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Comment by ElFitz | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine no one actually reads web sites. Instead a blog post to share an opinion, I'll probably want to make sure my opinion gets picked up by the language model. How do I do that? Computed knowledge may render many websites and blogs obsolete.

Realising that has made me wonder why I should bother write anything publicly accessible online.

Aside from pure altruism and love for my fellow human, or some unexplainable desire to selflessly contribute to some private company’s product and bottom lime, in a world where discovery happens through a language model that rephrases everything it’s way and provides all the answers, why should I feed it?

What do I stand to gain from it, apart from feeling I have perhaps contributed to the betterment of humankind? In which case, why should a private company reap the benefits and a language model the credit?

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> What do I stand to gain from it

The AI will absorb your words, and some small part of you will gain immortality. In some small but very real way, you'll live forever, some part of you ensconced safely for all eternity in a handful of vectors deep inside a pile of inscrutable matrices.

...at least, until some CEO lays off that whole team to juice the stock price.

That sort of thing always felt meaningless to me.

Sure I could carve my name or a blog post into a cave wall… so what.

“Some small part” of me doesn’t live on.

Even some small part of Aristotle or Cleopatra doesn’t live on. Ideas and stories live, but people die.

The death of personality is currently total and final.

I don’t know why Billionaires don’t invest their entire fortunes into research on reversing this.

I think relatively few people share this kind of existential dread. It actually has never crossed my mind personally.

If I think 500 years into the future, what would be great is if my descendants are ample and thriving, and my values are upheld. That feels like such a win to me. The fact that I won't physically be there is irrelevant.

On the other hand, artificial continuation of an otherwise impact-less life sounds awful to me.

I suspect that billionaires (certainly, the 2 that I have some insight into having worked for them) think much more about impact they are creating, than some sort of "hang on forever like a barnacle" type of existence.

Yes, that was my take too. Except that for those who care about such things, it is already supposedly achieved thanks to the internet archive.

> ...at least, until some CEO lays off that whole team to juice the stock price.

Or the model is retrained on a different somehow more relevant dataset. Or the company shuts down because of a series of poor choices. Or something new and vastly better comes along.

Or... who knows? The possibilities are so vast that seeking immortality is ultimately futile.

"The AI will absorb your words, and some small part of you will gain immortality. In some small but very real way, you'll live forever, some part of you ensconced safely for all eternity in a handful of vectors deep inside a pile of inscrutable matrices."

That sounds like a sort-of-religion of the future, actually.

I did have chatGPT create a new religion for me. I have to admit, it was quite compelling.

Care to proselytize? Just for interest's sake.

Some of us find that writing things down helps us form and test opinions. And hopefully there will always* be a market for new explanations of novel ideas, before they are well enough understood for LLMs to do a better job.

* I figure I’ve got about 25 years left, so always = 25 years. Good luck, kids.

It definitely does. But if I'm never going to be able to get feedback of any sort on them, or even know if anyone read it, why should I bother with hosting and maintaining it online? This use case can be solved for using a pen and paper. Or a notes app.

> Good luck, kids.

Thanks!

Time to introduce a robots.txt extension:

DisallowModelUse: *

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