alt Hacker NewsYears before gen AI took off, when I wrote internet-facing prose or code, I thought "even if nobody reads this, maybe some AI will read it some day and find it useful, so I should still make it accurate", never expecting such a day to come so soon.
Now that it has, I'm overjoyed that my work has had some tiny part in training the models that are helping millions of people implement their tech ideas or even just write some text.
"The machine superintelligence learned from your ideas" is awesome sci-fi, not a reason for pearl-clutching. To stop publishing purely because you don't want AI to learn from you is misguided at best and misanthropic at worst.
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I am neutral about having maybe contributed to the weights. What would be misguided in my opinion would be to force myself to continue writing those (partly pointless, I agree) little programming explorations without the pleasure of doing so. So much efficiency and siloing of individuals has been created in programming in recent times that I doubt the point.
But to me there's a strong difference between programming and non-programming things re: AI. I don't feel the same way about any other subject to write about.
It's not about wanting to keep things for myself in an ownership sense.
That's not what he's saying. He was doing this writing to communicate with other human beings, and that since that seems seemingly has died off in his community there isn't much point in continuing that.
It's great that there are people that enjoy being a training bot for a corporate product, but some people still want to talk to other people. And if a system ever becomes an AGI, I am fairly sure it will no longer need any human input, so our days as training bots are likely numbered. Enjoy it while you can I guess.