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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

A big chunk of their list have signed agreements with OpenAI, or in Meta’s case, has a competitor.

I’d argue the way Wired is reporting this as a gotcha is also a conflict of interest because of their deal with an effective competitor.

https://www.wired.com/story/conde-nast-openai-deal/

> “WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, the USA Today network, and WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, are among the many organizations opting to exclude their data from Apple’s AI training”

Versus

> “The media company joins The Atlantic, Axel Springer, Vox Media, and a host of other publishers who have partnered with OpenAI.”

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I find it quite concerning that we are going into a situation where some things can crawl some sites but not others.

I have my own serious ethical concerns about AI, but from a pure searchability standpoint it is likely to cause more problems than solve.

Information is going to start being silo'd. It would be like if I had to go to Google for one thing and Bing for something else.

That being said, I am also quite concerned about what you mentioned. I was not happy when I found out that ArsTechnica signed a deal with OpenAI (or I assume their parent company did). Did that deal include any requirements of how they talk about OpenAI, AI in General, or their competitors?

The concerns over AI are real, but they are putting a short term gain over the long term damage by somehow thinking that licensing data is going to save them.

The tone of this is a bit weird, do we have similar "blocking google", "blocking anthropic", "blocking meta" articles? Instead of what is really happening is those partnerships were formed so everything not that partnership is being blocked.

> Information is going to start being silo'd. It would be like if I had to go to Google for one thing and Bing for something else.

we're already there: a month ago reddit signed an agreement with Google to ingest their data, and then blocked everyone else (e.g. bing)

https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...

AI killed the Internet

> Information is going to start being silo'd

There is an argument for banning (or limiting the term of) exclusive licensing arrangements for purposes of training an LLM. Nobody is forced to do business with anyone. But OpenAI or Facebook shouldn't be able to force a publisher to only do business with them, thereby closing the market to new entrants.

How this affects their journalistic integrity was oddly not covered in the articles from their various publications that I’ve seen.

Ars since you mentioned it https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/opena...

To your point about siloed information, we also see this with Reddit and Google, since they have an exclusivity agreement.

If e-mail were invented today, you wouldn't be able to communicate with people who weren't on the same service provider.

If it were built by a VC backed company, you can be sure that you could receive email from all providers but only send to your same provider. Then, you could buy bundles of access. For only 9.99/mo, send emails to @aol.com, @yahoo.com, and @live.com.

The Internet has long existed in a state of tension over where value gets created, how it is consumed, and who pays for it. This had evolved into an uneasy truce of ad-supported big sites, making the web almost (but not quite) unusable for most people except a few adblocking freeloaders who get the good experience.

AI just blows all that up by providing a general-purpose plagiarism engine. It offers a substitute for any content, with a similar-looking but inauthentic version. People might accept not paywalling in order to reach human users, but nobody wants to be fodder for the plagiarism bot.

In some ways this is the "Can Googlebot scrape your content and display it on the home page but without generating any ad views for you?" debate we've seen with news publishers before.

It is interesting since at least with what Google was previously doing, you likely at least got some click throughs.

Personally the way I see it, you can't argue about being worried about plagiarism while allowing one company to just mine all of your work.

You either block all or you allow all. Anything else is not helping either situation.

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