If your voice isn't spoken then it will go unheard. It is of course up to you but I think that blogs and websites run by real people are invaluable (and I'd love to see what AI makes of that word!)
Scraping is a short term anomaly. The hype cycle is already dying which quickly reduces the amount of resources devoted to such efforts.
Where I think that post failed is poisoning the well of anyone ignoring Robots.txt is arguably a moral imperative. That post was concerned with wasting kWh, but ensuring that bad actors don’t profit discourages people from being bad actors.
My «voice» isn’t heard from a trained LLM anyway. Only a vague, blended and remixed imitation at best. As a human I have no interest in feeding that beast.
You wrote your comment in English but used French style quotation marks and made a few minor grammatical errors in your first sentence (won't instead of isn't, by instead of from). Your second sentence beautifully paints a gloomy image with just nine words and your final flourish has just the right level of "fuck it".
If you can deliver that amount of character in a single line in a second language then please do feed the beast. We are all the product of what we eat. The beast needs to eat its greens and suck up some vitamins.
15 years ago felt very different to me as well. Many of us lucked into the conditions that made many online interactions feel worthwhile. The loss of these settings sucks.* But such a creative environment is still attainable and can be found in pockets.
* To be fair, nostalgia around many off these communities can be misleading. Many were never designed to sustain realistic growth nor the inevitable pressures to monetize them. They were naive and ignored human nature, a product of the mentality of their creators or perhaps their participants or both. We know better now. Community building is tricky and worthwhile, rarely a matter of formulaic scaling.
I have actually cut back on blogging (partly) because I don't want my hard work to be slurped up and regurgitated by an AI. I write for other people. Not for AI
Do you think you might be being a touch reductive there? Perhaps ignoring factors like context, medium, the economic realities of who makes this “data” and who ends up making money off of it at their expense, the difference between mechanically harvesting data because it’s there and internalizing things through the lens of your mind and existence and making it your own… you know… pretty much everything about it except the razor thin slice of the situation you’re choosing to take into consideration? Any complex and nuanced situation can become cut-and-dried if you ignore enough.
Straw man. I can’t imagine how culture could exist without some people being thrown in prison. That doesn’t mean that criticizing a law or law enforcement practice is equivalent to arguing for abolishing prisons.
We can agree that prison and appropriation are both necessary for culture, regardless of their negative effects.
Your problem is the scale at which knowledge and ideas are being appropriated, but my point is that it was already happening a lot but it was far more implicit; now it's just explicit that it's happening because we see the process laid bare.
No, that is not “my problem” with it. It is one facet of it, there are lots of sucky ways to take ideas that have nothing to do with scale, and there are lots of ways that fundamentally mechanically harvesting “ideas” as data is different than just learning quickly, but I’m not interested in re-arguing any of this for the 500th time on HN.
It really is getting tiresome. I guess a lot of HN commenters are directly or indirectly heavily invested in the AI bubble and so cannot / will not argue in good faith because they’re barred by personal interests.
I saw a hint of it with crypto and NFT hype cycles, but this is on another level.
Sounds like that contemptible SJW needs to stop being so judgmental. And it’s definitely rude to imply motives that someone doesn’t directly state, isn’t it?
I welcome people to steal my ideas. I don't welcome the AI companies. They claim they want me to lose my job. Most people online don't want that for me.
Yeah, and the movie and music industries moved fast to have laws passed protecting their "ideas". The average person has no equivalent protection nor the means to pursue legal action. So opting out of the charade is a perfectly legitimate move.
And in clinging so hard to their 'ideas', the substance has slipped through their fingers and they've mostly reduced themselves to cloning their own movies.
I can't see how it's protecting creative risk; it protects the infrastructure for some to take risks, but that infrastructure isn't being used anywhere near its potential.
I'm no fan of the music/movie industry, but they abide by a set of common rules. If you take a piece of music and use it verbatim or close to it in your song, the original composer must be credited and the royalties shared.
It's still too much of a reach to expect regular people to want to contribute personal knowledge for free, into an opaque corpus that rewrites your words, sends them to someone else and arbitrarily decides whether you are to be credited with them.
Reading and writing are both intimate activities. The reader holds the writer's thoughts in mind, and the writer knows this and acts accordingly.
Personally, I don't particularly enjoy reading material that was made by an LLM. The fact that so little effort was applied suggests that there is not much reason for this to exist beyond a chance to serve a few quick links.
Since the llm is also running this as a business, I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").
I agree, but its not the only way to use an LLM. I tend to focus my time with ChatGPT on getting it to prompt me on good ways to do things. Like playing cooperative writing games, or coming up with coding training exercises.
>I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").
I often ask Chat GPT to cite anything it comes up with that I want to repeat, and if it cant cite it I ignore it.
I have been reading blogs, books or whatever for free for years often (99%+) of the time without payment or attribution. I have never considered myself to have a relationship with an author, and often wonder about people who have parasocial relationships.
I dont understand how a new tool that can chew on the data for me before presenting it hurts peoples feelings tbh. I would be honored if anything I have ever done was worthy of inclusion.
>Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.
wow there. You do note the big difference between AI regurgitating someone's content and Google indexing it?
If I put effort into creating something digital and people find it through Google's massive index of the internet, at least they'll see who its by, enjoy it within its context and have the whole thing before them. This is way different from some algorithm mashing what it scraped from a creator's work into its own rehash of a bunch of content.
You can understand why someone might detest the one and appreciate the other?
If I create, I might want you to benefit from it, but I might also want you and others to know it came from me. Not just consume it as an undifferentiated part of some parasitic corporation's AI slurry.
Google gives attribution and maybe provenance, while AI gives you smoke and mirrors. I guess we'll decide if copyright has any legs left to stand on in the modern world, or if it falls as collateral. It's so sad that commercial piracy has hit such an incredible tipping point that even I feel bad for creative people and their bleak economically dead future ahead.
I want to be optimistic, but I suspect what we'll end up with is a legal interpretation which allows LLMs to steal content from creators without the cool side benefit of being permitted to steal content ourselves. It will become legal for an LLM to turn your blog into a part of its library, but you won't be able to apply the same logic to read out-of-print books.
Sure, but I am the creator of the content. And I'm fine with Google indexing the content. I'm not fine with AI doing it. Especially since many of the AI's monetization goals are to make me, specifically, jobless
That's no guarantee it won't get slurped up by an AI at some point. Anything that goes into, say, GMail is ripe for plucking. And there's always a good chance your newsletters will get publicly archived on some web page somewhere, whether intentional or not.
I had the same thought. Still, perfect or not, I bet it'll be an attractive option for some.
I guess our gmail content has been fed into an AI of sorts since many years ago. I would surely hope, however, that Google would not use it for any sort of non-private LLM training data.
I don’t think there has to be some practical economic business justification to a) feel bummed out by your creative output getting munged up into something that, for all its better uses, will feed the great fire hoses spraying trillions of gallons of bullshit all over our information landscape, or b) reduce your creative output because of it. It’s weird how entitled people feel to other people’s creative work and get mad when people don’t freely create for and share with them, while simultaneously minimizing the value that work and its authors bring to our society. Despite what many say, the way people receive and interact with your work mentally/emotionally is really important, and all your work being sucked up into these models— often to create commercial products that are openly antagonistic to the people that created the work that made it possible— changes that. It’s sad that AI has devalued creative processes even to the creators themselves.
You could hack the email addresses out of a website, make disposable email addresses and send your writings to everyone including the replies from the previous newsletter with your response to them.
AI doesn’t care, the people using AI care. If you really write for other people, I’d recommend you reconsider blogging again.
Even if you write primarily for yourself (vanity, marketing, client acquisition, there is nothing wrong with that) and not for other people, I’d still recommend you publish your stuff. Not publishing will have always <= effect than publishing, even if AI slurps it up.
JD Salinger took a lot of heat over his reticence to publish any more of his writings after Catcher In the Rye and the Glass family stories. In 1974, he responded to the NY Times, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work."
You'd probably have a better time using something like Cloudflare to block known scrapers than trust companies that pirate terabytes of books to train their models to obey a "please don't" text file.
SV companies have that cycle where they give things for free until peoppe get dependent or until they killed competition. Then they switch to using every trick in a book to make you pay.
I’m with you, my blog is a static site with no JS hosted on GitHub pages. Unless I ever see anyone discussing it or linking to it I have no way of even knowing if it’s being read or not. I write for me, mostly.
> I'm just some dude with a decent job occasionally writing blog posts because it amuses me. I'd be pleasantly surprised if a dozen people read them before I die.
That is exactly the right approach. Most of the posts on my blog have low 3 figure hit rates after being up for a decade (the long tail is a joke) - that averages to maybe 20 hits a year. But that is not that point. I enjoyed writing the posts and just maybe somebody, somewhere enjoyed reading my hot take on The Last Jedi or whatever.
I don't really understand the people who blog for "exposure" or money - it seems like such an effort for very little material gain.
I guess I am in the same boat. I blog because I have this creative urge to write about subjects that interest me, and put it on the web because why not. AI would only accomplish taking away the part that I find "fun" about it, the reason to do it in the first place.
this is the spirit :). i dont mind ppl using AI or not actually. for some it really helps their writing. its what it exists for imho. but i do appreciate a good writer. other then that, blogs are about the topic, not it being written in some uber writing style.
for the writer, id hope like you it gives them joy, because that usually is something which gives it some spirit and joy to read also. its not important at all how things are worded if there was fun to be had!
Is your job super-safe? If so, that's awesome :-) The whole marketing thing only becomes important if you have to get a new one, and then it can become important very quickly.
That's where it turned for me. Originally, I had started a small tech-topic blog with the idea that it would be my portfolio because I really wanted to write for a tech publication, most because I thought I had the chops for it and I want a job where I can travel and work.
Things started off okay, me writing about my projects, etc on a small self-hosted site with zero analytics, keeping things small and manageable in my free time. But the lack of feedback sort of left me I limbo. Was I writing in an engaging way? Were my subjects interesting to more than just me? I had no idea. Eventually, that iteration of the blog got deleted.
And I made another. And another. And so on.
Til I landed on the current version, which is basically me just faffing about with a editorials about tech for fun since I have little time for actual projects anymore, let alone the accompanying writeup.
I still want that writing job, but I realize how much of a pipe dream it is, now. Tech bloggers were already a dime a dozen before I showed up and genAI only saturated that market even further. That, and I still have no interest in working for or hosting a site that is hostile to my reader by being a bloated sludge of scripts and sloppy use of frameworks, which limits my market for a writing career in disappointing and obvious ways.
When I see discussions like this pop up about writing online in today's landscape, it seems to always come down to "write what you find interesting or fun, but keep your eyes expectations near zero" which seems so self-defeating considering how much work it often takes to maintain a blog while you also have to tend to real life. As much as I loath places like Medium or Substack for asking for money up front, I do understand why those writers choose to go there instead of walking my lonely path.
