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Comment by brigadier132 | Hacker News Reader

For traditional search indexing the interests of the aggregator and the content creator were aligned. AIs on the other hand are adversarial to the interest of content creators, a sufficiently advanced AI can replace the creator of the content it was trained on.

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We're talking in this subthread about an AI agent accessing content, not training a model on content.

Training has copyright implications that are working their way through courts. AI agent access cannot be banned without fundamentally breaking the User Agent model of the web.

Ok, fine, let's restrict it to AI agents only, without training. It's still an adversarial relationship with the content creator. When you take an AI agent an ask it "find me the best italian restaurant in city xyz" it scans all the restaurant review sites and gives you back a recommendation. The content creator bears all the burden of creating and hosting the content and reaps non of the reward as the AI agent has now inserted itself as a middleman.

The above is also a much clearer / more obvious case of copyright infringement than AI training.

> AI agent access cannot be banned without fundamentally breaking the User Agent model of the web.

This is a non-sequitur but yes you are right, everything in the future will be behind a login screen and search engines will die.

> reaps non of the reward

Just to be clear what we're talking about: the reward in question is advertising dollars earned by manipulating people's attention for profit, right?

I frankly don't think that people have the right to that as a business model and would be more than happy to see AI agents kill off that kind of "free" content.

> The content creator bears all the burden of creating and hosting the content and reaps non of the reward as the AI agent has now inserted itself as a middleman.

As a user agent my god what's happened to our industry. Locking the web to known client which are sufficiently not the user's agent betrays everything the web is for.

Do you really hate AI so much that you'll give up everything you believe in to see it hurt?

Like I said in another comment, I'm pointing out what is going to actually happen based on incentives, not what I want to happen. I'd much rather the open web continue to exist and I think AI will be a beneficial thing for humanity.

edit: to be clear, it's already happening. Blogs are moving to substack, twitter blocks crawling, reddit is going the same way in blocking all crawlers except google.

To be optimistic, as long as anonymous access is a thing, or creating free accounts is a thing, such crawler blocks can probably be bypassed. I hope so, at least.

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