HACKER Q&A
📣 confoundingfac

Have you reduced technical knowledge contributions?


Do you find yourself thinking "whats the point, some AI will slurp it up and regurgitate it without attribution" when started to type out a technical answer on a forum? Or reduced technical help and assistance Stack Overflow for this reason?


  👤 dragonwriter Accepted Answer ✓
> Do you find yourself thinking “whats the point, some AI will slurp it up and regurgitate it without attribution” when started to type out a technical answer on a forum?

Not really, but, “this will get incorporated into other people’s knowledge and repeated without specific attribution if it is useful” has always been part of my baseline background assumption (not really front of mind) whenever I would share knowledge in any context, so I’m not sure why the fact that that process might involve generative AI would change the equation at all.

I suppose if “sharing knowledge” was just a tactic for seeking credit / personal brand marketing, that would be different, but...


👤 Engineering-MD
I have felt similar to this, but the culture on this site is rather pro AI doing this, hence some of the other rude replies. I think lots of things like this are and will move off the open web where sharing help is more personal and meaningful.

👤 serf
no, but i've put some projects that were at one time too complex to easily handle myself back in view with the idea that I can use AI to meaningfully fill in the gaps.

like others mentioned , i've already felt as if everything I post gets thrown into something somewhere for profit for many many years on the net; the new AI thing is just another facet of that to me.


👤 PaulHoule
No. I was very aware of how exploitative the Google economy was more than 10 years ago. See

http://www.seobook.com/blog

maybe it just stings for me because of the way one of my businesses was failed and how mad my wife was at me in the few years it took me to pay off our HELOC.

Getting mad about generative AI like getting upset in 2024 about Martin Luther King getting shot or Japan invading Perl Harbor. AI might be a good reason to not post about assembly language programming for the C-64 or how to make web pages with Flash and Cold Fusion.

Why do you post to Reddit or Hacker News when it is helping somebody else get (or stay) rich?

The advantage of generative A.I. is that it is not so two-sided so it will be a lot more competitive, today you are getting ripped off by a company in Silicon Valley but when the cost effectiveness of LLMs improves by 100x you will also be getting ripped off by people who live in places you never heard of.


👤 ungreased0675
No, I haven’t.

👤 tshirttime
No, but obviously you have. Believe me, the AI finds your contributions either obvious or wrong.