We’re All Content Creators for Machines

Jim makes reference to Nicholas Carr’s writing — and in particular a blog post he wrote recently called “Dead Labor, Dead Speech”.

I’d never heard of Nicholas Carr before until seeing this post of Jim’s. And it sounds like Nicholas has been fairly quiet of late until starting this new blog of his.

This:

LLMs…feed “vampire-like” on human culture. Without our words and pictures and songs, they would cease to function. They would become as silent as a corpse in a casket.

Wow. How vivid is that!

And another:

The generative-AI strategy is in one sense just a new variant on the central business strategy of the online economy. Whatever else the internet may be, it is a vast repository of human speech, digitized and machine-readable, that can be put to use by businesses to produce goods and services. For internet companies, speech becomes “user-generated content,” a private business asset. What makes the strategy so powerful, and so lucrative, is that all that digitized speech can be used without payment to its creators. It’s there for the taking.

Honestly, the entire article by Nicholas is well worth the read — and almost certainly worth subscribing to his RSS feed if you can. I have.