<p>I think there's a confusing mix of different questions and concerns here.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Are we free labor for OpenAI?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes, we are. As is <em>nearly everyone who has ever written any form of public (and some private) text that survives</em> - in books, documents, websites, etc. I understand Sextus Empiricus' argument but am willing to accept a broader definition of 'labour' - though I think it ultimately does not matter, for the reasons that follow.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When we turn inquisitive minds to ChatGPT, are we not participating in our own obsolescence?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Regarding the first half - nobody here is actually advocating telling people to go to ChatGPT for answers. This community is arguably more hostile to it than most (perhaps understandably so).</p>
<p>As for the obsolescence part, I have multiple disagreements.</p>
<ol>
<li>Most questions here are basic and many are entirely misguided. A tool that could address even the basic questions automatically (and LLMs cannot do this yet, but maybe in the future) would make this website much better and more fun to participate in.</li>
<li>You are already contributing your expertise for free (with a CC BY-SA 4.0 license) on a website
that allows anybody in the world to ask a question and get an
answer. This is what makes CV great, as well as StackOverflow, and what to me is one of the greatest sources of knowledge in the world -
Wikipedia. Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit but note that CV and StackOverflow are also making a private company money. Under what principle is contributing to CV/StackOverflow/Wikipedia fine and not an LLM?</li>
<li>Maybe what bothers you is the lack of credit/status that accrues to the originator of the text? But many of us participate anonymously or pseudonymously, so it seems unlikely that this is a broadly shared concern. Providing such attribution may not even be possible given how LLMs work. Like a human-produced text, the output arises from a mishmash of many sources, at least some of which will be contradictory.</li>
<li>Much of the world is arguably expertise-limited. If we raise the general standard of understanding and skill, the world could become a much better place! I would love it if LLMs can make this happen, even a little. And if they do rise in importance and change our societies, the people who created the large corpuses of useful training data - such as the anonymous wikipedia writers and editors - will have had a remarkably large role in shaping our future. I suspect many of them would be quite pleased by this.</li>
<li>It's entirely possible that raising the general standard of knowledge &amp; skill will lead to a greater demand for real expertise! Which could increase demand for our services. We really have no idea how this will play out: <a href="https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nobody-knows-how-many-jobs-will-be" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nobody-knows-how-many-jobs-will-be</a></li>
<li>I asked you about your proposed alternative and you say that we could &quot;stop using it&quot;. If you mean stop using ChatGPT, well, that doesn't matter one way or the other - your writings will still be part of its training data. You just won't be able to take advantage of what it provides. If you instead mean to stop using CV, I don't know what that achieves. As I said - your previous participation here was already making a private company money. You could do so but many of us will continue for the reasons I mentioned above.</li>
</ol>
<p>Instead of advocating that we all down our pens, you could consider directing your efforts towards policy/regulation. I don't claim to know the best path forward but there are ongoing debates about what we should allow AI companies to make use of for free and what they owe the rest of us. These are normally framed in the context of plagiarism of art (for models like DALL-E, Midjourney, etc) but the principles apply more broadly. For example, is it acceptable/legal to train an LLM on data with a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence and not provide specific attribution in any answer? I think this would be technically impossible for LLMs and I personally hope such concerns don't kill them, but it seems like a grey area.</p>
