> nobody will be willing to upload the new knowledge to the internet
I think there will be differences based on how centralized the repository of knowledge is. Even if textbooks and wikis largely die out, I imagine individuals such as myself will continue to keep brief topic specific "cookbook" style collections for purely personal benefit. There's no reason to be averse to publishing such things to github or the like and LLMs are fantastic at indexing and integrating disparate data sources.
Historically sorting through 10k different personal diaries for relevant entries would have been prohibitive but it seems to me that is no longer the case.
If you do want to watch one for whatever reason you can open it in the standard interface. The video IDs are neutral it's just the URL that determines which interface you get.
Actually I guess a browser extension to redirect to a fixed up URL would resolve the problem entirely.
Control Panel for YouTube [1] lets you remove most of the clutter from the Shorts player UI, or redirect Shorts to the normal player (using YouTube's internal navigation if on desktop, so no full page reload)
You'll have to disable hiding them first, as they're completly hidden by default
Using ublock and umatrix both on firefox with full tracking protection enabled. Don't recall ever having any issues with youtube. Sometimes an alert will pop up "see why you're experiencing playback interruptions" and it clicks through to a page about how this is due to my adblocking extension but the joke is on them because I don't recall it ever actually being interrupted. It's just this erroneous alert that occasionally pops up.
The problem is that producing a mix of personalized content that doesn't appear (at least on its face) to violate copyright still completely destroys their business model. So either copyright law needs to be updated or their business model does.
Either way I'm fairly certain that blocking AI agent access isn't a viable long term solution.
> Either way I'm fairly certain that blocking AI agent access isn't a viable long term solution.
Great point. If my personal AI assistant cannot find your product/website/content, it effectively may no longer exist! For me. Ain't nobody got the time to go searching that stuff up and sifting through the AI slop. The pendulum may even swing the other way and the publishers may need to start paying me (or whoever my gatekeeper is) for access to my space...
That’s a perspective I hadn’t considered. Although the whole thing stinks of middlemen extracting all the profit between producers and consumers e.g. ag sector by the laws won’t catch up or even force integration. Thanks!
The bigger question is business model vs value-add. Copyright law draws a very direct line from value-add to compensation - if you created something new (or even derivative), copyright attaches to allow for compensation, if people find it valuable.
Business models are a different animal: they can range from value-add services and products to rent-seeking to monopolies, extracting value from both producers and consumers.
While copyright law makes no mention of business models, I don't know whether that is a historical artifact since copyright is presumably older, or a philosophical exclusion because society owes no business model a right to exist. I would suggest the existence of monopoly-busting government agencies argues that societies do not owe business models a right of existence. Fair compensation for the advancement of arts and sciences is clearly a public good, though.
Tying it back to the AI-in-the-middle question, it's yet another platform in a series of these between producers and consumers, and doesn't override copyright. Regurgitating a copyright (article, art, whatever) should absolutely attract compensation; should summarizing content attract compensation? should it be considered any different from a friend (or executive assistant) describing the content? And if the producers' business model involves extracting value from a transaction on any basis other than adding value to the consumer, does society owe that business model any right to exist?
Which is a valuable perspective. But it's not a subsitute for a seasoned war journalist who can draw on global experience. (And relating that perspective to a particular home market.)
> I'm sure some of them would fly in to collect data if you paid them for it
Sure. That isn't "a news editorial that focuses on free content but in a newspaper-style, e. g. with professional (or good) writers."
One part of the population imagines journalists as writers. They're fine on free, ad-supported content. The other part understands that investigation is not only resource intensive, but also requires rare talent and courage. That part generally pays for its news.
Between the two, a Wikipedia-style journalistic resource is not entertaining enough for the former and not informative enough for the latter. (Importantly, compiling an encyclopedia is principally the work of research and writing. You can be a fine Wikipedia–or scientific journal or newspaper–editor without leaving your room.)
- crowdsourced data, eg, photos of airplane crashes
- people who live in an area start vlogs
- independent correspondents travel there to interview, eg Ukraine or Israel
We see that our best war reporting comes from analyst groups who ingest that data from the “firehose” of social media. Sometimes at a few levels, eg, in Ukraine the best coverage is people who compare the work of multiple groups mapping social media reports of combat. You have on top of that punditry about what various movements mean for the war.
So we don’t have “journalist”:
- we have raw data (eg, photos)
- we have first hand accounts, self-reported
- we have interviewers (of a few kinds)
- we have analysts who compile the above into meaningful intelligence
- we have anchors and pundits who report on the above to tell us narratives
The fundamental change is that what used to be several roles within a new agency are now independent contractors online. But that was always the case in secret — eg, many interviewers were contracted talent. We’re just seeing the pieces explicitly and without centralized editorial control.
So I tend not to catastrophize as much, because this to me is what the internet always does:
- route information flows around censorship
- disintermediate consumers from producers when the middle layer provides a net negative
As always in business, evolve or die. And traditional media has the same problem you outline:
- not entertaining enough for the celebrity gossip crowd
- too slow and compromised by institutional biases for the analyst crowd, eg, compare WillyOAM coverage of Ukraine to NYT coverage
Presumably someone has already built this and I'm just unaware of it, but I've long thought some sort of crowd sourced archival effort via browser extension should exist. I'm not sure how such an extension would avoid archiving privileged data though.
In particular, habeas petitions against DHS, and SSA appeals aren’t available online for public inspection: you have to go to a clerk’s office and pay for physical copies. (I think this may have been reasonable given the circumstances in past decades… not so now.)
But keep in mind that other less obvious data sources can often lead to similar issues. For example phone accelerometer data can be used to precisely locate someone driving in a car in a city by comparing it with a street map.
In the context of the military even just inferring a comprehensive map of which people are on which shift and when they change might be considered a threat.
I think there will be differences based on how centralized the repository of knowledge is. Even if textbooks and wikis largely die out, I imagine individuals such as myself will continue to keep brief topic specific "cookbook" style collections for purely personal benefit. There's no reason to be averse to publishing such things to github or the like and LLMs are fantastic at indexing and integrating disparate data sources.
Historically sorting through 10k different personal diaries for relevant entries would have been prohibitive but it seems to me that is no longer the case.
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