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Ask HN: Is copyright obsolete in the age of AI?

4 points by blindprogrammer ↗ HN
Does copyright become obsolete now that large language models (LLMs) are scraping and ingesting the content we write, and then use it to train themselves? What's the point of being a volunteer content creator for OpenAI or Google if LLMs scrape everything you put online? Why even try?

4 comments

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JohnFen
This was the conundrum I faced when I learned that everything was being scraped to train LLMs. I haven't figured out a reasonable solution to this at all and was forced to remove my websites from being accessible to random web visitors.

I'm very eager to find a way that I can make my sites accessible again.

blindprogrammer
Maybe requiring credit card payment would filter out LLMs. Is this gonna lead to closed-off paid websites ?
JohnFen
That might be effective, but requiring credit card payments is an unacceptable solution to me.

First, it would introduce a commercial aspect to my websites that I don't want them to have (too much of the web is commercial as it is).

Second, it would require me to have some sort of merchant account just to have a website. I don't want that additional hassle.

In the end, it doesn't appear to be a better solution than to just make my websites invite-only.

FunnyGunther
Well there is some flag that you can set in robots.txt of your website. But however I am sure, not many AI vendors respect this flag.

Which is why Google Gemini doesn't works to that level of magical greatness, I guess. They go with the ethical route of data collection.