Many times it seems as if I get many followers on social sites like Twitter and TikTok that follow just to observe and siphon ideas as well. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Are we getting to a point where we'll need to be more secretive about our opinions and ideas because of Ai and people who are leveraging it to copy others?
It's going to become increasingly complex to negotiate copyright issues now that "Ai" tools (that sample pre-existing online content and ideas) are being deployed everywhere... As people talk about Ai replacing jobs, it's also killing independent opportunity as Ai can be used to steal credit from original authors of ideas.
If independent authors and content creators suddenly went on strike and unpublished the majority of their work, that could potentially send a powerful message to the people exploiting online idea sharing, it could also devastate a lot of services that rely/profit on/off of those free data sources. As we are authors of many ideas, there should be a sense of companies that run Ai tools to be transparent concerning their data sources and a new system to give better and accurate credit to authors of original ideas.
I think the same way as prior to machine learning perhaps. Copyrights, trademarks, patents, etc... It might be harder to prove someone stole an idea so maybe that will require the arms race of machine-learning vs machine-learning bots. Given none of them show their work this will be challenging and litigious. Lawyers will need more advanced machine-learning for discovery, probably hiring new corporations that focus on this. With each new implementation of a tech usually comes new business models and countering business models. such as anti-malware, anti-virus, anti-spam all of which were preventable but whack-a-mole was less friction and led to new business models.
I personally hope this leads to a swath of legal suits that push machine-learning sites to show their work. I would expect nothing less than a debug audit trail of data sources. Here [1] is one potential start of the battles.
However, your underlying point is something I worry a lot about. I've already joined a number of people in removing everything I had on the publicly accessible web, because I don't want to contribute to these LLMs and there is no other way to prevent my own work from being used for that.
I don't know what the solution is. Or if one is even necessary. It may very well be that the number of people like me is small enough that it won't make any real difference in the big picture.
This goes both ways, as there is less profit incentive for stealing ideas in a more open ecosystem.