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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand why users are always up in arms about announcements like these. If you post content on public forums like Reddit, Stack Overflow, Quora, Tumblr, HN and wherever else then they will be available for public viewing and archiving, including by the likes of OpenAI. That has been true about the internet since day 1. If you don't agree with it, don't put the content out there.

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I think it's pretty reasonable that many users might perceive this as a betrayal of an implicit social contract. People posting things ten years ago, or even a year ago, shouldn't have had to make projections about future modelling advances / how data might be used in the future.

IMO: Renegotiating for "public approval" will always be something computing organizations have to engage with when making advances in tech that's downstream of publicly created records, knowledge, etc.

(That being said, I personally think this announcement is overall a win for healthier data flow, in particular because these kind of deals make the value of data explicit.)

I think there’s a pretty substantial difference between textfiles.com archiving bbs’S if the 80s and generative AI models sucking down creative works with a key objective of becoming a marketing and internet destroying low quality content farm evilcorp.

Because you're getting told straight away that they are monetizing your content, and not just any content but your opinions and thoughts.

"knowing" you are content, and being told straight away might lead to different reactions.

But that was the case in the first place for any of those companies.

I'm hardly "up in arms", but these announcements bother me because they're just rubbing in the fact that if you object to your content being used to train AI, the only option you have is to stop participating in the internet.

That's why HN is now the only public internet site that I participate in. I should quit even this, but I just can't. Addiction is a terrible thing.

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